Obsession

When my husband gets an idea in his head, he has a hard time letting it go until he's done what he set out to. Most times, his tenacity is endearing; at others, it's seriously annoying; occasionally, it's devestating.

For example, last summer we planned to see an outdoor concert. His kids were with us, so he decided that we needed a Frisbee to toss around before the show started. Fine idea, but after visiting our fourth store, it started sounding like a less good plan. When we finally found one in store number six, there wasn't enough time to play before the concert started.

Or the time he decided that he needed a special shirt to wear to a party we were hosting. He'd seen the perfect one in a store earlier in the week, but didn't buy it at the time. Now, with the party deadline looming, we drove to at least three different stores before we found the one he had been in. We barely made it home in time before our first guests rang the doorbell.

These are fairly benign, but incredibly typical, examples of his behavior. Shortly after we got engaged, he got it in his head that he wanted a long engagement. Fine, I said. Give me a rough timetable. But he refused to discuss it, to the point that his cold feet became a sort of sick joke between us. He became obsessed -- in the same way single-minded way he did when he was looking for a Frisbee or a shirt -- with putting me off. All of the sudden, instead of being the perfect woman with whom he wanted to spend the rest of his days, I was a shrewish harpy who was trying to tie him down and change him into a placid, domestic homebody.

Once he got this idea in his head, there was pretty much nothing I could do to disabuse him of it. When I stopped wearing my engagment ring, I told him it was the only tangible thing I could think of to convince him -- and the world -- that I was NOT the one with the obsession. But it was too late -- the idea was already there. And he ran with it, complaining bitterly about me to anyone who would listen. It turns out that there were a lot of people in his support group, some of whom gave him support that was much more than moral.

This was not an easy time for me, and I often considered leaving to let him figure out what he wanted without me in the picture. But everytime I pulled away, he came after me with a ferocity and tenacity that seemed to all the world like true love. I believed it. And I stayed when I should have run like the wind.

I'm pretty convinced now that obsession is never a good thing.


The Wife Who Knows