R-E-S-P-E-C-T

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

We were sitting in the family room, much the same as any night. Just a normal Wednesday evening. Dinner was done, dishes in the dishwasher, the kitchen tidied up. The television was off, and we were each sitting in our chairs, occupying ourselves with our devices. Or so I thought.  

I looked over at Ronin. Usually, he was absorbed in is iPad—reading a book, checking out the newsfeed, maybe playing a game. That man could concentrate to exclusion of all else. But not tonight—he kept glancing at me surreptitiously, his gaze darting away when our eyes met. He looked nervous. Something was definitely up. But what?

“What’s going on?” I asked the next time our eyes met.

“Nothing,” he replied, looking away.

Nothing my ass, I thought.  Something’s up, and I’m not sure it’s a good something.

I put down my tablet. The book that I was reading wasn’t that captivating, and I needed a break. I stood and made my way to the kitchen to make a cup of tea.  As I walked out of the room, I could feel Ronin’s eyes on me.

What is up with him?

A couple of minutes later, when I returned, he was still looking at me.

“What?” I said as I returned to my chair, hot tea mug in hand.

“Nothing,” he said, dropping his eyes, pretending to look at his screen.

Ronin and I have been married forever. We have three grown children, the youngest of whom is in her last year of university. We are empty nesters galloping towards retirement. It’ just the two of us now. We spend a lot of our time together, so we know each other pretty well. So, I was confident that there was something going on in Ronin’s life, making him act peculiar. And I wanted to know what it was.

I continued looking at my iPad, drinking my tea. Ronin’s eyes kept darting between his screen to me. We were each pretending to be absorbed in our screens, but were really eyeing each other covertly.

Finally, I couldn’t take it any more.

“What is going on with you?” I demanded.

He shook his head.

I put down my iPad, and looked at him.

“We’ve been together a long time, and I know when something’s on your mind. What’s bugging you?”

Ronn got up, and paced a bit.

“I need a drink,” and he headed into the kitchen.

He needs a drink? That is not good. Not good at all. What’s going on? I looked towards the kitchen thinking of possibilities, none of them good.

Did he have a terminal disease I didn’t know about, with only weeks to live? He looked fine, so maybe not that. Something to do with work? Oh my God, did he lose his job? He was a psychology prof at the local university. But they always need professors, right? Besides, we work at the same university in the same department, and I’d have heard the scuttlebutt. So, no. Did he squander our savings somehow with janky investments? Or gambling? No, that couldn’t be it. Our investments are joint, and I would know if the money had disappeared. Did he kill someone? Okay, I was getting desperate, but, I teach as well, and killing a student wasn’t always the farthest thing away from reality. Trust me.

I sat there, waiting, nerves jangling, every conceivable and inconceivable possibility scrolling through my brain.  

When Ronin finally came back into the family room, after what seemed like days, he didn’t sit down, he just paced a bit, with his drink clasped between his hands.

“Ronin! What is t?” I was getting worried.

He stopped and sat back down in his chair. I noticed that he was chewing his lower lip, a sure sign of nervousness.

He took a deep breath.

“I’m having an affair!” he blurted out.

I just looked at him. An affair? Had I heard him correctly—an affair? Ronin? Sure, we’ve been together a long time, but an affair? My heart was pounding in my chest. An affair. He’d said an affair. A betrayal of our life together. I felt slightly ill. I tried to calm myself. It was still very bad, but nobody had died. Yet. 

“Say again,” I stammered.

“Della, I’m having an affair.”

“Having, as in still going on?”

“Yes.”

I took a sip of my now tepid tea.

“A physical affair?”

“Yes.”

“Not just an infatuation, or something online?” Ronin was prone to hyperbole.

“Yes, a physical relationship,” he said crossing his arms across his chest—a classic defensive stance, with a touch of vexation.

“With a human person?” I asked, just to be clear.

Now he was getting annoyed at me, pursing his lips, squinting his eyes.

“Yes, Della, with a real person. Yes, we have sex. And yes, it is still going on.” He looked at me, trying to hide his annoyance. I stared back. “Satisfied?”

