explained, “It was as if we both just knew on some level that our father was sleazy and we worked around it. I think Joann ended up having more trouble with it, though, because she became an alcoholic and then married a man I thought was a real loser. They got divorced, and she’s in recovery now, but it seems to me she’s still attracted to men who just use her because she makes a good salary as a nurse.”
Meg, who was thirty-four at the time of our meeting, had gone to college part-time, but did not finish. Instead, six months after she met Paul she moved out of her house and in with him. It was the only impulsive thing she’d ever done, and she admitted that it had been totally out of character for the shy, cautious person she’d always been. But Paul appealed to her. He had a steady blue-collar job, was a hard worker, and shared her goals, which tended more toward raising a family than pursuing a career. Also, Meg could tell from occasional comments he would make that the idea of her being more educated than he was made Paul uncomfortable. So Meg dropped out of college and enrolled instead in a training program in a vocational school and became a machinist—one of the few females to work in that trade. And that had the added advantage, she said with a smile, of being a convenient way for her to continue “camouflaging” her body.
Meg and Paul married and had two children, a son and a daughter whom she described, with evident delight, as “my angels.” They were healthy, did well in school, and enjoyed sports and swimming in the town lake during the summer. Meg was concerned about a couple of things, however, beginning with Paul’s drinking.
Despite her low-key nature and the fact that she had not dated much before meeting Paul, Meg admitted that when she did go out with friends, she sometimes drank to excess. Then, after she and Paul got together they eventually fell into a pattern of having a couple of beers pretty much every night together—and sometimes more on the weekend. But she’d put those days behind her as soon as she got pregnant with her first child. Now she would have a beer or two on Saturday and/or Sunday, always with Paul. He, on the other hand, had continued to drink daily. He also smoked pot on the weekends. “He drinks either three or four beers, or else most of a bottle of wine, every night,” Meg explained, “and if he gets into one of his moods he drinks more than that. Sometimes I’m not sure if the drinking causes him to get into a mood, or if it’s the mood that makes him drink.”
What Meg meant by Paul’s “moods” was his tendency to sink into a severe state of depression, or else flare up with intense anger, with seemingly little provocation. He was, she said, extremely thin-skinned, and could take offense at things that others might consider trivial. For example, if he came home and felt “ignored” by her, when she was actually just busy taking care of the children, he might storm off in a huff. Drinking always made that situation worse. “If he’s had more than three beers and gets into a mood, then we can’t communicate at all. He just sulks or gets mean,” Meg explained. “We both work full-time as well as raising two kids. It’s like Paul is almost competing with them for my attention. I do try to pay attention to him, but there are times when I’m distracted or tired. He doesn’t seem to understand that.”
Here are a few examples of other issues that Meg was concerned about. From her perspective these issues clouded their relationship and, over time, were creating what she called a “distance” between her and Paul.
• Paul occasionally would complain that after Meg got pregnant he “lost his drinking buddy.” Indeed, after they began to live together and up until Meg got pregnant she did drink almost as much as Paul did, and she also sometimes smoked pot with him on weekends. When Paul complained about losing his “drinking buddy,” he would get sullen, and nothing Meg could say would lift him out of that sullen funk.
• On a few occasions when Meg tried to talk to Paul about his drinking—because she was concerned about how it was affecting his health and what it was modeling for the children—he would fly into a rage. At these times he would accuse Meg of thinking she was “too good for him.” Then he’d mutter something about how she was probably looking for someone to replace him.
• Over time Paul had turned sour on virtually every friendship he had. From his perspective, Meg explained, people were always letting Paul down. “And he holds a grudge like you wouldn’t believe!” she added. As a result, their circle of friends was extremely small, and their social life extremely limited.
• Paul’s attitude toward friends extended to his work relationships, where he regarded most of his coworkers as lazy and his bosses as incompetent. He was not only extremely critical of them, but of people in general. He was inclined, for example, to blow up when frustrated about how someone in the car ahead of him was driving.
• Paul was very concerned that Meg dressed in ways that he would call “provocative.” They had a limited social life, but even if they were going to a family function he would accuse her of “dressing sexy” so as to attract attention. He would also accuse her of flirting with his friends. According to Meg, however, “I don’t own a single ‘sexy’ outfit! Just ask my friends.”
• Whenever he was in one of his “funks,” Paul would make disparaging comments about himself. “If he’s trying to do some little repair job around the house I can hear him muttering words like ‘stupid’ to himself. And again, he often says that he thinks I will eventually ‘dump’ him for someone else.”
Once, after they returned home from a gathering with friends, Paul again accused Meg of flirting with a man who at the time was Paul’s best friend. Meg said she’d had a few drinks that night, admitted that it was only at times like those that she could allow her “feminine” side to show “even a little bit.” But she denied that she’d been intentionally flirtatious. As she’d told me, she learned from an early age to keep that part of herself under wraps. I was inclined to believe that she was sincere about this.
Despite the fact that Paul was aware of Meg’s history with her father, including the fact that she disliked flirtatiousness in other women and had never done anything that could make Paul distrust her, a fight nevertheless ensued between her and Paul, which she could not de-escalate. Then Paul pushed Meg. She stumbled backwards and fell to the floor. The racket woke the children, who emerged from their bedrooms in tears. Paul then proceeded to stomp around the house, upending a chair and further frightening the kids. Then he stormed out of the house, hopped into his truck, and sped off. At that point, fearing for what might happen if Paul returned in the same mood, Meg called her best friend, Jill, hastily dressed the children, and took them to spend the night with her friend.
Paul figured out where Meg and the children had gone as soon as he returned home to find his house empty. He called Jill’s house and asked to speak to Meg. When she got on the phone he apologized profusely. He also agreed, albeit reluctantly, to see a counselor with her.
Paul suffers from Male Borderline Personality Disorder or MBPD for short. Like the vast majority of men with this disorder, he has not been diagnosed as such. Instead, the counselor he met with (only twice) gave him a “diagnosis” of alcohol abuse and also said that Paul needed to work on anger management. And though this may be objectively true—Paul did have a drinking problem and his behavior at times was aggressive—this would not be of much help in understanding Paul’s behavior or changing it. And changing it would definitely be in Paul’s interest as well as Meg’s and their children’s.
Paul
Though you could say that Meg’s childhood was not exactly a bed of roses, Paul had it just as bad if not worse. His father had abandoned him and his mother when Paul was three and Paul never saw the man again. His mother, who was an alcoholic, subsequently married and divorced two alcoholics, both of whom were hostile and abusive to Paul. She’d had another son by Paul’s first stepfather, and this boy was the recipient
