The Question That Ended My Marriage
In a rare moment of vulnerability, I asked my husband this question, and knew I’d just empowered us to divorce.
Our marriage was perfunctory at best.
No passion. Rare sex.
But I’m an optimist. And we were naive.
We believed that we could overcome the obligatory and distant nature of our relationship and grow a healthy family from our shared background and common goals.
To this end, we tried marriage counseling. Twice over the course of a few years we looked to professionals to bridge the gap between us.
The first attempt lasted just one session. The therapist clearly wasn’t listening when we explained our relationship’s origin story of an accidental pregnancy. She lamely asked us, “What made you two fall in love?” He and I looked at each other in a moment of rare solidarity, and knew we wouldn’t be going back.
We tried again, with someone seemingly more astute, who saw us together and separately. This attempt ended a few months in, when during an argument he told me that the therapist had advised him: “If her behavior doesn’t change, you should leave her.”
I never did find out if he was telling me the truth. If so, that therapist was both unethical and unskilled in personality disorders and attachment styles. If he was lying, well, then, it was just another example of his using a person of authority to poke at my shame and push me away.
The attempts add up to…?
The year our son was four, we made a big move across the country, from Virginia back to our roots in Northern California. The idea was that since we weren’t succeeding on our own, maybe familiar places and faces would save our marriage. This included a family cruise to Alaska with my in-laws and our son for my 38th birthday.
It was awkward at best. Aboard the cruise ship, my husband and I still weren’t interested in the same activities.
So I experienced some pretty amazing things. Alone. Or wrangling a wily four-year-old boy on my own.
Chekhov’s gun. Shades of the single parenthood to come.
My blood quickened as I tracked a pod of orca hunting seals at sunset.
My teeth ached at the eery, echoing, hissing crack of glaciers calving. I watched with wonder and worry as huge chunks of ice dropped into the ocean, their rippling waves sending kayakers surfing.
I sat wrapped in my warmest clothes at the back of the ship. My lonely heart’s longings drowned out by the deafening roar of the massive engines and lulled by the vibrating deck and churning wake.
Loneliness redefined
In a sense, the move back home and the vacation had worked. I felt safe and refreshed enough to seek help and put in extra effort to keep the marriage afloat. I asked my in-laws for advice. I tried to be(come) the wife his mother always thought he needed. Naive optimism struck again.
My counseling psychology studies shed light on what I’d been experiencing since my teen years: a personality disorder born of childhood trauma. I attended individual therapy to heal my invisible wounds.
I leaned in to my role as a stay-at-home mom while finishing grad school and teaching yoga part-time. I intentionally pursued intimacy with my husband at the behest of my new therapist, and became pregnant with our second child. Right after getting our son a dog for his birthday. My life and heart were full. Overflowing in fact.
And that was the problem.
All of my energy, efforts and emotions were met by increasingly more of the same cold avoidance I had come to know from my husband.
Again, my psychology studies shed light on the experience: he has an avoidant attachment style, which incudes feeling discomfort with most anything to do with emotions: emotional intimacy, engaging with his own emotions, empathizing, trusting, prioritizing others, attending to anyone else’s needs.
So there I was reeling from all the feels. In the fall of 2017, our son started kindergarten, I finished my masters, our daughter was born, and I began navigating new personal and professional communities. With a husband who was physically present, self-indulgent but disengaged from the needs of his wife and children, emotionally numb, and unwilling to acknowledge his part of the problem, help me or seek help for himself.
The chronic invalidation and lack of connection was like kryptonite to the fear of abandonment at the core of my mental health issues.
A rollercoaster ride through hell
The next two and a half years were the worst of my life.
My penchant for dramatic flair and exaggeration notwithstanding, it’s true. My personal highway to hell was paved with my first therapy clients’ stories of the most heart-breaking and gut-wrenching traumas and tragedies that I’d ever heard. All while our family was reeling from our own confusing and tragic events. This story is for another time, stamped with a trigger warning for child abuse.
I felt like I was stuck on a roller coaster careening through a horror funhouse with off-balance wheels, sparks flying at every turn, no safety bar, being thrown against the sides of the car over and over, horrific images burned into my eyeballs a la Clockwork Orange, with no escape.
I survived by hyper-focusing on my children’s and clients’ well-being, shushing my own system’s cries for help, numbing with weed, ignoring my husband ignoring me.
The lockdown of March 2020 was an ironic savior.
My crafty side delighted in sewing custom masks in bright materials.
My creative inner child delighted in chalking pictures of suns and rainbows, and messages such as Look up! The sky is blue! all over our neighborhood. My personal favorite was an hour my son and I spent filling a family friend’s driveway with It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine, with a stick-figure portrait of their family looking joyful.
My rebellious side loved hopping fences into playgrounds with my children, tearing caution tape off of slides and swings.
The horror coaster calmed as hidden parts of myself emerged. My nervous system felt less raw, more regulated.
The question
Stuck together at home and tag-teaming childcare to attend to our respective virtual work like so many parents during spring of 2020 was like paddling a two-person canoe.
When the front and rear paddlers aren’t in sync, arguments occur or escalate.
(They’re called divorce boats for a reason.)
One particularly heated argument full of personal attacks exposed just how out of sync my husband and I were. I could feel myself spiraling into the familiar internal chaos of dysregulated emotions. I was climbing back on the rollercoaster, ready to protect myself with rage, to be out of control.
As he had done so many times before, he turned and walked away, left the room, left me alone to deal with the brewing storm inside of me, and took shelter in the proximity of our child.
And as I had done so many times before, I followed him, though this time felt different because I could feel. I wasn’t dissociated. My senses were engaged. My feet connected with the soft low-pile carpet. The cartoons on the TV weren’t muted, but squeaky and boisterous. The shapes of plants in the sunlit backyard were crisply defined.
It was a moment of clarity.
A moment of dull ache.
Something had weakened my usual protective wall of rage, leaving me vulnerable to really feel the emotions that had been masked over the past nine years. Fear quickened my heartbeat. Disgust twisted my gut. Sadness stuck in my throat.
I walked over to where my husband sat next to our son on the couch. Stopped within conversational distance. He glanced at me sideways with an I dare you look. He was expecting further friction, argument, escalation. Then he went back to pretending to watch the cartoon on the TV.
In a subtly choked and surprisingly calm voice I asked him,
“Counseling…or…mediation…?”
In hindsight, I can see that I didn’t speak the words marriage and divorce in a kind of higher knowing that the power was in the unspoken.
He answered flatly. “Mediation.” His eyes didn’t move from the TV.
In that moment I knew the chasm between us would never be crossed. That any future efforts to overcome the distant nature of our relationship and grow a healthy family would be in vain. We were headed into the end of our marriage, the beginning of our divorce, a life of split households, custody negotiation, co-parenting logistics, and a whole lot of unknown.
I said, “Ok,” turned and walked away, left the room, and went to be alone with the storm inside of me.
