Oscar Wilde

A Conversation with Oscar Wilde–College Memoirs: Life At Roanoke–March 1995, Part 11

As part of my Lit mid-term, I was to write a dinner dialogue between myself and one of the twelve authors we studied. I wrote,

I have invited over Oscar Wilde, have sent my time machine to him and brought him to my house. We go to Country Kitchen, not because it’s the best food (not), but because it’s the “local hangout” and he can see bits of local society.
“I loved ‘Importance of Being Earnest,'” I say. “It was so funny and so ridiculous.”
“Well, in my day, society is ridiculous,” Wilde says. “Marriage based on how much money you have, your worth determined by what you do and what your connections are–I wanted people to see how silly they were being with these attitudes.”
We go on discussing the play for a while, not any others since that’s the only one by him that I know. Then we begin to talk about contemporary issues–starting with marriage.
“Marriage these days is supposed to be based on love,” I say, “but we now have a 50% divorce rate.”
“We base it partly on love,” Wilde says, “or, rather, infatuation–and partly on economics. Our divorce rate is low because people just don’t divorce. But so many people are unhappy because they didn’t know their spouse well enough before marrying them, and now they’re no longer ‘in love,’ if they ever were in the first place.”
Somehow we end up on the subject of homosexuality; I admit I don’t agree with it, but I say that I think it was wrong for Wilde to be jailed for it. “You shouldn’t be put in jail just because of the way you are, when you can’t always help it,” I say.
“I was put there for ‘corrupting a young person’ with it,” he says. “I wish I’d never fought the Marquess; when he said I was homosexual, it was true. Maybe people would’ve forgotten about it if I hadn’t sued, but now I’m in prison for a drive I have. A drive I don’t know how to control.”
“You must admit, you were pretty–promiscuous there, and you do have a wife,” I say, which leads to AIDS–which leads to a discussion of the prevalence of syphilis in Wilde’s day. Interesting, but not something I’d want to record here.
People look at us and wonder why Wilde talks the way he does and why he dresses the way he does. But he notices that they seem less shocked at our topics of conversation than they are about him.
“It seems like you’re so much freer to talk, really talk, in your day,” he says. We eventually leave, and I take him back to my house to spend the rest of the evening–wishing all the while that such a handsome man weren’t gay!

Actually, I’ve since discovered that he swung both ways. And changed my mind about homosexual love being wrong. But anyway, finding this test paper especially interested me after reading De Profundis (my commentary here) and a new biography of his wife. There are details in the above conversation which, over nearly 20 years, I forgot I ever even knew.

Index
Cast of Characters (Work in Progress)

Table of Contents

Freshman Year

September 1991:

October 1991:

November 1991:

December 1991: Ride the Greyhound
January 1992: Dealing with a Breakup with Probable NVLD
February 1992:

March 1992: Shawn: Just Friends or Dating?

April 1992: Pledging, Prayer Group–and Peter’s Smear Campaign

May 1992:

Sophomore Year

Summer 1992:

September 1992:

October 1992–Shawn’s Exasperating Ambivalence:

November 1992:

December 1992:

January 1993:

February 1993:

March 1993:

April 1993:

May 1993:

Junior Year

Summer 1993: Music, Storm and Prophetic Dreams

September 1993:

October 1993:

November 1993:

December 1993:

January 1994:

February 1994:

March 1994:

April 1994:

May 1994:

Senior Year

June 1994–Bits of Abuse Here and There:

July & August 1994:

September 1994–Divorce: The Long, Dark, Painful Tunnel:

October 1994:

November 1994:

December 1994:

January 1995:

February 1995:

March 1995:

April 1995:

May 1995:

by Nyssa McCanmore
Posted on April 22, 2015May 17, 2022

De Profundis: Oscar Wilde on toxic friendship–Part 2

Part 1

Oscar Wilde was very relieved at the thought of losing Bosie out of his life, and soon got rid of his fever and began to feel better. But then a few days later, on his birthday, he got a letter from Bosie. He thought maybe it would be the usual “pretty phrase, an expression of affection, a word of sorrow” (typical hoovering) to get him back. But instead, it was

an elaborate repetition of the two scenes, set cunningly and carefully down in black and white! You mocked me with common jests. Your one satisfaction in the whole affair was, you said, that you retired to the Grand Hotel, and entered your luncheon to my account before you left for town.
You congratulated me on my prudence in leaving my sickbed, on my sudden flight downstairs [when he felt Bosie was going to harm him]. ‘It was an ugly moment for you,’ you said, ‘uglier than you imagine.’ Ah! I felt it but too well.
What it had really meant I did not know: whether you had with you the pistol you had bought to try and frighten your father with, and that, thinking it to be unloaded, you had once fired off in a public restaurant in my company:
whether your hand was moving towards a common dinner-knife that by chance was lying on the table between us:
whether, forgetting in your rage your low stature and inferior strength, you had thought of some specially personal insult, or attack even, as I lay ill there: I could not tell. I do not know to the present moment.
All I know is that a feeling of utter horror had come over me, and that I had felt that unless I left the room at once, and got away, you would have done, or tried to do, something that would have been, even to you, a source of lifelong shame.
Only once before in my life had I experienced such a feeling of horror at any human being. It was when in my library at Tite Street, waving his small hands in the air in epileptic fury, your father, with his bully, or his friend, between us, had stood uttering every foul word his foul mind could think of, and screaming the loathsome threats he afterwards with such cunning carried out.
In the latter case he, of course, was the one who had to leave the room first. I drove him out. In your case I went. It was not the first time I had been obliged to save you from yourself.

Both this letter and the scene itself would qualify as narcissistic rage episodes.

Bosie ended his letter with, “When you are not on your pedestal you are not interesting. The next time you are ill I will go away at once.” As Wilde wrote,

For you to write thus to me, when the very illness and fever from which I was suffering I had caught from tending you, was of course revolting in its coarseness and crudity; but for any human being in the whole world to write thus to another would be a sin for which there is no pardon, were there any sin for which there is none.

Then Wilde wrote, “I confess that when I had finished your letter I felt almost polluted, as if by associating with one of such a nature I had soiled and shamed my life irretrievably.”

This is exactly how I felt after receiving the e-mail from Richard and Tracy and copied here. Whether they both had written it, or just one of them, the e-mail was just as “revolting in its coarseness and crudity” and revealed the same “coarseness of fibre” as Wilde had described Bosie’s letter, and inspired similar revulsion.

But unfortunately, Bosie’s brother was found dead in a ditch, so Wilde decided to put off breaking off relations with him in his grief.

The gods are strange. It is not of our vices only they make instruments to scourge us. They bring us to ruin through what in us is good, gentle, humane, loving. But for my pity and affection for you and yours, I would not now be weeping in this terrible place.

…And but for my pity and affection for Richard’s family in their poverty, I would never have allowed them into my house…and they never would have become so entrenched in my life that they could bully me. But we can’t become cold and hard in order to keep away such sorrow; that won’t do, either.

For Wilde to have cut off Bosie at such a time would have been cruel.

Through your father you come of a race, marriage with whom is horrible, friendship fatal, and that lays violent hands either on its own life or on the lives of others.

