Defensive Indifference

Los Angeles, California

Defensive Indifference is a play seen in the latter innings of a baseball game in which the defensive team, either ahead or behind by a large amount, allows a player to advance a base without any attempt to put the runner out. When you follow baseball, and I have followed the Los Angeles Dodgers more or less religiously over the past few years, and you see this play, you think Wow. They just don't care if that guy runs. This can happen in relationships, as well. And maybe especially in long term relationships.

When I was in college as an English major, I took a class in my junior year that was entitled Contemporary Novels. The reading material was grim: Jerzy Kosinski; Alain Robbe-Grillet; Kurt Vonnegut; Ken Kesey; Joyce Carol Oates. I gravitated to majoring in literature with a desire to read all of F. Scott Fitzgerald. And, although this sounds tres pretentious, I fell in love with Shakespeare's comedies. There were entire chunks of literature, particularly British literature, that I ran from, kicking and screaming. But I won't list (as those Dickens afficianados out there will be horrified).

The novels class was at 2:00 in the afternoon on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and I was taking all my classes on those days. That meant four eighty-minute classes back to back, starting with Children's Literature at 8:00 and heading straight through until 3:15. In the middle was The Romantic Age, and Greek & Roman Epics in Translation, which inexplicably excluded any roman epics.

The worst thing about the novels class was that we had to critique one of the novels standing up in front of the class. And then be critiqued by the professor and our fellow students. Scary. Up until this point, I would check out of any class that required this. But my senior year was coming, and I knew I was going to have to deliver oral theses like this in senior seminars. So, even though I was the timid student who took Inductive Logic, for the love of heaven, to avoid taking Public Speaking, I stayed in this class.

The best thing about this class was the professor, Wallace Graves. Wally resided in the neighborhood where I had lived while attending junior high and high school, and I had often walked past his house. He had written a novel, entitled Trixie, that I had read before I took his class. He quickly became one of my favorite professors. A no bullish*t kind of guy who ran the class like a seminar. He gave us various writing exercises, and we dissected the novels one-by-one, most of which were disturbing. The novel I chose to critique was The Painted Bird, by Jerzy Kosinski. My theme was Kosinski's handling of the use of violence in the novel. But, para siempre, I digress...

In one of the discussions in class something came up about the definition of love, and as students in our young 20s, we came up with all kinds of nonsense. After listening to us, and after one of us asked him what his definition was, Wally said that love was the willingness to keep open the doors of communication. I carried this definition with me through the ending of my relationship with David, who was my longtime boyfriend and then fiance, at that time. And into my marriage with Billy. And I still believe it.

But what does that have to do with defensive indifference, you may very well ask. I believe that when a relationship drifts, or when a partner strays, even if just emotionally; indifference is the killer. Yes, relationships are about communication, but they are also about attention. You can't just talk. You have to listen. When you are not paying attention you can end up with defensive indifference. There goes your partner taking off down the baseline. What you don't notice appears to the other to be what you don't care about.

I didn't notice that Billy was suffering from depression. In response to my questioning him about his behavior, he would tell me that he was in a rut, and I tried hard to understand. Over a decade, I suggested changes that I thought would help, including counseling. But every suggestion was met with resistance. He didn't want to do that. He didn't want to make any changes. He wanted to stay in the rut. It didn't make sense to me, even though I had watched his father spend every day of the last ten years of his life...in his late fifties and early sixties...in front of the TV.  I was perplexed by his complaining when we spent a day together running errands, and his constant annoyance with traffic and other drivers. I didn't get his unwillingness to do much of anything socially besides dining out or going to a happy hour. While I had long ago identified it as a big problem, I still wasn't really attentive to the possibility that Billy was using alcohol in a way that wasn't just social. And, while I was spinning my wheels trying to help him out of his "rut" he was consistently defensively indifferent to me. That this coincided with the many deaths and endings in my life most likely compounded my own unhappiness with our life together.

Sometimes things happen in a relationship and recovery is not possible. When you glue back together a favorite cup which has broken, you can use it for a pen holder on your desk. You see the cracks, but you remember all the tea and cocoa it held for you before you got careless with it. Marriages are not crockery. Each broken edge remains sharp. Each uneven seam holds a painful memory. Its ability to no longer contain what you want to put into it makes you feel depleted and empty.

When my friend, Carol, ended her longtime marriage, she told me that she had done everything to save it except standing on her head, naked. A relationship should not require that intimate posture. But it does require intimacy. It requires a mutual sharing of feelings, thoughts, and fears (sorry to say this, guys!), as well as the ability to see and hear what is going on. That is intimacy. That is attention. Without it, all you got is defensive indifference. And that can be a game-changer.