NOTE: As I mentally deconstruct the demise of my marriage, I am publishing a series of short essays about things that happened, the way I felt, and so on. It's intended to illustrate my mental state at the time, and provide a kind of chronicle of my emotional state, hopefully helping me not make the same mistakes in future relationships.

5/13/03 1:05 PM: I don't know how to consider the progress I'm making.

According to half the links I could find with Google, there are four stages of grief when a relationship dissolves. Denial, depression, anger and acceptance. I finally hit stage three.

I started thinking about a lot of things, and that rarely ends well (ask anybody who knows me). I hit a bad patch in 2001. Yuri responded to that by running away from me and the issue. That gave me an all new problem. Yuri responded to that by running away from it. That made me do all kinds of stupid things that exacerbated the stupid things I was already, unwittingly doing. That sat for a number of months, and finally boiled to a head where she started confronting how absent she'd been, and I asked, "are we done here?" She finally said we were, in effect, running away again. Now, does any of this mitigate the f**ked up things I did to her? No.

Still. This bothers me.

As I said earlier, I don't have any actual animosity towards Yuri. I still love her and, if you must know, I'm probably still willing to set all the past aside and work through it. However, I now have anger about the situation. Her fight-or-flight response is stuck in "runaway" mode. She never fought any of the things, partially because of issues I know of in her upbringing (another story fraught with unflattering details about lots of people) and partially because the real goodness in her loathes any form of conflict, even when it's constructive.

I should have seen that coming. I really think I missed the signs that she was gonna implode, leaving me in the lurch.

So now I'm angry, which is good for doing pushups, it's good for driving creative productivity, and it's good for business. It's just a bad space to be in regarding somebody you care about (despite the fact that when I see her, I often hear my brain go "punk" and feel anger that she couldn't have "reclaimed" who she was earlier). It makes me lose respect for her, because she doesn't appear to be as impressive or together as I'd believed (but then again, her attraction to me wasn't what I believed, so I've got even more fuel for the fire, but we're getting into a digression here). It makes me look at her in a less forgiving light.

It makes me angry. Apologies to Bill Bixby, but you really wouldn't like me when I'm truly angry.

Back to that digression, here's a statement that'd make almost any man boil with anger or cringe in terror, depending on where he is at the time: "I could go three months without having sex and be okay." That's both sick and wrong. That's just not right at all.

This past weekend, Yuri drove to Davis and attended the Whole Earth Festival. When she was younger, she went every year. She's never been, nor even mentioned it, the whole time we were together. We would do this thing where, believing we knew each other, we would avoid saying/doing things because we'd think the other wouldn't like it or go along. We were almost universally wrong. So now she tells me she's "reclaiming" who she is, something I suggested she do for years, because I said she gave too much to everybody else and not enough to herself. Now she's more like the girl I fell for than the woman I've dealt with. The difference is now that I don't respect her as much, I don't think she's as smart or as together mentally. The anger is really at myself, for not seeing all of this to start, blinded by a gorgeous body and a deep affection which was, itself, a myth. She's not an illogical, over-reactionary harridan, but she's sure nowhere near as impressive as I believed.

She told me "it's okay to be mad at me." With the way I feel now, that'd be like being mad at a sofa, or being mad at the rain. Yuri is a product of her environment and upbringing, as am I. She reaceted in the way she felt was best, as did I. The sad coincidence is that we were both wholly wrong -- about the reactions, about even being with one another. It's just the way it is, and nobody put a gun to my head and send me into this. I wouldn't take away what happened, as I got more joy than I knew possible, but I can admit now that she's right and everything we tried was probably a bad idea. My friend Marsha's husband Omar once said, "If it's that easy, get gone, because you're not the woman I thought I married." I feel like that right now, that -- really, and I can admit this is coming from a place of hurt and anger, and solely my opinion -- she's too wussy to stand and deliver. Marsha responded to that challenge, incidentally, and she and Omar are still together (happier than ever, she says).

Among the myriad things lost along the way, we both lost a lot of the regard we held for one another in this. We lost the belief in one another when confronted with cold fact and real life. We both believe there's no way to get it back.

Mm. Yah, angry now.