This is an apt description of Borderline or Narcissistic Personality Disorders.

Wilde then describes Bosie’s leechlike behaviors, going on about how his devotion to Wilde (to the exclusion of his family) “was a proof of your wonderful appreciation of me, and your great affection,” but attaching himself to someone who provided money and “intellectual attractions.”

Bosie lived it up with Wilde, living off Wilde’s dime, making a show of giving up his allowance from his father rather than giving up Wilde, but not giving up “even one of your most superfluous luxuries, or most unnecessary extravagances.”

In fact, Wilde had been detained at a hotel because of trouble paying expenses incurred when Bosie stayed there with him for 10 days, then–without Wilde’s permission–brought a friend to stay there as well. Because he was detained, he found the card from Bosie’s father which led to the libel suit which led to his ruin, rather than off in France knowing nothing about the card.

Bosie financially drained not only Wilde, but, to some extent, his mother; “the continued drain…was never so distressing, because…never so completely unaccompanied by the smallest word of thanks, or sense of limit.” Wilde even ended up going bankrupt, and lost everything.

Wilde chides Bosie for thinking

that in attacking your own father with dreadful letters, abusive telegrams, and insulting postcards you were really fighting your mother’s battles, coming forward as her champion, and avenging the no doubt terrible wrongs and sufferings of her married life. It was quite an illusion on your part; one of your worst indeed.
The way for you to have avenged your mother’s wrongs on your father, if you considered it part of a son’s duty to do so, was by being a better son to your mother than you had been: by not making her afraid to speak to you on serious things: by not signing bills the payment of which devolved on her: by being gentler to her, and not bringing sorrow into her days….
You were wrong even in fancying that it would have been an absolute delight and joy to your mother if you had managed through me to get your father put into prison…And if you want to know what a woman really feels when her husband, and the father of her children, is in prison dress, in a prison cell, write to my wife and ask her. She will tell you.

It has been a year and a half since the sentencing, but Wilde’s memories still haunt him, as they do with many of us who have experienced the pain of being connected to a narcissistic or borderline personality disorder, but with the added trouble of being in prison.

Because he’s in prison, he doesn’t have those daily tasks or human interactions which keep most of us occupied during our grief; for some of us, our mind is that prison, because even our daily tasks cannot keep our minds from straying to that same topic, our memories and emotions about that person.

He writes that Bosie was once described by a newspaper as following Wilde about like his shadow:

[T]he memory of our friendship is the shadow that walks with me here: that seems never to leave me: that wakes me up at night to tell me the same story over and over till its wearisome iteration makes all sleep abandon me till dawn:
at dawn it begins again: it follows me into the prison-yard and makes me talk to myself as I tramp round: each detail that accompanied each dreadful moment I am forced to recall:
there is nothing that happened in those ill-starred years that I cannot recreate in that chamber of the brain which is set apart for grief or for despair:
every strained note of your voice, every twitch and gesture of your nervous hands, every bitter word, every poisonous phrase comes back to me: I remember the street or river down which we passed, the wall or woodland that surrounded us, at what figure on the dial stood the hands of the clock, which way went the wings of the wind, the shape and colour of the moon.

He acknowledges that Bosie loved him.

But you, like myself, have had a terrible tragedy in your life, though one of an entirely opposite character to mine…In you Hate was always stronger than Love. Your hatred of your father was of such stature that it entirely outstripped, o’erthrew, and overshadowed your love of me….
So to gratify it, you gambled with my life, as you gambled with my money, carelessly, recklessly, indifferent to the consequence. If you lost, the loss would not, you fancied, be yours. If you won, yours, you knew, would be the exultation, and the advantages of victory.

He describes how hate had blinded Bosie and gnawed at his nature. Then Bosie’s father sent Wilde a letter “with its obscene threats and coarse violences,” which sounds familiar to those of us who have dealt with the personality disordered.

Wilde sensed danger, said he “would not be the catspaw between you both in your ancient hatred of each other,” that it was not fair to Wilde, and in a familiar sentiment to those of us who have had to deal with drama queens/kings, “that I had something better to do with my life than to have scenes with a man drunken, declasse, and half-witted as he was.”

But Bosie insisted that it had nothing to do with Wilde, that he would not let his father dictate his private friendships, “that it would be most unfair of me to interfere.” Turns out Bosie had already, before speaking to Wilde, sent his father “a foolish and vulgar telegram, as your answer. That of course committed you to a foolish and vulgar course of action to follow.”

The telegram would shame “the commonest street-boy.” It went from “pert telegrams to priggish lawyers’ letters”; this urged on his father “still further,” makes it into a point of honor for his father; so the next attack comes to Wilde publicly instead of in a private letter.

I have to expel him from my house. He goes from restaurant to restaurant looking for me, in order to insult me before the whole world, and in such a manner that if I retaliated I would be ruined, and if I did not retaliate I would be ruined also.

This order of events is familiar to those who have entered into such wars with the personality disordered. In fact, it sounds familiar to me, because I have had to expel Richard and Tracy from my life, only to have them stalk my blog looking for something to use against me, and come to my church just so I can see them after I told them I did not want to see or hear from them again.

Rather than end the friendship with Wilde to spare him the wrath of his father, all he

could think of (besides of course writing to him insulting letters and telegrams) was to buy a ridiculous pistol that goes off in the Berkeley, under circumstances that create a worse scandal than ever came to your ears.
Indeed the idea of your being the object of a terrible quarrel between your father and a man of my position seemed to delight you. It, I suppose very naturally, pleased your vanity, and flattered your self-importance….I never remember you in higher spirits than you were for the rest of that season.

There’s that drama queening! Bosie then starts sending his father so many “telegrams of such a character” that his father finally tells his servant to stop bringing him telegrams.

(I’ve gotta wonder: Telegrams? Doesn’t that mean that the telegraph operator has to see the whole thing? Has Bosie no shame, letting telegraph operators see the telegrams he sends to his father and to Wilde? Or is this just what he wants?)

So Bosie switched to the open postcard! They both kept up the war, since Bosie’s father hated him as much as Bosie hated his father. And poor Wilde is made the scapegoat in the middle of an ancient hatred he never had anything to do with, with Bosie’s father going so far as to attempt to disrupt a performance of one of Wilde’s plays.

The thing that mattered most to Wilde, “the great primal note by which I had revealed, first myself to myself, and then myself to the world; the real passion of my life; the love to which all other loves were as marsh-water to red wine, or the glow-worm of the marsh to the magic mirror of the moon,” Bosie and his father very nearly destroyed as a casualty in their war.

