Jane & Bob: Privacy, Identity, and Unlocking the Door

By David W. McMillan, Ph.D. 

“I need my space,” Jane said. “And you won’t give it to me.”

“I had to get to my allergy medicine. I was having trouble breathing. You’d been in the bathroom for thirty minutes,” Bob said.

“It’s not just that,” Jane said, looking at me. “He read my emails from my sister. I keep them in a separate file. I told him to stay out of that file. It’s like my journal. It’s our journal, my sister’s and mine. Our emails back and forth are our private thoughts. I write them only to her. After I write my feelings in my emails, they often change and I feel and think differently. When I’m really angry, I write to her to get things off my chest. I may not really mean what I wrote and he read some of those emails last week and he used them to attack me, to build his case against me. Things I didn’t mean. Things that were exaggerations; that weren’t true. And we’ve fought all week, him demanding that I justify those thoughts that I never intended for him to read.”

“I could feel you withdrawing from me. You used to tell me everything. We had no secrets and now we do. I read that you are considering divorce. Shouldn’t I know that?!”

“I’m considering lots of things,” she said. “I’ve always thought about others first. I’m a pleaser. I’ve been whatever the children needed me to be, whatever you wanted me to be. I tried to think and believe like you. Then I heard you say you were voting for Trump and that flipped a switch in me. I can’t let you define me, but since I’ve never really defined myself, I don’t know who I am. That’s when I began to withdraw to exchange emails with my sister. She reminded me who I was when I was ten years old, a U-2 fan. In college, I danced on the bar. In high school I played softball. I had lots of women friends. Now I have you, my children and my sister. And I had lost touch with her until I emailed her about you being a Trump supporter.

“I need to figure out who I am, who I’m not and what I want from this life. I’m not doing this anymore. I feel like I’m one giant breast with everyone sucking the life out of me. Well, my children don’t live with me now. I’m closing down my tits to them and to you. I’m not taking care of anyone else until I know who I am other than a breast.”

 “So where does that leave me?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Do you want a divorce?” I asked.

“I don’t think so, but I need to figure out what I do want. And I don’t know how to do that. I use my private alone space to rebuild my identity. I knew who I was and what I wanted when I was ten, but since I had my first period, I have been trying to figure out how to please other people, fit in, belong, be good enough, satisfy a man, take care of my children. I’ve had it being a breast for everyone else.”

“Will you always want to keep secrets from me and to have hidden grievances about me?” Bob asked. “I thought we were of one mind about everything. I don’t know how to process this. I don’t have secrets from you. I even told you about my affairs.”

“And how do you think that made me feel?” she asked. “I wish you had never told me. Why didn’t you live with your sin instead of confessing to me? Now I have to know that I failed as a wife to satisfy my husband and your soul has been cleansed by your confession and my absolution. Yeah, that was great for me.”

“I don’t know what to say or what to think. I feel like the earth just caved in beneath me and I’m free falling.”

“Now you know why I needed my privacy. I knew if I told you that you would react this way. I didn’t want to tell you until I knew more about myself. I must reconstruct who I am. Once I had defined myself as an independent person like I once was at ten, I was going to come to you and see whether we could renegotiate our relationship.”

“I don’t know if I want a relationship with secrets and hidden agendas,” Bob said.

“Me either,” she agreed. “I want to be known and loved, known as I am, not as who you imagine. I don’t want to fit into your boxes anymore. I won’t ever vote for an authoritarian, misogynist, nazi, racist. And the truth be told, I’m not sure I can live with someone who will vote for him. How did I end up being in a marriage to someone who would support a Trump?”

“Well, I can’t vote for Biden. My family has always voted Republican.”

“This is not just about politics,” she said.

“No,” he said. “For me its about sneaking around and secret keeping and living with deceit and lies, justified by anger at me. I’m sure I don’t want to live in that marriage, married to an angry woman plotting against me.”

“That’s not what she is doing,” I said. “At least part of this need for privacy is motivated by good intentions and natural healthy development.”

“How could that be?” he asked.

