The Physical Characteristics of the Unloved

I've mentioned that I'm reading Mary Gordon's "Spending". I wake up early, turn on the light, and tell myself I'll read for half an hour before I get up. But then I enjoy the book so much that I can't put it down and the clock keeps ticking and pretty soon it's 7:00 and I've got to race to get out the door.

Last night after dinner Mr. Match and I were watching "Mad Money" and talking about Harman-Kardon speakers and I decided to pull up the photos of the million-dollar house I used to own. (Okay, if you wanna be a voyeur . . .) (Disclaimer: that page has not been updated in three years.) I wanted to show him the entertainment system that cost around forty thousand dollars. (I shudder when I think of it now. Actually, I shuddered when I realized that sleazy salesman at Wilson Audio had convinced EEFFH to spend that kind of money on a television and speakers and receivers.)

Mr. Match was asking me what it was like to live that way, and we got to talking about how I had become engaged to EEFFH, how I had chosen to go off with someone who was such a slob. And how I could have stayed for four years with someone who was so emotionally cruel, emotionally excluding of me — so very different from me.

Codependents of the World, Unite! I felt needed. I believed I had something to give that would improve his life, fill the holes in his psyche, leave him a better person. Okay, I was wrong!

And this morning my reading included this phrase: "the woman . . . with the uncared-for feet of someone who thinks herself unloved". And I got to thinking about EEFFH who, as I've told you, went the four years we were together without ever visiting the dentist despite his nightly bloody drool; who had the worst calloused, cracked feet in the Western Hemisphere but wouldn't dream of getting a pedicure; who, when he started an affair behind my back with a woman who was a bigger slob than he, stopped styling his hair and instead just let it fly in the breeze. This was a man who told me every Yiddish curseword in his vocabulary was learned from the mouth of his mother who used those words on him and at him. In retrospect, this was a man who thought himself unloved and unlovable. And all the caring and tending and nurturing in the world, on my part, could not change that.

Mr. Match asked if I missed the money. And the answer, honestly and truthfully from the bottom of my heart, is — no. Money does not equal love. Power does not equal love. I'd rather be alone and lonely than in a relationship and lonely any day.