What you had to do was quite simple, and quite clear before you, but Hate blinded you, and you could see nothing. I could not apologise to your father for his having insulted me and persecuted me in the most loathsome manner for nearly nine months.
I could not get rid of you out of my life. I had tried it again and again. I had gone so far as actually leaving England and going abroad in the hope of escaping from you. It had all been of no use.
You were the only person who could have done anything. The key of the situation rested entirely with yourself. It was the one great opportunity you had of making some slight return to me for all the love and affection and kindness and generosity and care I had shown you. Had you appreciated me even at a tenth of my value as an artist you would have done so.
But Hate blinded you. The faculty ‘by which, and by which alone, we can understand others in their real as in their ideal relations’ was dead in you. You thought simply of how to get your father into prison.
To see him ‘in the dock,’ as you used to say: that was your one idea. The phrase became one of the many scies of your daily conversation. One heard it at every meal. Well, you had your desire gratified. Hate granted you every single thing you wished for. It was an indulgent Master to you. It is so, indeed, to all who serve it.
For two days you sat on a high seat with the Sheriffs, and feasted your eyes with the spectacle of your father standing in the dock of the Central Criminal Court. And on the third day I took his place. What had occurred? In your hideous game of hate together, you had both thrown dice for my soul, and you happened to have lost. That was all.

Wilde hoped that when the sentence was given, Bosie would realize what he had done. But he did not. “It did not occur to me then that you could have the supreme vice, shallowness.” He hears nothing of Bosie until, second-hand, he discovers that Bosie wants to publish excerpts of his letters. Bosie had said his family would pay for their taxed costs, but it comes from Wilde, who is bankrupt.

This part is especially poignant and familiar, even though Wilde’s reason is being imprisoned, where pain and sorrow fill everything:

All this took place in the early part of November of the year before last. A great river of life flows between you and a date so distant. Hardly, if at all, can you see across so wide a waste, but to me it seems to have occurred, I will not say yesterday, but today.
Suffering is one long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return….
The thing that you personally have long ago forgotten, or can easily forget, is happening to me now, and will happen to me again to-morrow. Remember this, and you will be able to understand a little of why I am writing to you, and in this manner writing.

Wilde’s mother dies; various people, even ones he doesn’t know personally, send their condolences; Bosie sends not a word.

Wilde complains to Bosie’s brother about Bosie, in a letter meant to prohibit a dedication which is offensive to Wilde, and asks that the words about Bosie be copied and sent to him.

Bosie is upset, he gets his mother upset about it as well, and they spread the news far and wide of just how horrible the words are, yet Bosie never actually writes to Wilde himself about them.

Wilde complains that Bosie has feet of clay, that now it’s impossible to feel anything for him (or himself) but contempt and scorn.

And setting aside all other reasons, your indifference, your worldly wisdom, your callousness, your prudence, whatever you may choose to call it, has been made doubly bitter to me by the peculiar circumstances that either accompanied or followed my fall.

The following is especially familiar:

And the end of it all is that I have got to forgive you. I must do so. I don’t write this letter to put bitterness into your heart, but to pluck it out of mine.
For my own sake I must forgive you. One cannot always keep an adder in one’s breast to feed on one, nor rise up every night to sow thorns in the garden of one’s soul. It will not be difficult at all for me to do so, if you help me a little….
And I shall really have no difficulty in forgiving you. But to make it a pleasure for me you must feel that you want it. When you really want it you will find it waiting for you.

In a very familiar feeling, in the beginning of his imprisonment, Wilde wanted to die. Then he was filled with rage, and decided to commit suicide the same day of his eventual release.

Then he decided he wanted to live, but to always be sad and make his friends sad as well. Then he decided that would be unfair to his friends, so he must try to be happy for them. Finally, he decided he had so much to do that it would be a tragedy to die before he finished.

He remembers the people who laughed at him in the pillory. In a side-dig at Bosie, who once told Wilde that Wilde was not interesting when not on his pedestal, he writes,

But it is a very unimaginative nature that only cares for people on their pedestals. A pedestal may be a very unreal thing. A pillory is a terrific reality. They should have known also how to interpret sorrow better.
I have said that behind Sorrow there is always Sorrow. It were still wiser to say that behind sorrow there is always a soul. And to mock at a soul in pain is a dreadful thing. Unbeautiful are their lives who do it. In the strangely simple economy of the world people only get what they give, and to those who have not enough imagination to penetrate the mere outward of things and feel pity, what pity can be given save that of scorn?

It seems that mutual abuse was frequent between Bosie and his father. Wilde writes of a time in 1893 when Bosie’s father sent Bosie a “very vulgar, violent and abusive letter,” but Bosie’s reply

was in every way worse, and of course far less excusable, and consequently you were extremely proud of it. I remember quite well your saying to me with your most conceited air that you could beat your father ‘at his own trade.’ Quite true. But what a trade! What a competition!
You used to laugh and sneer at your father for retiring from your cousin’s house where he was living in order to write filthy letters to him from a neighbouring hotel.
You used to do just the same to me. You constantly lunched with me at some public restaurant, sulked or made a scene during luncheon, and then retired to White’s Club and wrote me a letter of the very foulest character.
The only difference between you and your father was that after you had dispatched your letter to me by special messenger, you would arrive yourself at my rooms some hours later, not to apologise, but to know if I had ordered dinner at the Savoy, and if not, why not. Sometimes you would actually arrive before the offensive letter had been read.

On one such occasion, Bosie got Wilde to invite a couple of Bosie’s friends, one of whom Wilde had never met before, to a “specially luxurious luncheon,” then instead of showing up, sent an abusive letter to Wilde, timed to reach him half an hour after he was supposed to have arrived. Rather than read it, Wilde stuck it in his pocket, lied to his guests that Bosie was ill, then read the letter later that evening.

As I was in the middle of its mire, wondering with infinite sadness how you could write letters that were really like the froth and foam on the lips of an epileptic, my servant came in to tell me that you were in the hall and were very anxious to see me for five minutes.

Sure, Bosie is in trouble because a solicitor is looking for him, and now he comes to Wilde for help after having manipulated and narcissistic-raged at him! Neither of them mentioned the letter, and Wilde was too easily forgiving.

When Bosie’s father’s letters were read in court, he “naturally felt ashamed and pretended to weep.” But Bosie’s own letters, if read in court, would have inspired “still more horror and repugnance…by everyone.”

But he beat his father’s own trade not just in style, but “in mode of attack you distanced him completely,” using public telegrams and open postcards. And while Wilde was in prison, Bosie began doing the same to Wilde’s friends as well!

Bosie’s mother made things difficult for Wilde as well. Instead of confronting her own son directly, she kept writing to Wilde, asking him to do it, because “I am afraid to: he gets so angry when he is spoken to.” Then she’d write, “On no account let Alfred know that I have written to you.”

He thought for sure she could’ve done something to stop the escalation between Wilde and Bosie’s father by taking “some serious steps,” but instead she sent a friend to suggest that Wilde “gradually drop” Bosie.

As if it had been possible for me to gradually drop you! I had tried to end our friendship in every possible way, going so far as actually to leave England and give a false address abroad in the hopes of breaking at one blow a bond that had become irksome, hateful, and ruinous to me. Do you think that I could have ‘gradually dropped’ you?
Do you think that would have satisfied your father? You know it would not. What your father wanted, indeed, was not the cessation of our friendship, but a public scandal. That is what he was striving for. His name had not been in the papers for years….
For what he was aiming at was popularity, and to pose as a champion of purity, as it is termed, is, in the present condition of the British public, the surest mode of becoming for the nonce a heroic figure.

