Man and Woman

Love & Control

I had a series of articles I was going to write last week.  But I had innumerable distractions from friends suffering depression, heartbreak, and dissociation from reality. I want to begin the next articles with a little story that occurred to me during a week of listening to tales of love woes.

The story is a story of a vulnerable woman, a woman feeling unloved, I suppose, who decides she wants to have an affair, who thinks she seeks only physical touch.  But what she is aware of is she no longer feels a vital part of a longstanding relationship  and what she is unaware of is that the touch she is seeking is not just physical touch but her own identity that for many years has been formulated to exist as wife and money.  This is the bad faith Sartre speaks about. The giving of one’s identity to one’s role.  In Sartre’s story the waiter who thinks he is a waiter.  The waiter is subservient to his identity as a waiter.  But as a waiter whose identity is subservient to his role his identity is also subservient to an existence beyond that role which is to serve those who come to him and be served.  So his role is to be subservient to those whom he serves and those whom he is serving who see him as subservient to them, his identity as a waiter is an identity that can only be subservient and serve.  But his existence is beyond that identity and he longs to exist beyond his identity. And here we would like to move one step beyond Sartre who states that this act of bad  faith, or false identity tends to create an existence of disconnect from his own reality, and suggest that the disconnect creates a susceptibility to a false reality rather than a bad faith to one’s own reality.

So let us return to our woman whose reality for most of her life has been that of being a wife and a mother.  That reality has ended and her children are no longer present.  Now she wants her husband to fulfill what she has lost in her identity as a mother.  But what  can the husband do who has also lost his identity to the identity of being man.  And whatever his identification of being a man may entail.  As youths the two approached each other through the physical touch that created an identity of being in love.  This created the children, now gone, and the identity of being a family.  The family is the community that exists as the reality of their identification but the identity of the family as a stand-in for the community demands the physicality of attraction that brought them to desire each enough to create a family as a stand-in community has no longer persisted.  There could be varying reasons why this might have occurred, but for our story to begin let us just suggest that both have been susceptible that what has been termed love is both synonymous with their initial physicality and extending that physicality is a betrayal of the love and therefore the love no longer exists.  So the identification of the love with the physicality may in itself have been a falseness, a bad faith identification  that they have both bought into that love for each other and physical attraction are synonymous.

So this woman of our story no longer has the physical attraction for the man she had, she has moved away from that attraction and the attraction being synonymous with the love she feels she  would be cheating the man to find love elsewhere.  But her identity as mother is not as present with her children now beyond her everyday care.  The attraction that initially excited her enough to have children with the husband is no longer a desire she wishes to pursue, and yet if she attempts to express desire with another she breaks the bond of the mini-community  of the family and she has no community beyond that community.  But she still desires the physical touch, but the physical touch is not desired from the man with whom she is had a  relationship with and has created a physical relationship with, and so since love and embrace are the same in her reality, she is wracked with guilt for having desires that has been conflated to believe that there is no love beyond the embrace.  So she begins to go out seeking, she tells herself, only for a fling, to be desired.  Let’s, for this story’s sake, say it was she, and not the man, who actually ceased the physical relationship, let’s say the man aged rapidly, let’s say he was much older than she and let’s say after he began to age he approaches her to embrace her one day and, being unattracted to the man she jumps away from the man and as if he is now repulsive and not want him  to touch her again.  Feeling rejected, the man rejects all physical contact.  The man’s identity as a man has been upended and he retreats into isolation.  He cannot tell his associates he has become repulsive to his wife, because that would lessen his identity as a  man.The man has no identity beyond his identity of being her man and her repulsion makes him susceptible to repelling all else.  He becomes unsociable, angry and lashes out at everyone.  He has never earned “respect” in the world, he has never earned “wealth” in the world, and his identity does not extend beyond the identity of his love for the woman which is his only identity because he never had found an identity within any community until she had accepted him into hers.  And so the man, always known as genial, but always inwardly angered, had been accepted into a family where he was able to express, not the anger, but the pain that had created the anger.  Because the woman who had embraced him had also felt the rejection and inability to be embraced by any community, and so the bond that formed their love was to identity in each and a recognition of the other’s  pain.  Their shared pain created a unitary existence they called their love.  

