Le Chat Noir

In many things, my beloved and I have a very yin-yang thing going on. He is very often quiet and reserved and I am, well, not - at least, not often. He is math and science smart and I'm all about the language and the literature. He wants to know HOW things work and I just want to know THAT things work. He revels in the process, I'm more focused on end results. For the most part, these differences in how we operate work out quite nicely for us; we fill in the missing pieces and complement each other very, very well.

Sometimes, though, it's not such a perfect fit.

The fact that I blog makes my husband uneasy. I respect and appreciate his reasoning; blogging can be an extremely risky undertaking. He's seen me get dooced. He worries about cyber-psychos and stalkers and identity theft and the like. All of these are well-founded concerns; the internet can, indeed, be a dangerous place. Still, he recognizes that blogging is a creative and intellectual exercise for me and has come, I think, to a grudging respect for the medium and my use of and affection for it.

In the process of blogging, I've come to "know" a few people through their own writing and their comments on my sites. Contrary and her husband, Pookie (who, I'm betting, is nothing like what I imagine a "Pookie" to be). Blue (whose site I can't link to, because everytime I try, it locks me out of my browser!!**) and her husband, Asshole (who, I'm betting, is exactly like what I expect an "Asshole" to be, but in the best possible ways, like "you call me "Asshole" like it's a bad thing"). One of these, Vanx over at Verb-Ops, is a particular favorite of mine. He's smart and funny and, over the course of about a year now, we've had conversations about everything from hair styles and hot sauce to Frankenstein and the nature of human existence. I can tell, from our correspondence, that he's someone I can really like and respect and, as such, I've been a little less careful about keeping my secret identity a secret from him (the fact that he's so smart that he kind of outed me once is beside the point, really).

Vanx has made a couple of trips to France in the past year, and one of those journeys resulted in a photo on his alternate site, Foto-Ops, of a store that featured posters of Le Chat Noir. I commented on this picture that I have always wanted a copy of that poster. Dear, sweet man that he is, Vanx scored one for me on his most recent trip! He emailed me early last week to find out how to best get it to me, and I sent him my address.

The poster arrived on Saturday and my husband, seeing the tube, asked what it was. I told him it was a poster. He asked if I'd gotten it from eBay and I, not in the habit of lying to my husband (or to anyone, for that matter), told him that it had come from Vanx.

Suffice to say that this did not go over well.

I don’t think that the problem was so much that Vanx had bought me a present, but that I gave him my address so he could mail it to me. After a very short and uncomfortable discussion about the wisdom (or lack thereof) of divulging such information to strangers, Husband made a dismissive comment about it being "my life" (the unspoken implication of which was that I could play fast and loose with it if I wanted, but that I was doing so very much against his will) before he left for a police auction and I left to teach a yoga class.

He left first, and I spent a little bit of time pacing the floor and fuming. It wasn't long, though, before I was struck by a moment of clarity and saw this confrontation as an opportunity for us. Before I left, I wrote this note and stuck it to the door for my beloved to find:


Dear You,

I am, by nature, outgoing and friendly. These things are essential parts of who I am and part of why you love me. I need for you to trust me to make sound judgments about the people I choose to let in. Good friends are worth a little risk.

-Me



We haven't really spoken about this since I left the note. I suspect that I made my point well and that he's taking some time to process the idea that it's not his concerns for our safety that upset me, but his lack of faith in my ability to judge character and to make decisions about who I invite in as a friend. One of the things that I adore about my husband is his ability to really consider new things and his willingness to change his thinking if presented with a valid reason to do so.

Wait: that’s TWO things...




(**Blue, if you're reading, check into that for me, would you? I haven't been able to properly congratulate you on your clean amnio results because your blog freezes my computer up solid!)