“I’m pretty sure the role of “pissed-off adulterer” isn’t the vibe you want to be using with me right now, I said, equally annoyed.

“I’m sorry,” he said, trying to look contrite. “But you’re not making this any easier.”

I blinked at him.

“Not making it easier? You think that I should be making this—” I waved my hand in a circle, encompassing both of us, “—easier? At the exact same time as you’ve upended my entire life?” I shook my head. “Those, sir, are pretty big balls that you’ve got, getting pissed at me when you’re the one in an extramarital relationship, emphasis on extra-marital!”

I sat rigid in my chair, glaring at him. He avoided eye contact. We sat in silence, me sipping my tea, he gulping whatever liquid fortification he had in his glass.

“Well,” he said, finally “do you have any questions for me?”

“What are you going to do?” I sad.  

“What do you mean?” he asked, as if he had not considered what the future held.

I took a deep breath, and proceeded. “Where do you see yourself in the next hour? Next twenty-four hours? Next month?”

He looked confused.

“The status quo has changed, Ronin,” I said. “I need to know what you are going to do. Long term, short term.”

“Don’t you want to talk about it—the affair, I mean. Don’t you want to know who it is?”

I took a moment to think.  

“No. That has nothing to do with me. Unless it is with one of my friends. Then I’ll be really pissed.”

“It’s no one you know. It’s my TA, Tanya.”

I nodded. I had met Tanya at faculty events and around the department, but I didn’t “know” know her. She was just another person in the psych department. 

“Okay, so not a friend,” I said considering. “So, not important. Your behaviour is what we need to discuss, and how it affects me. “ I paused to look at him. “I’m only concerned with what you’re going to do in the foreseeable future.” Sitting forward in my chair, I asked, “What are you going to do, Ronin?”

He picked up his drink, taking a healthy swallow.  “How much do you want me to tell you?”

I was getting angry. Ronin’s selfishness and narcissism knew no bounds. 

“I don’t care about your affair wth Tanya. I do care about what you’re going to do in the very near future.”m

“But I need to tell you the whole story. I need to unburden myself. Make you understand it from my perspective.”

I couldn’t help it. I felt the anger creeping in. I took another deep breath and tried to moderate my breathing. I unclenched my jaw, and counted to ten.

“Let me get this straight,” I said. “You want to unburden yourself to me? The woman whom you have just betrayed? You want to tell me all about your illicit affair—the nitty-gritty details?” I shook my head. “What makes you think that I give a shit? You literally screwed me over, and now you want to tell me about it? No thank you.”

Ronin looked at me, intently. “You don’t want to know about it? You don’t care about about what you did that drove me into the arms of another woman—”

I lost it. The crap coming out of that man’s mouth!

“DROVE YOU INTO THE ARMS OF ANTHER WOMAN? ARE. YOU. KIDDNG. ME?”

He raised his hands, in a defensive gesture as if to ward me off.  

“Don’t get angry,” he said trying to placate me. “I just thought that you would want to know. It’s as much about you as it is about me.”

Deep breath Della. Deep breath.

“It is not about me. It has nothing to do with me. It is one hundred percent about you.  And your libido. And your need to reassure your self that you are still a verily, attractive man, even though you are fifty-seven years old. Old-age frightens you, Ronin, and that is why you need to bed a younger woman. Don’ be telling me it is about me. It’s about you and your penis, and the decisions the two of you made. It is not about me!”

It’s hard to argue with your wife when she also has a PhD in psychology.

Ronin looked at me. A small smile appearing on his lips. Was he trying to provoke me?

“You are showing remarkable restraint,” he said, nodding. “I thought for sure there would be tears, or you would kick me out. But instead you opted to calmly discuss this potentially life-altering situation, and its affects on your life.” He paused. “That was very mature of you,” he said slowly, still nodding his head as if what he had just said was deeply profound.

He walked over to his phone, and turned something off.

“Were you recording this?” I asked, incredulous.