“When we are born, we build an identity around what we want, our likes and dislikes. Often women, when they have their big estrogen hormone dump at puberty, they begin to focus on nurturing and pleasing others, just as Jane describes. Women can lose their sense of who they are and what they want in their role as wife and mother. Menopause reduces their estrogen load and some women wake up from their nurturing and caregiving, like Jane, and they don’t know who they are anymore. They need to experiment, try out new ideas and new ways of being. It’s like they go shopping for a new wardrobe. They try out this crazy thought to see if it fits. They need privacy to do this experimentation because they may consider one idea seriously for a time only to decide that its not a fit for them. This is the purpose of a journal or in Janes’ case, her email exchanges with her sister. Jane described why she needed this privacy well, to protect you from being hurt and to protect herself from your judgments. In these emails, she tried on the idea of divorce. She aired her grievances against you, some reasonable, some not. And she began sorting through her options for her new self and the rest of her life.”

“She demanded her space and her privacy with a rage and defensiveness I’ve never seen before,” he said. “I thought I had done something terribly wrong. When I asked what I had done, she had accused me of offending her. And I guess I did. I felt horrible. I tried everything to please her. I could give her privacy and space if she didn’t blame me for needing to get away from me. I took it personally. I tried to defend myself and as you observed, my defense only made it worse. The space she took, the privacy she demanded did not make her better. She came back even more angry. Her case against me was more strident. How can I trust that giving her space will eventuate into something good when in the past, it never really did?”

“I used my space poorly,” she said. “Dr. McMillan pointed that out to us last session and he’s right. I used my space to indulge my fears and anger. I built my case against you. My focus wasn’t really on me and how to make myself better. I just nurtured a victim mentality and I’m sorry to say, my sister encouraged it with her responses to my emails.”

“Yes, she did,” he said. “I saw that when I read those emails.”

“You had no right,” she began.

“Yes, he had no right,” I agreed, “but we are past that and I think if you treat him with respect, he will respect your privacy. If you learn how to use your space and privacy to manger your emotions and look at the tragic reality of the mess of you both have made of your marriage, that you Jane have made and return sooner without rage or blame, but with compassion for yourself and Bob, then I think you will begin to build a self of which you can be proud.”

“I have regressed,” she said. “I see that now. Adolescents need their secrets from their parents in order to experiment and to discover themselves. Mature adults should be able to be themselves without secrets and be able to trust rather than hide. I want that back. Bob’s right we had that. Bob, I want to return to an open loving relationship.”

“How can you do that if you hate me for thinking differently than you?” Bob asked. “I did vote for Trump, with misgivings, but I did and you seem to hate me for that.”

“I hate that you voted for him, but I don’t hate you,” she said.

“Your relationship was built on an immature consensus trade,” I said. “Perhaps each of you, but certainly Jane, believes she gave up her right to have independent thoughts in your relationship in order to agree with you and satisfy your need for her to believe like you. In your earlier relationship, control was important. Jane managed you by giving you the illusion of control. You don’t have to agree to feel love for one another every second. You don’t have to use each other as transitional objects to feel secure and safe.”

“What’s a transitional object?” Bob asked.

“It’s the blanket or stuffed animals’ children use for comfort as they transition from infancy to childhood. You have used your agreement, your consensus and thought control as a device to give you security.

“If you don’t agree on things, you both believed your world would fall apart. Probably you agreed most of time, but when you didn’t, someone had to pretend they agreed.”

“I’ve done that with how she decorates the house for years,” he said.

“And I’ve pretended to be a good Republican wife,” she said.

“Well, I have news,” I said, “grownups can be different and love each other. In fact, if people appreciate one another’s differences, they can each contribute to the other something they didn’t have. Appreciation of differences creates healthy trade and wealth. Hoarding your approval to give only to those who agree and forcing conforming consensus only frightens and stifles social trade.”

“I see why you didn’t vote for Trump,” Bob said. “He’s a jerk, especially to women.”

“And I see why you don’t want to leave the Republican Party,” Jane said. “Your father was a Bush delegate to the Republican convention. You’ve always distrusted ‘Big Government.’ I respect that.”

“You might both be happier in a marriage that encourages the differences you have and respects them,” I said.

“That would be something I want to discover,” Jane said.

“We’ll have to make some changes with the furniture,” Bob said.

“I can live with that,” Jane said. 

Jane and Bob’s relationship was an immature one built on the notion that they shared in common all of their ideas and values. Mostly Jane paid his price. She either convinced herself she did agree with Bob or she swallowed her independent thoughts and feelings and pretended she conformed to Bob’s expectations. She did this until she couldn’t anymore.

Now they must discover a new kind of intimate relationship, one that can appreciate and respect differences. They will nee dot develop skills to negotiate these differences into share actions and decisions.