Plot Holes

Sex per se is not the problem. Lucille Ball and her husband were sexually involved and revolutionized broadcast television with their show I Love Lucy. 

But "They're married!" is not a reasonable proxy for concluding their sexual involvement is not a problem. Sylvia and Michael Dickerson were married (he's dead now) and that was probably an example of "There's more prostitution within marriage than outside of it."

Them being married didn't magically make their community development nonprofit organization, Our Aberdeen, a legitimate means to further community development in Aberdeen. It was mostly window dressing, probably intentionally so (at least on the part of Michael).

I have absolutely no idea why Tom Fejeran never gave me the professional feedback I asked for. As far as I can tell, there was no conflict of interest and he's dead now, so I can't discuss it with him. 

He had been an urban planner in Guam until shortly before he met me. He had recently changed jobs and was working as a school teacher, probably because he was in the midst of a long, drawn out divorce and he wanted custody of the kids which I understand he got.

I was living in California and the project I asked him to read was about California. He knew before he met me I was facing a divorce though no papers had been filed and he was already legally separated. 

Anyone who knew about our relationship knew I was not the cause of his divorce and he was not the cause of mine. Those decisions were made before we ever met.

I could speculate and list out guesses and that would tell you how my mind works but it doesn't necessarily cast light on what he was thinking. So let's skip that pointless exercise. 

I can tell you what went wrong with Michael Dickerson's plot to marry me, I mean aside from the fact that I had ZERO romantic interest in him and he probably died before Sylvia. I say that because I've seen his obituary but couldn't find one for her when I had business reasons for checking on that.

Michael Dickerson was over twenty years my senior. His first wife died after something like 30 or 35 years of marriage and he had at least one child from that marriage. 

Men tend to marry later than women and tend to be a few years older than their wives. He was likely mid-twenties when he married the first time and around age sixty when she died.

I never heard mention of prior marriages or children for Sylvia and they were too old for having kids when they got together. She was likely a single, childless career woman for decades prior to marrying him. She worked as a legal secretary. 

They had been in Aberdeen something like twelve years when I moved there. Sylvia mentioned that figure to me at some point fairly early on.

He probably remarried relatively quickly in his early sixties, officially retired and began drawing both a retirement check and social security check at sixty five and then promptly moved to Aberdeen at age sixty five. 

Sylvia was a few years younger than him, probably still late fifties at the time that they moved to Aberdeen. She didn't really want to retire at that point in time and didn't really like Aberdeen. 

She researched the possibility of continuing to work as a legal secretary after leaving California. The nearest jobs were in Olympia and it wasn't feasible to drive an hour each way while working full time nor take a bus 90 minutes each way. 

They went to Olympia at least once a month to shop and eat at a nice restaurant. She called it "going to town" while she talked trash about the local Walmart and did her best to avoid shopping there.

So a woman nominally doing local economic development and wealthy enough to live in a big house on the hill would regularly "party" -- dinner and shopping being roughly the equivalent of partying if you are in your seventies like they were -- in Olympia and spend her money anywhere but Aberdeen. 

Sylvia didn't actually like Aberdeen and didn't really want to be there. Michael had more assets and she had never been married before. 

She had worked for years because she had to. Her career was not hard won in spite of a husband and children. She likely gave it up without a real fight, one part Cinderella brainwashing and one part having never much thought about any of it.

She may have said "Why Aberdeen? Why not Olympia? I like Olympia and could keep working. I'm not 65 yet." But whatever his casually dismissive reply, hers was not "If I have to choose between my marriage and my career, I'll keep my career. If you want me to follow you to Washington, I'll follow you to Olympia. I'm not moving to Aberdeen."

Michael Dickerson was an old-fashioned career guy, man of the house, king of his castle and when he married a woman with a career, he fairly promptly stripped her of it and turned her into the little wifey doing his cooking and cleaning.

Michael Dickerson had ZERO experience accommodating or supporting the career of a wife. He was probably imagining that Sylvia would die and I would leap at the opportunity to marry well and move to his big house on the hill and promptly become slave labor doing the cleaning of that big house and cooking for him.

Yeah, no. I don't like cooking and my son took over the cooking when I got divorced and had a corporate job. I'm capable of screwing up noodles these days. I live like a man in a lot of ways these days.

In the meantime, I was very poor and working very part time for him and getting my check out of him was like pulling teeth. It wasn't making his radar to try to take care of me TODAY. He wasn't going to magically become considerate of my needs overnight if I was stupid enough to marry the asshole who treated women like chattel property.

He did NOT have the mental models in place for how to treat my career aspirations seriously. Sylvia gave up her career without a fight and he gave her a consolation prize of busy work in the form of a tiny nonprofit, having stripped her of her independence and declined to move where she wanted to be.

If I had been male and his goal had been actually improving Aberdeen, he probably could have immediately seen that "Oh, uh, saying nice things about her behind her back at meetings she's not invited to isn't going to get the town to fire Wil Russoul and hire her. She needs to have face time with people and needs to know what's going on in town and needs the opportunity to win people over."

He probably couldn't really invite me to those meetings because he was a married man hoping to marry me. People would have realized he was sweet on me and that would have led to more drama for me, not less.

As a married man in a small town, it would have been challenging to back me in earnest even if he hadn't been imagining I'm going to be his third wife. But he had probably been intentionally sabotaging development in Aberdeen for twelve years because he didn't really want it to grow -- he wanted his peace and quiet -- and he had absolutely no experience taking a wife's career seriously and now he's got this half-baked plan to get me my dream job as a means to get into my pants.

He's got conflict of interest six ways to Sunday. 

He's conflicted over wanting me while Sylvia is still alive. 

He's conflicted over me having potential to actually develop a town he's intentionally throttling. 

He's conflicted over supporting my career aspirations at all when his real goal is to make me little wifey number three.

Even if he has ZERO conscience and is unbothered emotionally, those are in conflict in practical terms and there are as a practical matter social conflicts he needs to somehow navigate with regards to convincing people he's really sincere about thinking I'm more qualified for the job than Wil Russoul. 

He probably did sincerely believe that but he didn't really want me to have a career nor did he want me to really develop the town. 

So how do you convincingly back me and promote me enough to win me over while not really -- oopsie! -- succeeding in getting me a real career that would pay well enough to make me less likely to agree to marry him and helping me develop a town he doesn't want developed?

People are not monoliths. They don't necessarily realize upfront that this is what's involved here.

I have speculated he may have done something bad and moved to Aberdeen to hide from that. I have no proof of that, just social patterns that look suspiciously like Sylvia was "an abused wife" intentionally cut off from her friends and ability to support herself, though I saw zero evidence he ever hit her, plus he was cagey with information like someone hiding something. 

If that's why he moved there and why he was strangling development, maybe he felt "It's been 17 years, I can probably stop worrying about that and it would be nice to have better restaurants locally."

Or maybe he imagined he would give lip service to backing me, Sylvia dies and I take over Our Aberdeen and he sabotages my development goals and makes noises about small town development being hard, etc.

I don't know how the world fixes this pattern where male interest is such a stumbling block for women seemingly no matter what women do because rest assured I had absolutely no intentions of getting romantically involved with Michael Dickerson under any circumstance. 

I post this in hopes of casting light on some of the challenges that exist whether he is sincere in his desire to back her or not.