“Yes.” He put up his hands again, trying to calm me down. “But, there’s a reason. I’m doing research into how partners react to getting this type of bad news. Life-altering bad news. My team and I are each presenting a relationship ending, worse-case scenario to our partners, and recording their reactions. We’re trying to see if there is a correlation between the type of news and the the responses of partners. We’re looking for commonalties, and trying to see if there are any trends.

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Research? This very awful scenario was just research? I was more angry now then I had been when he told me he was having an affair.

Breathe, Della, breathe. Big calming breaths. Breathe in, breathe out.

“So,” I said, trying to find my zen. “You’re telling me that there was no affair with Tanya?”

“Correct.”

“And that this scenario is a research project?”

“Correct.”

He nodded his head, looking pretty proud of himself, that stupid smile still on his face. “We’re gauging and then analyzing the outcomes and reactions. Because I’m the head of the research team, tonight was the first couple interaction. Once we examine and tweak the scenario, then the team will conduct their own partner interactions. Then we can extrapolate that information into the general public and compare our findings with real-world interviews with people who have experienced relationship-ending experiences..

Big cleansing breaths, Della.

“What about non-maleficence?”

Ronin looked bewildered.  

“What do you mean?”

I squinted. I couldn’t believe he was this dense.

“Non-maleficence. You remember non-maleficence don’t you? First year psych? The concept that you, as the practitioner, must conduct ethical research that causes no harm. No. Harm.”

“I don’t understand. This was what, fifteen minutes? How could you consider it harmful?

I spoke through clenched jaws. “It was harmful and unethical.”

“No way!” he said, shaking his head. “This was not maleficence. This was just research, plain and simple. It wasn’t that bad.”

I stood and strode over to him.

“In this ‘ethical’ field study, you disrupted my entire life. Changed my perspective on my marriage, my value as a human being and as a woman, destroyed my trust in you, and belief in my marriage vows. You turned my entire life upside down.” I bent down, getting as close as I could without head-butting him. “All for a research project.” I stood back up. “That, sir, is the epitome of maleficence causing harm.”

“But, I didn’t think—”

I cut him off.  

“You’re right, you didn’t think. You didn’t think about me, at all. But I am certainly thinking about you, and what your future holds.”

Ronin blanched. “What do you mean?”

I paused, considering if I wanted to take the next step. I looked at Ronin, my husband and partner—truly looked at him. The man I had always treated with the utmost respect. The man who I thought, right up until this evening, would treat me with the same level of respect. Apparently I was wrong.

He had destroyed my view of my life—our life—for some research project. And his team was willing to do the same thing to their families. For what? Some paper to be published in some stupid journal that no one was going to read anyways? It would have been preferable if he had been having an affair. At least I could console myself wth the knowledge that it wasn’t preplanned, like this stupid project. That the hurt and betrayal weren’t purposely elicited to gauge my reaction. A liaison with his TA could have happened. Not great at all, but definitely not as bad as purposefully wounding me with made-up actions. This shit was preplanned, and designed to hurt and injure. And it had worked.  

Nope, this was unforgivable.

“I want you out,” I said. “Now. Go upstairs, pack a bag, and leave.”

He looked shocked.

“Surely, you’re not serious. It was just work.”

“I am serious. As serious as a heart attack.”

He shook his head.

“I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“Bullshit!” I stomped my foot. “You knew it would cause upset and anguish, but you went ahead with it. You knew that it would upend my life, but you went ahead with it. You knew that, as part of your ‘research’ you would cause me to question my life with you. Knowing all that, you still went ahead with it. Your research was more important than my well-being.”

“I … I …”

“There is nothing you can say. You need to go. Now.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Sorry doesn’t cut it, buddy. I am not a lab rat, and I deserve better than this nonsense.” I turned and walked away. “You need to leave.”

Ronin went upstairs and came down a few minutes later, lugging a suitcase.

“Is there anything I can say or do to make you change your mind.”

“Unless you have a time machine that can take us back to the time before you opened stupid your mouth, then no. We’re done.”

He walked slowly towards the front door. “I didn’t see that coming.”

“You should have,” I replied.

He opened the door, and was gone.