Skip to main content

Dead Weight

In the story Town Car from the collection Wall Street Noir ( a nice collection of short stories exploring the dark side of how business gets done on Wall Street - in many ways the opposite of the CNBC edition) , David Noonan writes.

The last thing he wanted was a girlfriend with nothing to do, calling him six times a day, sitting in front of the TV all night wondering why he couldn't spend more time with her,carefully watering her boredom until it bloomed into glorious hysteria. Heather was too busy for that shit.

These are the thoughts of a man who has a trophy wife at home and all the trappings of a normal life. Heather is his mistress and he compares making love with her to working out a couple of hours at the gym. This also happens to be his alibi for when he is visiting her.

While Heather's being too busy to turn hysterical for love and attention works great for this married man, the sentiments would find resonance with a lot of others who are emotionally unavailable in their relationships. They seek the comfort of having a significant other in their lives but are unable or unwilling to invest emotionally in this person.

It really aggravates them when the aggrieved party expresses their desire for more out of their relationship, sometimes to the point where breaking up is the only recourse. The dead weight that renders emotional involvement in a relationship impossible can be a myriad different shapes and is only sometimes a spouse.

Comments

Anonymous said…
This reminds me of my stbx wife, although in a completely opposite way. She would never call me, however late I would get. On asking, she would say something like 'I did not want to disturb you'. Now how do you argue with that. But if she did need something, she could find me, even in hell. Sometimes, you do want to be disturbed dammit.
Heartcrossings said…
lars - How true ! Isn't calling for no reason a great sign of love and affection ?

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...

Changing Pace

This blog has been a big part of my life for the last five years. Besides giving me the opportunity to connect with a number of interesting people and share my thoughts and ideas with them, it has been a form of daily meditation for me. No matter what the day threw my way, I made a very deliberate effort to find a little quiet time to write.The process of thinking about what to write and then the act of writing itself worked as an antidote to aggravations big and small. Five and half years ago, when I started Heartcrossings both my personal and professional lives left a lot to be desired for. The only real happiness I had was in being J's mother. While that was often enough to make me forget what I did not have, I sorely needed a third place to call my own and shape in the likeness of my dreams. This blog has been where there were no limits or constraints and that was absolutely exhilarating - it is the reason I have been able to nurture it for as long and as much as I have. A lot ...