Severed from his existence that had covered the suppressed anger caused by his feelings of being rejected by the community but normally perceived as a rather genial personality–the opposite would have been a violent or criminal personality—now becomes an explosion of the pain in anger and the violent personality emerges.  And even though it emerges against everyone but her, she suddenly witnesses the instability of his personality now expressed as an inability to be able to accept others as anything but opponents.  His refuge had been deconstructed to such a degree he could no longer converse without feeling rejected. 

For the woman,this was toubling. Her identity as part of him led her to believe her repulsion of him was due to him no longer loving her and his anger was the proof that he did not.  

For the man his identity as part of her led him to cling ever more tightly to what he did not believe.  If he allowed himself to believe she didn’t love him he would have no identity and so he lashed out at everyone else as if they had taken her from him.  All the rest of the world were at fault, not she, and they had stolen his love from him and he was angry at the world.
Well the woman finally is approached by a strange man.  But she finds it is not just the touch she  is seeking, but the identity of being loved.  She abandons herself to such an extent she snaps to attention at his call. He texts her to say he is coming to meet her and she fixes herself up and as she gets on the bus to meet him and then waits and the text comes:  something came up but just go home and open her bedroom window  (she has already told him her husband sleeps in a separate bedroom). He plays for a couple of weeks with increasing promises of expectation and professions of love and withdrawals from fulfilling those promises.  And he increasingly demands her acquiescence to behavior she has never acquiesced to in her past.  He spanks her and she cries out.  “Hush” he tells her, “if you want to have me again tell me you want me to spank you. Tell me it brings you joy.  “Oh yes, it does,” she says.  And then he leaves without  any further intercouse that day. She receives a text, “If you want me again, tell me to come and beat your body until it is black and blue, tell me the more pain I inflict on you the more you  want me.”

And then he texts her to never speak of her husband as husband. She becomes encouraged he now wants to become her husband. “No,” he tells her, “It’s too soon for that, first you must tell the husband everything about us, every kiss, every submission you made to me, everything you had never done with him that you let me do to you.  And the next time I will come in the front door.”  She obediently tells her husband everything but the promise to allow herself to be beaten, but that hasn’t happened yet.  

Of course he is despondent, but he is poor and he says he will support  his wife until the new lover takes over for her financial responsibility.  And he makes arrangements to leave for a weekend.  She calls the next   evening to the location she has deposited her husband. Surprised, the husband asked her if it had not gone well when she tells him he had left. Although he can hear the sound of tears in her voice, she assures him it’s all right, he had only gone because he had to work that evening. He would be back the next day.  But early the next morning she calls the husband and tells him her lover has texted he will be visiting his son that day.  “Didn't you say he lived with his son and that’s why he couldn’t be with you except in our home?” “Well maybe they just already had plans to do something together today, but I am getting on the next bus and I am bringing you home now.”  She doesn’t come.  The husband is restless, but assumes her lover has come over.  But the place where he is staying, the people who live there are also beginning to be nervous, it is getting late and they were told he would be departing that evening.  They call the woman and ask her if she is coming.  “Tomorrow,” she says, “can he stay one more night with you.”  But the husband has been married to the woman for a long time.  He recognizes the nuances of despondency in her voice.  And he knows she has always been afraid of being alone in the dark.  He knows she sleeps with all the lights on her to escape her fears.  He had been worried how she made it through the previous night, he doesn’t wish to see her alone for another night , so even though she has been assured he will be able to stay another night, he tells the people keeping him he must go.  They assist him to the bus and ride with him to the stop closest to his location which is in a small nearby village.  They must continue, it is the last bus on which they can return to their own city that night.  It is not that far for the man to walk, and he assures them with his canes he will be able to find his home.  He knows the path to his house in the mountains beyond the village where he has gotten off the bus.  

