Dancing Which I Don't

It was Friday evening, the end of a moderately demanding week at work, and I was looking forward to going out to dinner with my sweet, lovely wife. We had not done this for some time, so I had invited my wife to go out for dinner and have an evening together away from our home, without chores and tasks surrounding us and demanding to be done.

Our lives were in a new phase, after the hard early years of trying to make ends meet, of having and raising children, and now we were on our own, with our almost grown children away at school. The children would be home from time to time, might even live with us sometime in the future, but most of the time from now on it would just be the two of us. We had a nice house, two reliable cars, and enough income from both our jobs to live comfortably, and indeed, to go out for dinner occasionally.

I had made reservations for the evening at a restaurant that both of us enjoy, and I was running a little late, so knew that I would have to get cleaned up and dressed in a hurry.

My wife was already dressed, very attractively and very pleasing too my eyes. She urged me to hurry, and so I offered to telephone the restaurant and ask that out reservation be moved forward a half hour. My wife said, no, we can't do that, I told John Harmon that we would meet him there at 7:00 PM and we can't leave him standing there waiting for us to show up a half hour late.

I was a bit taken aback. Who? Who is John Harmon and why is he meeting us? She said, he is a new man at the office, recently moved here from out of town, and since he does not know anyone locally I wanted you to meet him, and later to introduce him to some of our friends. They have dancing at the restaurant starting at eight o'clock so I thought that you could get acquainted and then perhaps I could dance for a little while.

I said, dear, you know that I don't dance. I admire dancing, I think it is graceful and beautiful, but I have just never mastered it and have no talent or inclination for it at all. As you undoubtedly remember, I made disastrous attempts at dancing before and after we were married, and if you don't remember I'm sure your poor feet do, and that is why we gave up on it.

I told her that I had intended for this evening to be for us to have dinner together as a couple and have some time for ourselves, since our various obligations on top of our jobs make it difficult to find time for just us.

I then said, it appears that you have planned and designed this evening for something quite different, and kept me in the dark about it. I am a bit hurt, and at least a little bit angry about this. Your have sprung this on me minutes before we are supposed to meet this new man in your life, and laid out an evening in which you can have the pleasure of dancing while I sit as an excess baggage third party at the table, being bored and embarrassed. That was not my intention at all when I asked you to go out with me this evening.

In all fairness, let me say that she had always loved to dance and had unselfishly foregone that pleasure during our marriage while we worked through our tight early years and our child raising years, only having an occasional chance to dance, always with another man, at occasional parties over the years. She loved to dance, desired to dance, perhaps even needed to dance, and had had few opportunities during our years together. It occurred to me that not being able to do what she loved, desired and perhaps needed was from her point of view one of the prices she had paid for being married to me. This thought made me realize that I had perhaps been selfish in expecting her to give up this pleasure as part of the price of being my wife. I should add that I did not like it when she danced with other men over the years, but didn't say anything about that to her. Dance is symbolic of sex, and often a prelude to sex, always has been and always will be. That is what it is for.

She had taken me unawares, redefining the evening to which I had invited her and introducing into it a new man that I had never met, and asserting for the first time that she wanted a change in our lives and had initiated it. Our evening together had been unilaterally canceled by her and an altogether different evening substituted for it, one that involved me as, I said, as an embarrassed and humiliated piece of excess baggage, the third figure in a crowd, as in "two's company, three's a crowd," with me expected to sit by myself politely at the table like a bump on a log.

I said to her, Dear, this is not what I invited you out for, and I am not going to go with you. You have already decided what the evening is going to be like and what you have decided is not acceptable to me. You go ahead and meet this new man in your life and I will find something else to do.

She said, you can't do that, and it is too late to cancel, and John may already be there waiting for us. I told her to go on, go, you made an appointment and it would not be fair to him to be stood up by her as the person who had invited him to be there in the first place.

I told her that if I ever asked her out again, and I probably would not, there was to be no redefining the occasion behind my back, and certainly no bringing of another man into the matter.

She asked what I would do, and I said perhaps go to a movie, or check out the local bars to see if any of my friends were there, or perhaps go to the Friday night poker game at a friends' house. She remarked that I did not like to play poker, and I responded that although that was true, I did like companionship and conversation at the end of the work week and if playing poker was the price for having those things tonight, I would play poker. I did not add the obvious observation that it was for companionship and conversation with her that I had invited her out in the first place.

I told her that I did not think that she had ever gone out on me or been unfaithful to me during our marriage, if she had that would have been and immediate and final end to our marriage, but that it looked to me that that was about to change.

She protested angrily that I was talking nonsense, and that she resented the implication of what I had said. I replied that time would tell, perhaps as early as tonight.

I told her that when I went out, I would not leave the porch light on, as it would burn all night if she did not come home, as that would arouse the interest of the neighbors, and that she might want to take a small flashlight with her in case she did come home. She angrily responded that she had no plans to stay out all night and that it was insulting of me to even suggest it. I responded that if it did not happen tonight, it might happen the next time, or the time after that, but that she was obviously initiating a new social life for herself that did not include me, and it was sure to happen before too long.

I began taking off my tie and changing into more comfortable clothes for what was, for me, going to be a somewhat different night out than I had planned. She became angrier and said that she had a right to go dancing after she had gone so many years sacrificing that pleasure to marriage and family. I agreed with her, and said that I did not claim to own her, and she did indeed have a right to go dancing with other men whenever she wished, just not while married to me.

I think that we had simply arrived at a new phase in our marriage in which our fundamental desires and intentions no longer matched and that was probably what was meant by "irreconcilable differences". I said as much to her, and she was then taken aback, as I had been by her surprise re-planning of the evening out to which I had invited her in the first place.

I said that she had taken the first step to introducing a new and different man into her life, and that by doing so she had initiated the process of shoving me out of her life.

She said, we need to talk, and I replied that no, we had talked just now, and that she had better be on her way to her date. She said that it was not a date, but she then left.

I went out and played a few hands of poker, which was boring for me, but did provide the companionship and conversation that I desired at the end of the work week. Afterwards, I went home and to bed at a fairly early hour, and gloomily assumed that this was what my future Friday nights would be like.

The next morning I made an appointment with an attorney specializing in divorces, and suggested to my wife that she might also want to do so, although I intended to propose a fair settlement that she might well want to accept it and avoid the expense of hiring an attorney for herself, but that it was up to her to decide.

As to whether she came home that night or not, it is irrelevant.