BBC: Blue-Pill Broadcasting Corporation

L and I watched the first episode of the new season of Downton Abbey last night.  It's a lovely, lushly-produced BBC period soap opera about repressed British people doing repressed British things.  If you like that sort of thing, it's probably the finest example of "that sort of thing" you're likely to find.

It's also absolutely stuffed to the gills with the bluest of pills.  (It rhymes so it must be true.)  In this episode, the Earl of Grantham breaks down in tears in front of his American wife because he put all of their financial eggs in one basket (what kind of repressed, conservative English gentleman ARE you?  Diversify, man!) with a hole in the bottom and may be forced to sell the estate.  She immediately switches to full-on mothering mode and just about folds him in her arms telling him there there, it's going to be all right, dear.  Good to have such an understanding wife, but I hope you weren't planning on getting laid with her anytime soon.

Meanwhile, in the latest development in the show's main romantic subplot, the earl's eldest daughter throws a massive fitness test at her fiancee, a distant cousin and the earl's heir-apparent, at the mere suggestion that he might have a moral problem accepting some money that could save the estate because it comes from the will of the father of a previous (decease) love interest of his, and it was clear that he was put in the will when he and Deceased Love Interest were still engaged and never taken out before the father died.

(Yeah, there's a lot of stuff about wills and British succession law.  It's that kind of show.)

Eldest Daughter seems ready to take the whole thing as proof that Heir Apparent is not "on their side" and call of the engagement.  Heir Apparent at first seems poised to just barely squeak through the fitness test with a pass: after some thought and a manly pep talk from his best man (a delightfully drunken Irish radical), he calmly informs her that the wedding is still on, that he refuses to fight over an inheritance that he's not even certain is his yet, and that they will no doubt have many such disagreements in the future but that he refuses to have their marriage called into question over each and every one of them.  Good man.

Then he bungles the whole thing by ASKING if he may kiss her, when she's been broadcasting "take me!" signals all episode long with such strength that in 4.4 years they will be detectable by aliens on Alpha Centauri.  Way to screw up a decent show of Alpha strength with exactly the wrong kind of weak supplicating Beta, Beta Boy.  Of course the show depicts the whole thing as terribly romantic.

Anyway, as far as events in my own life goes, I realized the other night that I'd gotten my calendar wrong.  Our last couples counseling appointment isn't NEXT Friday (to coincide with our last parenting class), it's THIS Friday.  So that alters my timetable a bit, because that last counseling appointment still seems like the best possible setting to point out that, if anything, L seems less inclined toward kids now than when we started this process nearly two months ago and that we could stand to start getting real about the implications of that when it comes to our future together (or lack thereof).

It's times like this that I think keeping this blog is a very good thing for me.  I have as great a tendency toward self-bullshitting as anyone else, and there are times when putting something down in writing acts as a wonderful bullshit detector.  When I started this post, it was going to be all about what a nice evening we had together last night, watching silly British TV shows and making snarky quips to each other about the characters while she puttered around the living room cleaning up and I puttered around the kitchen fixing dinner, and how little I wanted to give that up for anything.

And writing that down made it sound so pathetic.  Really?  Watching TV together?  That's what's so special that I can't stand to give it up?  That's what I love so much that even now I still hear a little voice way in the back of my head saying, "This isn't so bad, is it?  You can settle for this, can't you?  You don't really need to rock the boat by pushing this kids thing, do you?  Why not just give up and let her have her way so that you don't have to disrupt your comfy, cozy little existence?"?

No.  Time to man up.  I love her, and I love our life together, and I deserve to have that kind of life... but I also deserve the rest of what I want.  And sitting back and waiting for her to be "ready" isn't going to get me that.