But the man doesn’t find his way. He becomes tired, he falls several times in the narrow roads because his legs no longer support him even with the canes.  There are few houses and no cars  coming by. And he needs to be with his wife, he cannot leave her alone for a second night.  He has no idea of the time, but he knows it was around 10:30 p.m. when he got off the bus, and he knows it has been some time.  He is lying in the street now, he hasn’t found the strength to rise up.  The man is blind but he sees light.  In the dark, the lights are very intense.  The man has always been sensitive to ultraviolet rays and has had to shield his eyes since childhood from those rays when going out.  Now he sees nothing but light.  He doesn’t really know if he is blind, the idea of blindness that he has learned to believe is one of absence of light.  But even with his eyes closed there is too much light, it prevents him from seeing shapes, but he sees shades of light, and thus, to some degree, objects, unidentifiable as to what those objects are, but aware by the shades that they exist.  And so lying in the street, face to the side, and eyes unopened because there is no light to discern anything, he becomes aware of light.  He pulls himself up, and now he sees a very intense lightness just before him, he yells out, “help” in a rather weak voice.  But the light recedes beyond him.  In despair the man calls up to the sky, “Where am I?  Where am I? Why can’t I find my home? “  And then the light is coming back from behind him, and a car is beside him in the road.  “Do you need help?” a voice says.  “Yes.”  “Are you lost?”  “Yes, I can’t find my home.”  The door to the car opens. The voice says, “Do you know where you live?” “Yes,” the man tells the voice his address, “do you know where that is?” There is silence for a minute, and then a woman’s voice is speaking and handing him a cell phone.  Presumably the address has been pulled up on GPS.  “Is this where you live?” the second voice queries.  “ I don’t know, I can’t see” the man says, he repeats his address, and then says, “do you know where the CVS is {name of town}, if you know where that is, it’s not far, I can tell you how to get to my home.  Can you please take me?”  “Yes.” the male voice replies.  

They drive through the mountains for quite ways, the man must have wandered quite a ways he realizes, eventually the man knows they have returned to the town because the complete darkness is gone, but still they drive for quite aways along the only lighted road until he is told they are approaching the CVS, and the man is  able to give them directions.  When he is told they have turned onto the road on which he lives, he tells his benefactors, "There is a big sign on the gate with {house number}.”  The car slows and the woman’s voice says, “Is this your house?”  The male voice says “Yes, there is the sign with the number.” The man thanks his benefactors profusely with tearful gratefulness in his voice and gets out.  

The man is relieved, and even though his dwelling is nearly a quarter of a mile from his gate, the first thing he is aware of is that there is no light emanating from the dwelling.  Panicking , the man tries to run with his sticks, he falls over face first, he picks himself up and finds one of his canes.  He bumps into a tree and falls, lifts himself again.  He knows the trees are on the opposite side from his house and he reverses course and then stumbles across the shell of their abandoned car, now stripped of its parts, both engine, tires, seats, hood and trunk,  and is nothing but a rusted shell.  He loses his other support stick, but knows his steps are just behind the car, and he crawls to the steps  and pulls himself up them .  He finds the door and uses the front railing (the back has collapsed long ago), he knocks on his door. But it is feeble, a knock barely even he can hear on the outside of the door.  He gets back down on his hands and knees and in doing so his hands hit air, where the back railing had once been,, but he is able to not fall off because his knees are secure  enough and he is able to swing his arms to the left and grasp the railing of the ramp that had been installed when the man had used a wheelchair, when the left side of his back had had several discs removed from that side.  He walks down the ramp holding the railing and reaching for the side of the house.  He was a big man when he was whole and had long arms.  He feels for the window to her bedroom and strikes it with his palm.  Momentarily he hears the door open and his wife calling him and he makes his way into the house and he collapses onto the floor.

If you are  ascertaining that I may be telling my story, I am only compiling many stories to tell your story.  The story of the promise of democracy to deliver freedom, and then pull back on its fullness that creates a susceptibility to believe it cannot come about as promised and the appearance of the lover who encourages you to abandon the belief you have in  freedom to his control. The wandering of the man is the wandering to find your way back to the doorway of your home and return to the embrace of what has become your security.  And it all comes about because of the delusion that the democratic society you have grown up in has become an identity that is not your real identity and some have abandoned the bad faith of the promised freedom to seek freedom in the arms of the even more controlling lover.