Near the end, he writes,

I have now written, at great length, to you in order that you should realise what you were to me before my imprisonment, during those three years’ fatal friendship: what you have been to me during my imprisonment, already within two moons of its completion almost: and what I hope to be to myself and to others when my imprisonment is over.
I cannot reconstruct my letter, or rewrite it. You must take it as it stands, blotted in many places with tears, in some with the signs of passion or pain, and make it out as best you can, blots, corrections and all….
I will admit that it is a severe letter. I have not spared you. Indeed you may say that, after admitting that to weigh you against the smallest of my sorrows, the meanest of my losses, would be really unfair to you, I have actually done so, and made scruple by scruple the most careful assay of your nature. That is true. But you must remember that you put yourself into the scales.

More information on this letter is here. Wilde spent three months, near the end of his imprisonment, writing this 50,000-word letter. He had a friend copy it. As written in the link here referenced,

In 1913, the entire letter was read to the court after Douglas sued Arthur Ransome for libel, and parts published in the London Press. Douglas testified that he had received the letter from Ross, but after reading Ross’s cover note threw it in the fire unread.
He later claimed that he had never received the package at all. Observers reported that Douglas could not bear it when he learned that the letter was addressed to him and heard its full contents.

From Wikipedia:

Although Douglas had been the cause of his misfortunes, he and Wilde were reunited in August 1897 at Rouen. This meeting was disapproved of by the friends and families of both men.
Constance Wilde was already refusing to meet Wilde or allow him to see their sons, though she kept him supplied with money. During the latter part of 1897, Wilde and Douglas lived together near Naples for a few months until they were separated by their respective families under the threat of a cutting-off of funds.

by Nyssa McCanmore
Posted on August 15, 2012August 5, 2022

De Profundis: Oscar Wilde on toxic friendship–Part 1

(Here is another blog about this work, which also gives some background.)

I’m currently reading Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis, written by him in prison to his “friend” Lord Alfred Douglas (“Bosie”).

So far, it’s complaining about the volatile relationship they had, a combination of intimate friendship and lover, and a violent temper which ran in Douglas’ family. The more I read, the more it sounds like borderline personality or some other mood/personality disorder:

Douglas was a leech, a stalker, and a writer of telegrams and letters full of foul accusations whenever Wilde tried to stick up for himself and end the friendship. Wilde recognized that it was toxic, but kept taking him back, again and again and again.

He kept giving in to Douglas, hoping that he would calm down, only to find that he became even worse over time. The rages of this Douglas sound so much like Tracy that I really feel for Wilde.

The text you often find for this work is abridged for general audiences, cutting out the personal letter to Bosie, since it’s a massive work and much of it is about general subjects such as suffering, humility, art, things which Wilde wanted the public to read.

But my copy, part of Complete Works of Oscar Wilde published by Collins (HarperCollins) Publishers, is the entire work, 80 pages. Here I will focus on the private letter and how it deals with toxic friendship and Cluster Bs (often-used colloquial term for people with narcissistic, histrionic, borderline, anti-social, high-conflict personality disorders), and how similar it sounds to my own experiences with Tracy.

On page 984, we read,

But most of all I blame myself for the entire ethical degradation I allowed you to bring on me. The basis of character is will power, and my will power became absolutely subject to yours. It sounds a grotesque thing to say, but it is none the less true.
Those incessant scenes that seemed to be almost physically necessary to you, and in which your mind and body grew distorted, and you became a thing as terrible to look at as to listen to:
that dreadful mania you inherit from your father, the mania for writing revolting and loathsome letters:
your entire lack of any control over your emotions as displayed in your long resentful moods of sullen silence, no less than in the sudden fits of almost epileptic rage:
all these things in reference to which one of my letters to you, left by you lying about in the Savoy or some other hotel, and so produced in court by your father’s counsel, contained an entreaty not devoid of pathos, had you at that time been able to recognise pathos either in its elements or its expression — these, I say, were the origin and causes of my fatal yielding to you in your daily increasing demands.
You wore me out. It was the triumph of the smaller over the bigger nature. It was the case of that tyranny of the weak over the strong which somewhere in one of my plays I describe as being “the only tyranny that lasts.”

This certainly sounds like some form of Cluster B personality disorder, especially because it is “inherited.” Borderline and narcissistic personality disorders can run in families, though it’s unclear if it’s from genetics, or from a psychological response to living with a Cluster B. The following sounds very much like Tracy:

And it was inevitable. In every relation of life with others one has to find some moyen de vivre. In your case, one had either to give up to you or to give you up. There was no other alternative.
Through deep if misplaced affection for you: through great pity for your defects of temper and temperament: through my own proverbial good-nature and Celtic laziness: through an artistic aversion to coarse scenes and ugly words: through that incapacity to bear resentment of any kind which at that time characterised me:
through my dislike of seeing life made bitter and uncomely by what to me, with my eyes really fixed on other things, seemed to be mere trifles too petty for more than a moment’s thought or interest–through these reasons, simple as they may sound, I gave up to you always.
As a natural result, your claims, your efforts at domination, your exactions grew more and more unreasonable.
Your meanest motive, your lowest appetite, your most common passion, became to you laws by which the lives of others were to be guided always, and to which, if necessary, they were to be without scruple sacrificed.
Knowing that by making a scene you could always have your way, it was but natural that you should proceed, almost unconsciously I have no doubt, to every excess of vulgar violence….
At the one supremely and tragically critical moment of all my life, just before my lamentable step of beginning my absurd action [suing Bosie’s father for libel], on the one side there was your father attacking me with hideous cards left at my club, on the other side there was you attacking me with no less loathsome letters….
My habit — due to indifference chiefly at first — of giving up to you in everything had become insensibly a real part of my nature….I had allowed you to sap my strength of character, and to me the formation of a habit had proved to be not Failure merely but Ruin.
Ethically you had been even still more destructive to me than you had been artistically. The warrant once granted, your will of course directed everything.

Wilde writes that, when Bosie talked him into going to trial against Bosie’s father instead of going abroad as his true friends advised, “Of course I should have got rid of you, I should have shaken you out of my life as a man shakes from his raiment a thing that has stung him.”

This is what I did to Tracy when she raged at me, but unfortunately, Wilde did not do this to Bosie. Part of the trouble was that Wilde kept trying to shake him off, sometimes even going to the trouble of fleeing the country and leaving a fake address with a servant so Bosie would not follow him:

As far as I can make out I ended my friendship with you every three months regularly, and each time that I did so you managed by means of entreaties, telegrams, letters, the interposition of your friends, the interposition of mine, and the like to induce me to allow you back.

Sounds like Wilde was subjected to “hoovering,” the common term for a Cluster B’s attempts to get back the person who has escaped. And Wilde kept taking him back and forgiving him. It must be maddening to go through this every three months with the same person.

