A Little Spice

“Jeal­ousy is like a hot pep­per.
Use it mildly, and you add spice to the rela­tion­ship.
Use too much of it and it can burn.”

Ayala M. Pines
Roman­tic Jeal­ousy (1992)

Are you a jeal­ous per­son? In what ways? Toward whom? Are there any behav­iors or char­ac­ter­is­tics that are guar­an­teed to bring out the green envy mon­ster who lurks deep within your soul? Has your part­ner ever given you rea­son to be jealous?

When Big­Bob and I met, he was 34 years old and had one child from a pre­vi­ous mar­riage. I was 28. When we were get­ting acquainted, we did not deem it nec­es­sary or con­struc­tive to devote much con­ver­sa­tion to prior rela­tion­ships in which each of us had been involved except to the extent that pre­vi­ous expe­ri­ences impacted cur­rent behav­iors, opin­ions, out­looks. Nei­ther of us is really “the jeal­ous type” and we both believed that the only thing that really mat­tered was the future.

So I was shocked when the let­ter arrived.

Yes, the wed­ding date was set, the invi­ta­tions had been mailed, the pho­tog­ra­pher and caterer retained, and the wed­ding attire pur­chased. I came home from work one after­noon and began prepar­ing din­ner. He was still at work, but I expected him to arrive shortly. I decided to check the mail where I found the usual assort­ment of bills, adver­tise­ments … and a curi­ous let­ter from a local ambu­lance com­pany. I say “curi­ous” because it was a business-sized enve­lope with a preprinted return address, but no trans­par­ent win­dow. It was addressed to “Bob” rather than the more for­mal “Robert,” the name under which busi­ness is usu­ally trans­acted. And his name was hand-written rather than typed or printed. I fig­ured that this was prob­a­bly an invoice or cor­re­spon­dence of some sort and the sec­re­tary had just opted to write out the address in long hand because I recalled Big­Bob telling me about a for­mer room­mate who had taken ill and ended up being taken to the hos­pi­tal via ambu­lance. So I opened the envelope.

There was no bill or business-related cor­re­spon­dence con­tained there. Rather, there were about four hand-written pages with which I was instantly intrigued.

The let­ter began with an apol­ogy and then launched into rem­i­nis­cences of times spent together dur­ing the pre­vi­ous year. I no longer remem­ber all of the details, but the woman who wrote the let­ter was, essen­tially, sorry that things had not worked out between them. She said that she missed him, thought about him all of the time, and was cer­tain that if they gave it another shot, they would live hap­pily ever after.

Big­Bob had never men­tioned her by name, but based upon the details in the let­ter, I fig­ured out that she was the woman who had briefly rented a house around the cor­ner. They had become acquainted because she had a daugh­ter around the same age as BigBob’s daugh­ter, so the two lit­tle girls played together. In con­trast to her writ­ten pro­fes­sions of unre­quited love and long­ing, BigBob’s ren­di­tion of the story went some­thing like this: “We went on a few dates. It was no big deal. She didn’t live there very long and, after she moved, we never saw each other again.”

Guys usu­ally change the sub­ject when the topic of for­mer girl­friends comes up, shrug­ging rela­tion­ships off as “no big deal.” For just a split sec­ond, I won­dered if there was more to the story than he had shared with me — or if the letter-writer’s had only imag­ined or hoped that there was. One thing was clear: She was lonely and look­ing for love. But no mat­ter what had tran­spired between them, I was read­ing that let­ter in our house, cook­ing our din­ner, wear­ing the engage­ment ring he had given me and spread out on the desk where I sat read­ing the let­ter were a vari­ety of items related to our upcom­ing wed­ding, includ­ing the remain­ing sup­ply of invi­ta­tions, notes about the menu for the recep­tion, to-do lists, and appoint­ment reminders for the required coun­sel­ing ses­sions with the pas­tor, and tuxedo and dress fittings.

