Why I Love my Wife

Or, Why I Love my Wife

Published on December 27, 2006 By EmperorofIceCream In Misc

Everyone in JU (at least, those who have been here awhile) knows little whip. Everyone. And everyone who knows her in JU has an opinion about her, whether 'good' or 'bad'. She has her favorite victims, her good JU buddies, and the rest to amuse her, the vast sea of anonymous, mediocre, second-rate bloggers whom everyone ignores. And all who have, in any way, encountered her have an opinion about her.

Allow me to tell you the truth. The very worst you can imagine of her, the cruellest and most vicious thing, the most terrible thing you can associate with the term 'being human', is true of her. Her cruelty is absolute and knows no limits. And yet she can be terribly solicitous and sympathetic - so long as you do whatever she tells you to do in order to remedy whatever situation she is willing to sympathize with you over.

Why do I love her? Because her cleverest cruelties are always supremely witty. Because her cruellest observations make me howl with laughter. Because she is, consummately, a woman, and women are far more terrible, sophisticated, and savage in their humor than are men. And this is a thing worthy of the greatest love and respect on the part of men: a) because women in general swoon when a man acknowledges the fact of this cruelty; and

most women are too simple to realize that some men are capable of exploiting their understanding of their own cruelty to their own advantage.

My wife is at once the most knowing and the most innocent of individuals. It's innocence allied to curiosity that makes me howl with laughter when we sit at the table in the kitchen in the evening after I get back from work and bullshit back and forth. She makes me laugh more than anyone else I've ever known. And she has the invaluable gift of being able to make me laugh at myself, of being able to cut me down to my proper size, without ever being insulting or arrogant or over-bearing. She makes me see myself - and laugh. Which cannot ever be anything but a good thing.

There is no denying that she's strange. But neither is there any denying that I am strange, or that how we are strange together intermeshes in interesting and provocative ways.

I think that's what I love about her most. That she's willing to accept the many ways in which I am strange, and willing to build a successful life around them without any demand that I change. She is how she is: and she is willing to accord the same privilege of being to anyone who is willing to take up the challenge of actually being what they are.

Everyone, including the most devoted of lovers, wants you to change to the point where they can recognise themselves in you. Not Sabrina. Instead, like me, she demands that you be absolutely yourself - even if doing so requires that you be at war with each other every evening. Better to be at war with each other than to live in the deathly peace of complacency. Of self-satisfied 'understanding'.

Why do I love her? Because she makes me laugh more than anyone else ever has.

My wife is a remarkable woman.

Comments (Page 2)

EmperorofIceCream

on Dec 31, 2006

To: Shovelheat

Heh, wished I had a nickle for every time I've heard that particular taunt.

I'm sure you do: you'd be a reasonably wealthy man. There are two practical principles of life (that may be said to sum up, as general rules of thumb, my approach to the necessary evil of living cheek-by-jowl with others). Always do what you are afraid of. Always do what you say you will do - and be as certain as you can that what you say you will do is meaningful within the context of the circumstances that prompted you to speak in the first place. It is an axiom with me that it's better to keep silence and be thought a fool than to open my mouth and by speaking demonstrate conclusively that I am a fool. Also, he who proceeds in patient silence is far more likely to achieve what he intends than the braggart who announces to the world what he intends to do beforehand, and incites the hatred, or the envy, or the resentment, or the simple incredulity of the world to oppose him.

In the perfectly circumscribed circumstances that pertain to relationships in JU, blacklisting is the ultimate disavowal of the worth of another. Here, where the written word is our medium of communication and relationship, blacklisting is akin to murder, because it removes from the blacklister's personal universe (his or her blog) the possibility of communicating with the blacklistee. It's a way of saying that the blacklistee is so entirely unimportant, so thoroughly and completely irrelevant, and at the same time so perniciously annoying, that the deliberate removal of the blacklistee from the personal world of the blacklister is the only appropriate course of action.

Of course, this 'virtual killing' of someone in JU has none of the terrible consequences of real murder in the real world. But the structure of the impulse that leads to the act of blacklisting is the same as the structure of the impulse that leads to actual murder: the desire to expunge the victim from the world of the murderer forever.

I rarely blacklist. But none of the holders of that rare privilege have ever been returned to the land of the living, or, less poetically put, none of them have ever been taken off it. I have killed them, just as I said I would. Because I respect the power of speaking (speech is where reality lives) I have never told anyone (since I became an adult) that I would kill them. Because no one has ever done anything to me (yet) that merits actual killing. Those are not words that I would ever speak until and unless I sincerely meant them. And, if I meant them, I would not speak them to the person toward whom I directed that sentiment. Why tell someone you want to kill that you intend killing them?

So. While JU is a trivial forum, and an arena in which we indulge the solipsistic pleasure of appearing only as we wish to appear, it is still a forum in which words carry a power that ought not to be abused.

Threatening to blacklist someone in JU is a trivial act with no real consequences. It's also a form of murder (at least in relation to the private world of the blogger issuing the threat). If someone, anyone, were to offend me by their comments regarding my wife on this thread, which is a tribute to her and an expression of my feelings towards her as her husband, that person would be instantly and irrevocably blacklisted and, in my mind at least, in relation to the world of my blog, I will have killed the offender.

Yes, your (may I say...our?) Sabrina is a remarkable woman. Funny, but I've never seen what's to NOT like about her -I mean, she calls 'em as she sees 'em and if she does occasionaly fucks up she admits it.

Our wedding was attended by a man called Joe. He had known Sabrina for most of their lives and he was her closest friend on Earth. They were sometime lovers, and as close to each other as breath is to the person doing the breathing. Another man might have been intimidated by his presence at the wedding: not I. Why? Because what we share can't be threatened in the kind of ways that the jealous mind fears. If it satisfies something in you to refer to her as ours, and therefore in some sense yours, then feel free to do so - because the way in which she may be said to be yours relates solely to JU, to the respect she (and I) have for your ability as a writer, and to an arena of personal myth, story-telling, regret, and the imagination of other possibilities for our lives.

None of which would withstand, for even an instant, the reality of actually being married to her. To be married to her is a great privilege, and often a great pleasure, but it's not something I'd recommend to the faint-hearted, or those who don't share our particular pleasures and proclivities.

So by all means feel free to think of her as 'ours', because whatever you may think of when you use the word in your own thoughts is so far removed from the reality of our lives together that it constitutes nothing but fantasy.

And a man's fantasies are his own.

EmperorofIceCream

on Jan 02, 2007

To little whip

Hehe, in other words, I'm a REAL bitch outside of JU.

Yes you are. Which is only one of many reasons that I love you.

V^^^^^^V bites you.

foreverserenity

on Nov 02, 2008

aww, I wondered who resurrected this one! You'll get through it Whip...it ain't a easy road sometimes, but love does conquer all.....99.9% of the time anyways!

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