Wilde also was subject to “false nostalgia,” when the victim of a Cluster B begins thinking things couldn’t possibly be as bad as he thinks they are, that he must be imagining it:

On my return to London the next day I remember sitting in my room and sadly and seriously trying to make up my mind whether or not you really were what you seemed to me to be, so full of terrible defects, so utterly ruinous both to yourself and to others, so fatal a one to know even or to be with.
For a whole week I thought about it, and wondered if after all I was not unjust and mistaken in my estimate of you.
At the end of the week a letter from your mother is handed in. It expressed to the full every feeling I myself had about you….
She saw, of course, that heredity had burdened you with a terrible legacy, and frankly admitted it, admitted it with terror: he is ‘the one of my children who has inherited the fatal Douglas temperament,’ she wrote of you.

I know the feeling, because I, myself, was subjected to these same feelings many times, during my ill-fated friendship with Richard and Tracy, during the several times I considered breaking off the friendship before I actually did, and even after Jeff and I broke things off with them finally.

Even after I wrote everything down, I still would get these feelings–then look back over what I had written, in my blogs/accounts and to friends, and see that everything I wrote was true.

And since it was all true, and since there was so much crap in there that they did, and since my friends were reading what I wrote and saying these people were not worth the pain I was going through, and how horrible they were–I had to force myself to realize that I was not making it up.

Just as Wilde did, I had to get confirmation from others that I was not “unjust and mistaken.” Not only did my husband Jeff agree with me about the things that had gone on, but I would e-mail Todd about the situation and find that he had the same impressions I did about many things.

I wrote out the things I had witnessed Richard and Tracy doing, and what Richard had told me was going on when I wasn’t around, sent it to a friend who does social work–and she said they both sound very abusive so please report them to CPS.

From what I’ve read on the Shrink4Men website, false nostalgia seems to be common among victims of Cluster Bs, probably because it’s so hard to believe that someone you love could really be so horrible to you, and because of the gaslighting they often do to their victims. For example:

The I’ve Never Been Happier Hoover: This Hoover is basically a form of reverse psychology in which the abuser assumes, rightly or wrongly, that your abandonment fears are equal to or greater than her own.
I haven’t been this happy in years since you left. You always brought out the worst in me. I never behaved that way with anyone else. I started dating again and am being treated the way I always wanted to be treated. You have no idea how to treat a woman.
The purpose of this Hoover is to get you to begin to doubt your experiences, feelings and memories of her and the relationship. This kind of Hoover can lead you to wonder,
“What if I’d said or done x instead of y? Maybe it really is me? Maybe I should give her another chance? What if she really is wonderful with the new guy? Why wasn’t she that way than me? I wonder if she’ll take me back if I promise to try harder to make her happy?” –Dr. Tara J. Palmatier, Hoovers: Don’t Let the Crazy Suck You Back In

Wilde tried to let go of his friendship with Bosie, at Bosie’s mother’s urging. But Bosie kept “writing to me by every post from Egypt.” Wilde read them, then tore them up. Bosie even telegraphed Wilde’s wife to beg her to get Wilde to write him back!

Our friendship had always been a source of distress to her: not merely because she had never liked you personally, but because she saw how your continual companionship altered me, and not for the better: still, just as she had always been most gracious and hospitable to you, so she could not bear the idea of my being in any way unkind–for so it seemed to her–to any of my friends.
She thought, knew indeed, that it was a thing alien to my character. At her request I did communicate with you.

The result is especially noteworthy:

I remember the wording of my telegram quite well. I said that time healed every wound but that for many months to come I would neither write to you nor see you.
You started without delay for Paris, sending me passionate telegrams on the road to beg me to see you once, at any rate. I declined. You arrived in Paris late on a Saturday night, and found a brief letter from me waiting for you at your hotel stating that I would not see you.
Next morning I received in Tite Street a telegram of some ten or eleven pages in length from you. You stated in it that no matter what you had done to me you could not believe that I would absolutely decline to see you:
you reminded me that for the sake of seeing me even for one hour you had travelled six days and nights across Europe without stopping once on the way: you made what I must admit was a most pathetic appeal, and ended with what seemed to me a threat of suicide, and one not thinly veiled.
You had yourself often told me how many of your race there had been who had stained their hands in their own blood; your uncle certainly, your grandfather possibly; many others in the mad, bad line from which you come.
Pity, my old affection for you, regard for your mother to whom your death under such dreadful circumstances would have been a blow almost too great for her to bear, the horror of the idea that so young a life, and one that amidst all its ugly faults had still promise of beauty in it, should come to so revolting an end, mere humanity itself–all these, if excuses be necessary, must serve as my excuse for consenting to accord you one last interview.
When I arrived in Paris, your tears, breaking out again and again all through the evening, and falling over your cheeks like rain as we sat, at dinner first at Voisin’s, at supper at Paillard’s afterwards:
the unfeigned joy you evinced at seeing me, holding my hand whenever you could, as though you were a gentle and penitent child: your contrition, so simple and sincere, at the moment: made me consent to renew our friendship.
Two days after we had returned to London, your father saw you having luncheon with me at the Cafe Royal, joined my table, drank of my wine, and that afternoon, through a letter addressed to you, began his first attack on me.

As written here, this is

The Psycho Hoover: The Psycho Hoover is the FOG Hoover on steroids. It includes threats of suicide and/or violence. Basically, the abuser is just escalating their guilt and/or intimidation tactics to keep you in the relationship.

…The Deluxe Hoover: This is the Hoover in which she morphs from abuser to super sweet, sexed up, Stepford wife. In reality, it’s nothing more than a return to the honeymoon and or love bombing stage of the relationship.
In other words, she turns on the charm or whatever it was about her that attracted you to her in the first place. It can have the effect of resurrecting your hopes that the woman you fell in love with is real and that maybe, just maybe, you can go back to the way things were “before.”
I promise things will get better. I love you SO much. We were great together at first. We can get that back! Please just give us another chance! Remember the good times (or time)? Don’t you want to have that again? We’ll both go to therapy. We’ll make it work.
More often than not, the abuse behaviors resurface once you return.

In other words, you broke up with this person because they’re nasty/crazy/whatever, but they do whatever they can to get you back and make you think things will be better this time.

But it’s all an act, because as soon as they’ve got you back, the old behaviors resurface. Yet more ways that Bosie’s family curse seems to be a Cluster B personality disorder.

Wilde then describes a time when first Bosie, then Wilde came down with a nasty flu. They were away from home at the time, so had to depend on each other. Wilde took care of Bosie very well, while when he got better and then Wilde got it, Bosie just kept disappearing to go have fun, leaving Wilde without anyone to care for him.

Bosie, of course, being a leech, is doing this on Wilde’s dime. Wilde tries to get him to stick around, but Bosie never comes around except for money. One night at 3am, Wilde goes to the sitting-room in desperate need of water, and finds Bosie:

You fell on me with every hideous word an intemperate mood, an undisciplined and untutored nature could suggest. By the terrible alchemy of egotism you converted your remorse into rage.
You accused me of selfishness in expecting you to be with me when I was ill; of standing between you and your amusements; of trying to deprive you of your pleasures.
You told me, and I know it was quite true, that you had come back at midnight simply in order to change your dress-clothes, and go out again to where you hoped new pleasures were waiting for you, but that by leaving for you a letter in which I had reminded you that you had neglected me the whole day and the whole evening, I had really robbed you of your desire for more enjoyments, and diminished your actual capacity for fresh delights.