“What should I do with this let­ter?” was the ques­tion I asked myself. I thought about burn­ing it and never telling him about it, but that dis­hon­est approach would bring no sat­is­fac­tion because I really wanted to see his reac­tion. After all, I told myself, if this let­ter is going to make him stop and recon­sider our upcom­ing mar­riage, I want to know about his doubts now, not later. Deep inside, I knew that wasn’t going to hap­pen, but in such intense sit­u­a­tions there is some­times a split sec­ond of doubt that pre­cedes resump­tion of ratio­nal thinking.

So I resolved that I would def­i­nitely present him with the let­ter when he got home.

Next was the mat­ter of my hav­ing read it. Again, I won­dered: Should I admit that I read all of it? Will he be angry? Embar­rassed? Feel like his pri­vacy has been vio­lated? We have always lived by a sim­ple rule of thumb: Whomever gets the mail opens the mail. Obvi­ously, he would know that I was lying if I shoved the let­ter back into the enve­lope and sealed it in an effort to make it look like it had never been opened.

And then my thoughts turned back to the woman who had writ­ten the let­ter. I began to imag­ine what it was like to be in her shoes. I won­dered what she was like and, frankly, was a bit creeped out at know­ing that she had been spend­ing so much time fan­ta­siz­ing and dream­ing about my fiancee. Curi­ously, though, the sit­u­a­tion was also an ego boost because, after all, the guy was all mine even though some other woman obvi­ously wanted him very badly. Badly enough to risk send­ing a reveal­ing, soul-bearing let­ter that put her vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties on dis­play and left her ripe for for the worst kind of rejec­tion. She was obvi­ously too afraid of rejec­tion to just pick up the phone and call, even though there was no sug­ges­tion that she knew I existed, much less that we were engaged. I was in no posi­tion to judge her moti­va­tions or sin­cer­ity, but all indi­ca­tions were that she had reached out with her heart — and I con­cluded that she deserved some kind of response so that she would learn the truth and could have clo­sure. Nat­u­rally, I also wanted to ensure that she never con­tacted us again.

But who should be the one to let her down gen­tly? Before I really thought about it, I found myself dial­ing the tele­phone num­ber on the ambu­lance com­pany let­ter­head. When she answered, I calmly told her my name and said, “I live on _________ Avenue.” She gasped lightly, sig­nalling that she com­pre­hended the import of those five words with­out the need for fur­ther expla­na­tion. I quickly added, in a very matter-of-fact tone, “Bob Siess is my fiancee so I would really appre­ci­ate if you would refrain from send­ing any more let­ters to my house.” She mum­bled “o.k.” and before there could be any uncom­fort­able silence, I said, “Thank you” and hung up.

Just as I put the phone down, Big­Bob came home from work. A few min­utes spent
chang­ing his clothes and unwind­ing, he asked the ques­tion peo­ple rou­tinely ask each other on week­day evenings, “Any­thing inter­est­ing in the mail?”

“Well, as a mat­ter of fact … ”

I told him exactly what had hap­pened … that I read the let­ter and called the woman who wrote it, detail­ing our brief conversation.

He just stared at me, try­ing to process the infor­ma­tion. “Where’s the let­ter?” he asked. I handed it to him, ask­ing, “Do you want me to go in the other room so that you can read it by yourself?”

And then I learned that a lit­tle jeal­ousy — espe­cially in the form of one part­ner run­ning off a poten­tial inter­loper — can indeed add a lit­tle spice to a relationship.

Big­Bob took the let­ter from me and walked into the kitchen. I watched as he calmly but delib­er­a­tively ripped it into many small pieces. “Don’t you even want to read it?” I asked incred­u­lously. “You don’t want to know exactly what she said? You can call her your­self if you want to … it’s all right with me.” He ignored my ques­tion and com­men­tary as he con­tin­ued rip­ping the paper. Then he opened the garbage can, threw all the pieces in, got him­self a beer from the refrig­er­a­tor, and tuned to face he. Look­ing at me with a big grin on his face, he answered all of my ques­tions with just one of his own: “What’s for dinner?”

Orig­i­nally pub­lished June 10, 2007.

Tech­no­rati Tags: Car­ni­val of Fam­ily Life, Spin Cycle, Sun­day Scribblings

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