pre-emptive retaliation

"There have been times recently, since the beginning of our troubles, when the sight of David awake, active, conscious, walking and talking has made me want to retch, so acute is my loathing of him; at night, though, it's a different story.  We still make love, in a halfhearted, functional way, but it's not sex; it's more that we've worked out sleeping in the last twenty odd years, and how to do it together.  I've developed contours for his elbows and knees and bum, and nobody else quite fits into me in quite the same way, especially not Stephen, who despite being leaner and taller and all sorts of things that you think might recommend him to a woman looking for a bed partner, seems to have all sorts of body parts in all the wrong places; there were times last night when I began to wonder gloomily whether David is the only person in the world with whoom I will ever be comfortable, whether the reason our marriage and maybe countless marriages have survived thus far is that there is some perfect weight/height differential that no one has ever researched properly, and if one oor other partner is a fraction of a millimieter wrong either way then the relationship will never take.  And it's not just that, either.  When David's asleep, I can turn him backinto the person I still love: I can impose my idea of what David should be, used to be, onto his sleeping form, and the seven hours I spend with that David just about gets me through the next day with the other David."

-hornby.