Wilde left in disgust, went back to bed, but lay awake for some time, full of thirst. At 11:00 Bosie came in. Wilde thought Bosie was going to make excuses and ask for forgiveness like usual, the forgiveness

that you knew in your heart was invariably waiting for you, no matter what you did; your absolute trust that I would always forgive you being the thing in you that I always really liked the best, perhaps the best thing in you to like. So far from doing that, you began to repeat the same scene with renewed emphasis and more violent assertion.
I told you at length to leave the room: you pretended to do so, but when I lifted up my head from the pillow in which I had buried it, you were still there, and with brutality of laughter and hysteria of rage you moved suddenly towards me.
A sense of horror came over me, for what exact reason I could not make out; but I got out of my bed at once, and bare-footed and just as I was, made my way down the two flights of stairs to the sitting-room, which I did not leave till the owner of the lodgings–whom I had rung for–had assured me that you had left my bedroom, and promised to remain within call, in case of necessity.

An hour passes, during which the doctor comes by, finding him “in a state of absolute nervous prostration,” and worse fever than he had been before. Then Bosie comes back, grabs some money from the dressing-table and mantelpiece, takes his luggage, and leaves.

Actually, this also reminds me of Richard, in the final weeks when I tried to confront him over things he had done that were mean, and his reaction each time was to blow up at me.

And it reminds me of my abusive ex Phil, who–along with his brother and his girlfriend–accused me of being a “party pooper” who didn’t want Phil to have any fun–because I had a concussion. Because I did not want to go dancing with a concussion. Because I wanted Phil to care for me instead of dancing while I had a concussion.

Bosie’s narcissistic/borderline rage episode produced the same effect on Wilde which Tracy’s rage episode had on me:

Is it necessary for me to state that I saw clearly that it would be a dishonour to myself to continue even an acquaintance with such a one as you had showed yourself to be?
That I recognised that the ultimate moment had come, and recognised it as being really a great relief?

This is an 80-page work with lots of ground to cover, so I will break this off now and continue it later.

Part 2

by Nyssa McCanmore
Posted on June 20, 2012May 9, 2023

I finally find my Frodo–who moves in

As a shy, quiet person, I had the occasional friends in school but not always in my neighborhood, so when classes changed and lunch periods changed and the kids around me changed, my friends changed as well.

Since I was verbally bullied for being different from the other kids (somehow weird), I was glad to have these friends, but I longed to have that one friend who would stick with me through life. Someone to be inseparable (but not lovers) with, like Bill & Ted or Anne & Diana or Frodo & Sam or Ofra Haza & Andrew Eldritch or Gus & Shawn.

I made good friends in college who became friends for life, but after college we moved away from each other–separate cities, separate states. It’s hard to maintain close friendships even when they live an hour away from you, so we’ve relied heavily on e-mail and now Facebook.

I did occasionally see friends who lived about an hour away, and occasionally did things in the SCA while Jeff was more involved in it for a while.

Male or female has never mattered to me. I have two brothers and no sisters, so I was just as comfortable hanging out with boys as with girls. Not the athletic type of boy who thinks burps are funny, no. I mean the smart, geeky ones who watch British TV and play role-playing games.

My husband and I both have had opposite-sex friends, some close, all through our marriage, with no jealousy.

But it had been years since I’d had a close friend who lived right there nearby, when Richard and I became close over the Net and the phone, having met on a forum while I was searching for spiritual truth.

He was impressed by the theological section of my website, and wanted to befriend me. He said his wife wanted to befriend me too, but I rarely heard from her, no e-mails or phone calls, just a web chat one evening.

I was surprised at how easily I could talk to Richard on the phone, and for hours, because with most people I just can’t do that, preferring face-to-face or e-mail/letters even for my closest friends.

Also, I can only talk on and on with people I “click” with. That doesn’t happen with just anyone, either. Jeff, too, found him easy to talk to when I was unable to come to the phone right away.

In those days, Richard called when he said he would, except once–and that time, he apologized and explained later. (This all changed in 2008.) He led me into Orthodoxy, where I found my spiritual home, and that’s mostly what we talked about, as I had lots of questions. He seemed like a cool person. But he lived far away.

I began going to the local Greek Orthodox church in November 2006, though–deliberately taking my time to make such a huge decision–I didn’t join it officially until January 2009.

I did what I could to connect with people there during coffee hour, but had to deal not only with my shyness but with the language barrier: Most of the parishioners spoke English just fine, but many of them spoke and understood very little English. Also, most of them were much older than I was.

One morning during Divine Liturgy, in a fit of loneliness, I prayed that God would please send me a friend. Just a short time later–within a few months, I believe–Richard e-mailed me that he needed a new place to live, and I suggested my hometown. He hadn’t expected that, and was surprised to find how promising my hometown would be.

This was early fall 2007. His wife and children were thousands of miles away with her parents while he cleared out their house, from which they’d been evicted. He had no job, and hated the area. He had no hope and nowhere to go.

He was grateful to me because he actually felt happy now, hopeful. He checked out the links I sent him about my city, then later in person, and loved the town.

He asked to stay with us for a few days while looking for a job; he began calling at least once a day, talking my ear off so much that my ear actually began ringing.

I already felt bonded with him, that we had a close friendship, even though we never met, because he was the only person (besides my priest and Jeff) to whom I told all the details when my family was shaken up during Lent 2007.

It was a disturbing event, full of embarrassing details, things that had been hidden from me by my family for my entire life. He and my priest heard them all, but even my college friends didn’t hear them at first.

But he had never told me certain personal details about himself and his life, which now, in September 2007, he began telling me, things which just started pouring out without me prompting him. I worried a bit about his violent past, and was uncomfortable with some of the things he said, because I felt they should be kept private from most people.

But we’d been on the same forum for about two years, we’d been phone friends for maybe a year or so, Todd (the owner of the forum) had stayed with him twice for a month each time, Richard’s wife was on the same forum, and another poster had been his phone friend for several years and had glowing praises for him, so I figured–hoped–he was safe. And hoped that he would arrive while Jeff was around, which he did. The day he arrived was, I believe, around October 5, 2007.

Despite pouring out my soul to a forum friend online, in person for the first time, he or she seems a complete stranger. So I turn into a turtle, hiding in my shell.

It took me a bit to get used to Richard’s physical presence, to connect the forum guy and the voice on the phone with this hulking stranger in my living room. We had shared so many things already, I had confided things in him, called him when my family went through a terrible upset–but now he was like a stranger.

He was happy to meet me, but after waiting anxiously for him all day long, now I wanted to run away from him. Until one afternoon when we started chatting about music, the conversation began to flow, and then we just looked at each other all of a sudden like, “Whoa!”

Everything began coming together and falling into place. Despite Tracy’s aggressive personality–which he had been telling me about and which I soon began seeing for myself–our families seemed to be blessings and helps for each other over the coming years.

It all seemed to be an answer to prayer, the moving of the Spirit, God’s will for Richard and I to be friends and help each other spiritually and materially.

