A common sin among men is to go out with the boys promising to be home by 9 p.m. but stay out until the wee hours without a phone call. The worry is awful. You begin to plan the funeral. At some point you feel there will be a funeral even if he walks in the door in the next five minutes. It must be the ultimate irony that the urge to kill is most likely evoked when we feel our loved ones have deliberately compromised their personal safety.
I understand why there is a fine living to be made by teaching couples how to fight constructively in the sense that I know the need is there. What I don’t understand is the psychological mechanism that love creates within us that makes us so vulnerable and volatile. Whatever it is, it does get better over time. I was most vulnerable as a newly wed when attention is most on the relationship. I recall that later life’s busyness could mean that my husband and I could spew hateful words including obscenities at one another in the morning, forget about them by dinner, and then remember at bedtime that we forgot to be angry. Now we’ve been married so long and get on so well, that I am surprised at the rare occasion of the rising of the blood. We are like volcanoes, inactive, but not completely dormant. I suspect that the old, old joke about the couple celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary will probably survive through the ages. I’m thinking of the one about the couple who never ever considered divorce, but contemplated murder many times.
