There are times in every relationship when you assume an ill-fitting role for the sake of your partner. Crankenstein didn’t enjoy prying a partially eaten mole carcass from the jaws of our beloved (and disgusting) dog, who ripped it from the earth right in front of us with her fangs a few years ago. But she gallantly did so anyway, because — as you might expect of someone who spent a full semester dissecting a cadaver — she’s less squeamish about viscera than I am.
Similarly, I’m Crankenstein’s ladder-climber due to her fear of heights; her weed-puller because she’s afraid of rashes; her insect-killer not because I enjoy it but because her arachnophobia is greater than mine. Left to my own devices, I might yelp at the sight of a spider, but she won’t willingly enter a room that harbors one. Though it’s nothing I’ve previously detailed here, Crankenstein has many phobias that disrupt our lives (especially hers) on a daily, and sometimes hourly, basis.
That wasn’t always the case. When we met, I was attracted to a quality of hers that wasn’t quite fearlessness, but something close to it. She was plunged into stressful new settings every few weeks in residency and invariably handled it with aplomb. There was nothing she wouldn’t do for her job, and I expected she’d bring the same dedication and enthusiasm to our relationship — not that we anticipated our life together would be as exhausting as her work.
In 2018, she became acutely fearful of bad weather — something I’d already been through with my ex — and her occasional health anxiety turned into frequent health anxiety that I jokingly called Niles, in honor of Frasier’s neurotic Niles Crane.* In late 2019, she followed the earliest dispatches from China about COVID-19 with dread. A few weeks into 2020, she told me to start preparing for extended lockdown or quarantine scenarios and advised our friends and relatives to do the same. Her prescience about the pandemic convinced her that her anxiety was right about everything.
‘Niles,’ now our constant companion, wasn’t the only problem in our relationship, but none were harder to live with.** It wasn’t that I couldn’t handle mental illness — given my family, the friends I love most, and the women I’ve had long-term relationships with, I’m pretty used to it by now. It was that Crankenstein spent several years ignoring my pleas to seek help beyond what she normally received for her depression, eating disorder and trauma history. What finally made her change her tune? Unsurprisingly, it was her job.
What Crankenstein couldn’t do for either of us or our marriage (and again, she suffered greatly), she could do once the distress caused by OCD was no longer compatible with her career. She likes to say that Muriel is the love of my life; medicine is the love of hers. She will read this and disagree — she’ll argue “It was until I met you” — but I know that’s untrue. Crankenstein loves me the way you love a reliable car or a comfortable pair of jeans. We’re a pairing based on pragmatism more than passion and I’m OK with that. I love that she loves her work.
But as I stood on that ladder a few nights ago, worried my left leg would buckle, I was tired. Earlier that day I’d emptied nearly half of the basement on my own to make room for the crew that will complete our upcoming repairs. It wasn’t easy to do with a bum arm. The harder I physically exert myself, the more I shake afterward, so I’d been tremoring throughout the day when rigidity and slowness are usually bigger concerns. The next day my arms and legs were covered in bruises from wrestling with things I struggled to move.
“You could’ve waited for me to help,” Crankenstein said later, but I’ve heard that before, and despite her best intentions it rarely works out that way. ‘Niles,’ though somewhat subdued by exposure therapy, takes over and worries if she gets a scratch or stubs a toe or touches something rusty, and then she retreats to swab and bandage herself. Or she’s seized by a migraine and goes to bed early. Inevitably, things get delayed until we run out of time — and then it’s my problem, not hers, because she’s busy with work. This stirred such resentment the last time we moved that I kept some of my clothes in an IKEA bag for months afterward, in case I decided to leave.
Yet I’ve stayed, even as her anxieties and phobias multiplied and conspired with her denial to crowd me out of our already wounded marriage. The great ‘Niles’ debacle — during which I compiled a list of her most paralyzing, peculiar fears that grew to several pages — wasn’t the first time my concerns about Crankenstein were dismissed until the crisis reached a breaking point, a pattern I’m not sure we can correct. Some of that’s because we’re stubborn, some of it’s because of dynamics she was raised with, and some of it is that I’ve been burned so many times that I never trust the burner’s cool. There are many roles I’m willing to play for her, but ‘fool’ is no longer one of them.
* There’s a great Florence + the Machine video in which Bill Nighy plays Florence’s anxiety, and he keeps going and going like the Energizer Bunny as she’s run ragged, captive to his whims; they are perfect stand-ins for ‘Niles’ and Crankenstein.
** Here I should clarify, since this is a potentially sensitive topic, that no one in my ‘real-life’ is aware of this site other than Crankenstein. The same is true of nearly everything I write anonymously or pseudonymously. I like readers to find me because our interests intersect, and those are the things I usually write about. In two-and-a-half decades of writing for strangers, online and in print, I didn’t reveal anything even slightly personal until 2021 or 2022 (and even then it was limited to intestines). What I’m doing here is new and different, prompted by concerns about whether I’ll get dementia, but I remain privacy-conscious and don’t post things like this without Crankenstein’s permission.