Richard lived with us for two months, during which time we bonded even more, as I did with two of my college roommates. There’s just something about living with a person, day in day out, and them being there through all the things you deal with from day to day. We told each other everything.

Though it wasn’t supposed to drag on for so long, I didn’t mind. I finally had someone to watch TV with, since Jeff spent most evenings on the computer or watching other things. I was sure we would be friends for life. At long last, I had somebody outside of the family to talk to again.

Richard became my family, more like a twin brother moving in than a stranger. Jeff was not some Neanderthal macho man threatened by this. He, a far more enlightened being than that, usually spent evenings in the basement so Richard and I could talk.

He trusted us both so much that twice he went out of town overnight, once for work and once for a D&D game in the next county on the same day as a blizzard.

And we were careful not to see each other in undress, yelling out warnings when necessary, since we had no spare bedroom and had to stick him on the couch. I wore my robe over my nightgown; I wore a tank top under revealing shirts; I never wear low-waist pants or high-waist shirts.

I considered him my best and closest friend. He was the one I went to about religion. He’s the one I found to help light my way when I was searching for the True Church, the original doctrines. He had already found it before I did.

We had similar backgrounds, and similar views of the various churches. We could sympathize with each other about going through contemporary church services.

We could discuss Orthodox theology with a similar base knowledge and interest. We could discuss the meaning of original sin, or whether River of Fire is a good source of Orthodox doctrine. We could discuss what it means to experience the Holy Spirit.

I could ask him about various things, such as why the English translations of the Latin and Greek versions of the Nicene Creed are so different, even the parts that come from the original Ecumenical Council that produced them.

I could share with him Orthodox writings, and give him Orthodox books and icons for Christmas or birthdays. I could tell him what led me away from Western doctrines, without feeling judged for turning to “heresies.”

I simply don’t have another friend with whom I can discuss all these things, at least not from the same background, baseline knowledge, amount of interest and same denomination.

I asked him about difficult points of Orthodox doctrine or practices. I asked him how to forgive people who had hurt me years before. I lamented to him about Net Orthodoxy and its legalism.

In short, he was my spiritual mentor.

He was the one I always wrote to about interesting church meetings or services. Who else can I write these things to, who has the same level of interest? I wrote to him about my church because he was the one who led me there.

And these things led to sharing our life experiences and troubles. I told him my secrets, and he told me his. He was my counselor, as I poured out my heart to him about various issues I dealt with, how I’d been bullied growing up, and how I’d been used and abused by college exes.

This included private details which I did not normally tell anyone, because of their nature. I told him these things because I trusted him completely.

I told him funny stories of things that happened day-to-day, or dreams. I shared with him thoughts about movies I watched, books I read, life stories. We talked for hours at a time.

Since he lived with us for a time, he became like an adopted brother, so I could tell him things I didn’t tell other people. He became “Uncle Rich” to my son. We could joke back and forth with each other and play off each other so easily that one guy in an IRC chat room said, “I love it when you guys are here!”

We went on religious websites together and defended Orthodoxy. And we had similar tastes in music, both loving the obscure Goth genres, 80s, New Wave–yet knew some of the same Christian artists as well. He had actually been a Goth, while I was interested in Goth culture, and did as much “Gothyness” as I could do in a small city in the Midwest.

Because of our similar backgrounds, we both knew about the Thief in the Night series, Left Behind, and other such things. We were even the same age, so grew up with the same pop culture. We both liked watching EWTN. We were both interested in paranormal investigations.

It seems impossible to replace him. These elements of our friendship I found especially valuable and important, especially appealing, and these were the reasons I was so attached to his friendship.

I was quite certain, from how he acted and what he said every day, that the feeling was mutual, that we both felt bonded to each other in a special, lasting, close friendship. I wanted to be like his sister or cousin, to whom he was also this close.

I had no idea he was love-bombing me, bonding me to him emotionally with so much attention and praise that it became addictive. He must have seen how vulnerable I was, since I so badly needed a friend, so badly wanted that One True Friend.

Even though he lived in my house and I knew his gross and annoying habits, I was so devoted to his friendship that I could overlook this. He had such charisma that I saw the same bond and devotion in Todd and in Richard’s best friend from his hometown. I craved his good opinion, and felt devastated when he criticized me.

It wasn’t about a lover: I already had one. It was about that One True Friend, whom I had always dreamed of, and would think I had found, only one of us had to move away so things drifted off. I felt my life would not be complete without that One True Friend, that Frodo, in addition to my husband and child. I was a ready victim:

Loneliness. If you’re lonely, your unmet social and emotional needs can create an opening for a psychopath to enter your life. Many lonely people are also bored, which elevates risk.
According to Brown, some victims don’t even know they’re lonely, bored, or living a small, confined life, but the psychopath knows. –Psychopaths & Love, Traits of the Psychopath’s Victim

In this part, I explain about Richard’s claim to have hypnotized me. I knew nothing of this until 2009, when he told me he used conversational hypnotism to get me to open up with him while he lived here.

He told me Americans are far too reserved, so he gets upset whenever people say Frodo and Sam are gay lovers. He said it used to be seen as perfectly normal and NOT sexual to hug or hold hands or whatever with friends as well as family members or spouses.

I told him that in the book Two Towers, second in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Frodo and Sam held hands, fell asleep cuddled up with each other, and the like, and that’s why I joked about them being lovers.

But he said the fuss in America over Frodo and Sam’s supposed homosexual relationship was silly, that no one would have dreamed they were homosexuals back when the book was written.

Which is true, but also made me more susceptible to Richard breaking down my own physical reserve. It took me a while just to hug him.

I don’t have a problem with opposite-sex friends innocently flirting: My husband does it, I do it, my geek friends do it, my SCA friends do it, my old co-workers did it. In time I learned that Richard did it, too, with everybody, including male friends! My husband and friends also consider it perfectly natural to get crushes now and then, as long as you don’t act on them.

At first, Richard behaved like a prude about innocent flirting, but then he got freer. One Sunday morning, we visited the brand-new Catholic church building–and he put his head on my shoulder right there in the middle of Mass. He muttered a playful “sorry” and sat back up.

Then he went in the opposite direction of “prude” one night all of a sudden, after Jeff went to bed.

He didn’t put hands in forbidden zones or try to kiss me or profess undying passion, no, nothing like that. But he confused me greatly by putting his head in my lap, then on my shoulder.

I was used to flirting with words, such as the occasional double entendre. Or Richard calling up a female friend right after calling his wife and saying, “Hey, what are you wearing?” He demonstrated it was all meant in fun.

But this–What was this? He had also started giving me long, affectionate hugs good-night.

The alarm bells went off. I wanted a platonic friendship, not an affair; we were getting in too deep! I finally fled to my room to go to bed and get away from this.

Then the next day and night he went about life like nothing happened, talking about his wife and kids coming to town in a couple of days, etc.

Then the following night he did these things again, making me think, What the heck is going on here?

Then the next day he acted normally again. I also felt like the scum of the earth for letting him do these things.

So that night I found a way to bring up the “cuddling and flirting,” to confront him about it, get the truth out of him of what the heck he was up to.

