Diary

I will be closing on the house in Brandon on June 5, and the main move will be on June 10. Anne isn't pressuring me to leave quickly, so I may not finish until June 11 or 12. Since my family doesn't want any contact with Anne, she has agreed to leave the premises while they're present. This move came up so suddenly that I'll have many unplanned activities. For example, I don't own much furniture and will have to buy some. Also, I have few cooking and dining utensils, so I'll have to buy some of those too.

Overall, I'm feeling a little more positive now, because I'm weary of living in Anne-world. Part of my personality has been repressed by her, and I'm looking forward to being myself again. The main drawback is the risk of being alone for too long a period. I've done that before, in Dixon, Illinois, and grew tired of it. Though I'm fairly robust psychologically, I know that being alone can be bad for your mental health. This is especially true if you live in a rural area and don't have local friends. I am hoping that it will be easier to develop a basic social network here, where the local population is better-educated and more widely-traveled than the people in Dixon. This will be my twenty-second home after living in two countries and eight states. In the meantime, our daily interactions have become less tense: if I don't question or criticize her, she seems perfectly happy. She is enjoying the hypomanic state accompanying her preparation to move.

I am still cogitating about the way Anne handled this, and the picture that emerges isn't very pretty. To be fair, other women I've known – my ex-wife and Kimberly – behaved in a similar fashion. In all three cases, their approach was somewhat clinical: they realized that their goals were not the same as my goals, and that they would be happier if they moved on to a different arrangement. My general complaint in all three cases was that there wasn't much discussion. However, in the cases of my ex-wife and Kimberly, it wasn't very difficult to infer their motives. My ex-wife wanted an upper-middle-class lifestyle and more social prestige, and Kimberly wanted to continue her free-spirit-artistic-traveler fantasy, which was inconsistent with committed relationships, something I don't think she ever had. My ex-wife's plan didn't materialize, because her standard of living mainly declined after the divorce: she was a single mother with a low income. I don't particularly want to pick on Kimberly, but I think that she went from being a failed dancer to being a failed singer to being a failed writer – without ever having had a serious relationship. Her latest book is an autobiographical one about her back pain!

Anne is a lot more complex than my ex-wife or Kimberly. She is pathologically self-protective to such an extent that she deviates further from social orthodoxy than they do. Her main statement, "I'm moving to Seattle," gives away nothing about her motives. You have no immediate way of knowing whether she is specifically rejecting you, whether she dislikes Middlebury, whether she wants to be near her son, whether she will save money on housing, etc. It's been over a month now, and it seems that she decided that she doesn't want to live with a man any longer. She does seem to dislike specific things about me, but she won't discuss them. Part of her strategy may be based on fear that I'll retaliate if she criticizes me. The oddest part, I think, is her complete disregard for the inconvenience that this causes me. All of a sudden, without notice, during weak housing and stock markets, after just providing funds for my daughter and her family to buy a house, I am being involuntarily forced out of my home. It seems possible, though perhaps unlikely, that she planned it now in order to inflict maximum damage. She hasn't said a single apologetic word, and she showed no interest in and made no suggestions about what course of action I might take. I still find this rather astounding behavior coming from someone who pretends to be a caring human being. She also makes light of the fact that selling this house will provide a windfall to her, since it has almost doubled in value since she bought it. Combining these factors, I still think that there are psychopathic elements to her personality that can't be explained simply by bipolar disorder, autism and ADHD.

What do you think?