love and marriage. go together like a horse and carriage.

dear i+i: I love my wife. I swear I do. But she is a worrier. Like all the time. Like she's always fixated on some new disaster or calamity or peeve - the level of anxiety never changes. She's always on Threat Level Orange - it's just a moving target. Always something new. I could understand it, I guess, if it was like about overpopulation or greenhouse gases or the fact that we'll be going to war over water in 15 years instead of oil. But it's never that shit. It's always whether or not the cable bill has been mailed in. Or if the cat's been fed. I swear to god she's gonna get in a wreck someday looking at the goddamn odometer for the 13,000th time to see if we need an oil change. How can I deal with this? - Sick With Worry


ian: Gosh, SWW, I'm stumped, buddy. I've been married to a wonderful woman for 14 years, and sure we've had our ups and downs, but I can't recall a time she's ever been sick with worry like this. I'm inclined to recommend that you seek some counseling for your…


maybe give a foot massage…


surprise her with flowers…


OK. She's gone. The wife is gone, and I'm free to speak frankly. 


How do I know? She skims the first few lines of each post, so she can claim she's reading them. So she has ammunition for later claims that she supports me, and I never support her.  Welcome to the battle of wills/lifelong balance sheet of marriage. 


Here's how it goes in our house: 

1. The cable bill arrives. 
2. This fact registers with myself: "Fuck those blood suckers. Make 'em wait." This fact registers with my wife: "Ohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygod. We only have eleven days to get this in. We're gonna be late. Our credit rating will go up in flames. We're going to lose the house. This might as well be our eviction notice right here."
3. I think about it once more when writing a check to the blood suckers like a week later.
4. She thinks with escalating anxiety about it ever six seconds after for the three days after the check has been mailed. During those days, she'll have a tab open to our bank account on her desktop at work. She will hit "refresh" every 3-5 seconds until she verifies that, YES, the check has cleared. Then hit "refresh" every 3-5 seconds to verify that some glitch does not occur. Repeat monthly. With every bill that arrives. Ever.

Or this one:

1. We get a reminder postcard from the kids' dentist that it's time to schedule a check-up/cleaning.
2. I stick it on the fridge and remember it only when fetching late night sad-pants ice cream thusly: "Fuck. Gotta make that appointment." Think of it no further. Become more of a fat-ass with sad-pants ice cream.
3. She sees the postcard and goes: "Ohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygod. We are so neglectful. I be they have some kind of abscess or something horrible. They're gonna lose their teeth. We're gonna be found out. They'll take our kids away. DCFS is gonna kick in our door and take them away in the dead of night." Every time she sees it. For the nine weeks it's on the fridge - the three weeks before the appointment is made/kept without incident AND the six weeks that the postcard stays on the fridge before we remember to recycle it. Repeat biweekly for every little ailment that sets one or both kids complaining. Until they move away.

Or this:

1. Weather turns colder. Time for our annual furnace cleaning/maintenance. 
2. This fact occurs to me once every week or ten days till we get the guy to come out.
3. This fact plagues my wife like so: "This place is gonna erupt in a fireball ANY SECOND if we don't get the heating guy here LIKE YESTERDAY." 
4. The guys comes out, does a cleaning/tune up/filter change. I don't think about our furnace till next October. The wife's Panic-ometer is recalibrated to start redlining about it in March.

Welcome. To the Perpetual State of Shemergency.

Lemme be clear on something, here: I'm not one of these dickface dudes who define the world in terms of gender difference. Like this wet fart. I don't think this way. 

But on the question of anxiety accumulation, I have observed this distinction. Between myself as an individual human, and my wife - also an individual human. I'm not generalizing. If you extrapolate from these two individual humans and create some broader commentary on humans overall, that's on you, friend. 

My world view accommodates the following responses to worrisome situations:

1. Fuck it.
2. Fuck this.
3. Fuck all this.
4. Fuck that.
5. Fuck you.
6. Fuck him.
7. Fuck them.
8. Fuck off.
9. Fuck no.
10. You fucking kidding me?
11. You cannot be fucking serious.
12. Get the fuck outta here. 
13. Jesus fucking Christ.
14. I swear to fucking Christ, I will skin that [bank teller/James Franco/GOP Senate Minority Leader] alive.
15. etc.

And that's the fucking end of it. Till my next fucking aneurysm about the next fucking thing.

In wife-brain, the introduction of a worrisome piece of information lights one of those trails of gunpowder that goes hissing and crackling after Yosemite Sam - it never kills the varmint you're after and you cannot escape it. Which would be fine. She would detonate the powder, her face would be all cartoon-blackened, she would reset in the next scene and start over.

But, no.

Because each new bit of worrisome input sets off a line of chatter inside her skull. And each line of chatter must be tracked and catalogued, cross-referenced and prioritized in a constant onrush of data that makes the NSA's command center look like a fucking lemonade stand on a desolate and windswept Siberian tundra. The sheer amount of data that gets pushed through this system is a testament to the limitless vistas of human potential currently squandered on exasperating horse shit.

Each new thread of Threat Level Orange that gets fed into the system sends a pulse of Wig Out to into her consciousness. She is able to hear and understand each of these impulses with an appalling clarity. She can retrieve any single one of them, can provide exhaustive analysis of their interrelatedness, and can track the constantly shifting level of priority assigned to each impulse. Inside her head, it's like a constant Inception-style landscape where reality is degrading and folding in on itself with that crazy tuba music.

The fucked up impact on ME, though: I CANNOT HEAR these important, important impulses as it travels through the system. To her, they have the insistent quality of a broadcast interrupted by Homeland Security. To me, they are thoughts in her head. That don't actually exist in any way, take any form, or have the capacity to intrude upon the reality I share with her. Said reality, I have come to recognize, is completely eclipsed by the howling round of Gollum-fights the prize of which is to feast on the meager scraps on what future is left to us and our children that is constantly taking place in her mind.

And SINCE I CANNOT HEAR the unceasing chatter in her head, I am POWERLESS TO RESPOND TO IT. But because these fears are her constant companions, and feel so urgent and real to her, she fully expects me to TAKE ACTION.

So no, I did not pay the cable bill yet. Because the 86,000 requests to do so took place non-verbally inside her head.

This naturally increases exponentially the level of anxiety that attends each impulse, BECAUSE NOTHING IS BEING DONE. Her intra-cranial entreaties have fallen once more on deaf ears. EVEN THOUGH THE BANSHEE SHRIEKING IN HER BRAIN GROWS LOUDER BY THE SECOND, WHICH JESUS GOD IS SURELY WORTH A FULL-ON FREAKOUT, AM I RIGHT?!?

I have tried. I have tried to explain that just because there is an Olivier from Marathon Man ruthlessly and insistently extracting her sanity in there, does not mean I can see him or know what he's asking. 

And it just makes things worse when I tell her to relax. Because for me to do so is code for "you're fucking crazy." Which introduces a new impulse of Threat Level Orange into an already overtaxed system.

So you know what? Fuck this.