But he said, No, it wasn’t cuddling, cuddling is something else, my family/relatives put our heads on each other’s shoulders, I was sleepy, and the teasing wasn’t flirting, it was “playful banter.”

Now I see him as using me for affection after a long, tumultuous period with his wife, but holding back just enough that he could feign innocence when I called him on it later…when he realized I thought he was making moves on me, told him they were freaking me out.

I see him as manipulating me through his covert hypnotism and the trust he gained with me, doing these things when Jeff was not there, preying on my NVLD gullibility–which has also made me susceptible to elaborate hoaxes played on me by exes. But at the time, I just saw him as a well-meaning bumbler.

But now that I called him out, it was time for him to backtrack: I’m sorry if I violated your boundaries. No, no, I do those things with my sisters-in-law! cousins! sister! They’re gestures of friendship and caring! And those things I said–that was just “playful banter,” not even flirting. No, we did nothing wrong. You can look your husband in the eye. And no, we don’t have to stop doing these things…..

I never would’ve thought of doing these things, with my American and possibly Asperger-ish reserve, if it had not been for Richard mentoring me on how they’re perfectly fine for platonic friends to do.

I was never quite as comfortable with it as he was, but he taught me there was nothing to worry about, and made me feel silly for ever thinking he meant anything more than friendship. Then I began advocating such things myself. I discovered the Cuddle Party website:

One problem with finding comforting touch is that if you believe that touch is about sex, then either you are afraid it might lead to sex, or you are afraid it might not lead to sex. Not so helpful.
We humans need touch and affection. It’s no longer a question. Nurturing, welcome consensual touch is good for you.
Good for your body, heart and spirit. Good for your blood pressure, your nervous system, your emotional health, your ability to connect with and trust people, your ability to respect and care for yourself, your creativity, sense of safety and comfort and belonging.
Infants who are deprived of touch fail to thrive; we never outgrow the need.
Why is it so hard to find? Because for the most part, we think it has to do with sexual relationship, or at least romance, hooking up or ‘attraction’.
What if it just has do with being a human being who cares about other human beings? Kindness, compassion, comfort and nourishment.
Cuddle Party is a movement to reclaim this option in our lives.

I discovered that other cultures and time periods have been freer than our own with nonsexual touch, discovered that I have SCA friends who are just as free with their friends as Richard is with his friends.

We set up some boundaries to stay out of trouble, “forbidden zones” and the like, and agreed that any “playful banter” would be done in platonic friendship only, that any gestures would be in platonic friendship only. I knew that if he ever tried to kiss me, I’d have to end the friendship right there and then. I thought that was that.

Oh, by the way (he said the day his wife moved in with us), don’t do these things when she’s around. She’s very jealous of other women.

Then, of course, when wifey finds out–I don’t know what he told her, but from the way she kept blaming me for everything, I get the impression he didn’t give her the full story, that he was the instigator telling me it was all innocent. So who gets in trouble? Me.

It makes me feel like such a naive, gullible fool, putting my trust in his words more than in his actions, which told me something other than what his words said, but for the sake of friendship I chose to believe him and trust him.

I now realize my own blame here was to not call him out on the discrepancies I noted even then (how one day he called it “flirting” then re-named it to “playful banter” when it was convenient for him). To fail to notice that he didn’t do these things in front of Jeff, that he told me not to do them around Tracy.

But I wanted to believe he was telling me the truth because I didn’t want to be some scumbag cheater. And you just don’t want to accuse your BFF of lying to you.

I wanted a One True Friend, not a lover, did not want to turn my beautiful friendship into a stinky, dirty, filthy affair. I did not want to be barred from the Eucharist through carnal relations with the one who led me to the Eucharist in the first place.

He was not sexually attractive, with his repulsive hygiene (bathing every two or three days) and morbid obesity. But we had a connection of the mind and spirit, a rare jewel of friendship, the Platonic ideal and philia.

Oscar Wilde also discusses this ideal in his Portrait of W.H. (pages 62-67 in this copy, near the end of part II of the full text). He explains that Renaissance thinkers resurrected the Platonic ideal of friendship, and used terms for their bosom friends that made Victorian readers think they were lovers, even though they were not.

The lack of Frodo/Sam-type friendships in modern American society is described here:

Why is The Lord of the Rings such a powerful myth? Why did the final installment earn almost half a billion dollars in its first eighteen days?
Because all of us want the fellowship illustrated in the films. Because we want relationships that last. Because we want to feel super-glued to family and friends, like the glue that bound Sam and Frodo. Because we want involvement. Because we want shared creativity and wonder, because we want loyalty and commitment.
And yet we don’t have this feeling. Oh, if we are lucky we have it in one relationship, maybe a spouse. But in general we don’t have it.
In general we tend to be atoms bouncing around the eternal void, occasionally bumping into another atom, exchanging a curse or a smile.
Ought we not create our own Fellowship of The Ring? Ought we not create relationships that will last a lifetime? Ought we not build delightful things, even at some risk to ourselves? Ought we not discover something with ourselves that demands eternal loyalty and commitment?

I thought Richard was that kind of friend for me.

I wanted to believe we were simply expressing caring for each other as just friends. I didn’t realize his instructions to not do them around Tracy gave them a dirty tinge. I believed him, and saw nothing wrong with giving him the same gestures that I would to my son.

I did not do to him gestures that I only do to my husband, did not do the kinds of cuddling I only do with my husband or son. No, for us “cuddling” meant sleeping on a shoulder, with arms folded only around yourself. Like in a recent viral Internet picture in which a man let a tired stranger sleep on his shoulder on a subway train. Or John sleeping on Jesus’ shoulder during the Last Supper (John 13:23-25).

It was sweet, innocent, a beautiful symbol of platonic friendship, which Americans could do well to adopt, instead of labeling it “gay” or “inappropriate.” We had distinct boundaries in place.

So I thought we were safe and everything would be fine. However, he needed to move out soon, before anything did happen.

But moving in his family was not the answer: No, he finally had a job now, and should have saved up a down payment, then moved out immediately after. You know, like we planned all along.

But then one day, he told me the plans had changed and his family was coming to stay at our little condo. !!!!

You may already have noted that I am much like Anne Shirley. I always identified with her inner life: full of romantic ideals and loyalty, expressive on paper even if (unlike Anne) I am not in speech, willing to tell my friends I love them and how much they mean to me, identifying kindred spirits and longing for a Bosom Friend.

One of my friends, Mike from my college memoirs, believes we should say “I love you” to anyone–friends, co-workers–without fear that it’s somehow “inappropriate.” I also identify with Marianne in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility.

While Tracy was always angry at somebody or something, always ready to fight. Whenever I picture her, her face is twisted in fury as she yells and screams or hits. Tracy does not understand people like me. She is not a kindred spirit.

Here are articles written by people who believe that physical affection between platonic friends is not wrong at all–not even if your friend puts his head in your lap. So no, it’s not wrong to behave this way with a friend, just different from the current culture:

Platonic Love and its Revealing Secrets

Is Flirting Cheating?

Touch Much: Why is Platonic Affection so Taboo?

Table of Contents

1. Introduction

2. We share a house