I married young. I got engaged at nineteen and married at twenty-two. I chose not to study abroad so that it would be possible to graduate a semester early, because after such a long engagement I couldn’t wait to be married. This ended up being a pretty ironic choice, given we were only married for two years before calling it quits. Unlike Bari, my “Secret Life of Fine” period occurred during my marriage, not after. I want to be clear that I am not criticizing Bari in any way; rather, I was inspired by her experience to articulate mine. I admire the courage that it had to have taken her to admit that she was not, in fact, fine, because I too have learned to find this courage the hard way. I do not know what marriage was like for Bari, nor do I presume her relationship was anything like mine, but I would like to offer some insight into my own experience in a relatively similar situation.
When my ex-husband and I met, I had just broken up with a long-term high school ex, who I considered to be my first “real love.” In fact, I had never done the “slutty teenager thing,” while Oprah and other mainstream media outlets were warning parents about rainbow parties and sex bracelets. I was wondering “Who even does that?” and was already a serial monogamist. When I entered college at eighteen, I went through a brief period of blaming this obsessive monogamy for my unhappiness — in my mind I was unhappy because I hadn’t experienced enough sexually and socially, and this was college, man, so I was going to remedy that. Well, of course, I didn’t. I had one brief fling, then met someone I didn’t necessarily have sexual or romantic feelings for, but who I believed offered everything I thought that I wanted in a man, and might be what I needed, since that whole multiple passionate love affairs thing hadn’t panned out. At the time, I didn’t trust myself. I had tried what I thought I “wanted” to do and it hadn’t worked out as planned, so when I met this man, my initial reaction was that I thought I “needed” him and just wouldn’t let myself fall too hard because I had poor judgement, or was too scared. I thought the lack of sexual and romantic feeling was my brain’s (which had always been prone to over-analyzing everything) fault, and that I better just suck it up and let this good thing happen. This someone was, of course, my ex-husband.
One night, after fingering me in my dorm room because he couldn’t find a condom, this boy I was putting on the “perfect man” pedestal asked me to go out with him. I was still hesitant, and at odds with myself and my feelings on the subject of him. So I said I wasn’t ready for a relationship and just “wanted to like, hang out for a while, ya know?” The next day, I recanted, and we became “Facebook Official.”
When we first started dating, we spent a lot of time together in his dorm room. In fact, I’m pretty sure I cried when he had to go away for a Mock Trial Trip a few weekends in, because it was going to be our first two nights apart as a couple. I also stopped spending as much time with my friends, and started to only see them at dinner and sometimes in class. For a while, I truly felt that breathless, happy feeling whenever I thought about him, or about us. I knew that I was in love and this was The Real Deal. I even began to fantasize about marriage, something I had been pretty sure was not for me. Despite these feelings and the constant sex, there was still something (besides orgasms) missing from our relationship, our chemistry. Looking back, my body was probably trying to tell me something my brain was trying to keep a secret: this wasn’t going to work.
After this relatively short “new relationship feeling” was over, I started to notice that he spent a lot of time with his friends down the hall, and I spent a lot of time alone in his dorm room, doing homework and watching DVDs. When I became fed up with this, and voiced these feelings of neglect to a mutual friend, she told me I was “full of shit” and “shouldn’t complain” about being ignored, because he had bought me jewelry from Tiffany’s and she would kill for someone like that. One Tiffany necklace does not an amazing relationship make, but I assumed at the time that she was right, and I was ungrateful. Especially because when I brought this up with my ex, he essentially told me as much.
He was older than me, so my sophomore year was his senior and we lived in opposite ends of the same co-ed dorm building. This of course meant that once again, I quickly fell into the pattern of staying in his room and mostly avoiding other people, much to the chagrin of his younger sister, who was my roommate and friend. It was during this year that we got engaged. For the most part, this year went really well. I can’t remember any major issues, fights or blow ups (although I’m sure there were plenty). However, once he graduated and we got our own apartment together, everything started to go downhill. After a year peppered with petty arguments that often turned into meltdowns and full of emotional cheating scandals with teenagers and old friends and laziness (Re: helping around the house on his part and extreme jealousy, hurt, bitterness and resentment on mine), we moved to the nearest big city and began to blame our former problems on the town we had lived in causing us to act out.
We were still hell bent on keeping up the old lie for ourselves, each other and everyone else: Everything’s fine. We’re fine. This is Love. In this new setting, I began to feel even more isolated, because we knew so few people. Admittedly, this isolation had always been self-imposed. I’ve never been a very outgoing person, but ultimately it pushed me farther towards pretending everything was good with the person who had become my only support system (albeit not a great one), and pushed me down the aisle when I had no business wearing that pretty white dress.
I hope that you see, at this point, how our eventual divorce was my fault too. I did things no self-respecting feminist (as I’ve always been quick to label myself) should do, not only for a man, but just in general. As he was drifting, we both willfully ignored it, and maybe I was the one who set this trend at the beginning. This is what I mean when I say my “Secret Life of Fine” was during my marriage, not after. Neither of us were happy, and boy were there some red flags we both ignored. We constantly told ourselves, our friends, our family and even each other that everything was fine, we were fine. That our relationship might not look perfect to an outsider, but it was what we wanted. When we finally decided to end it, I had a panic attack. Partly because it took me until after, when I finally formed relationships (both platonic and romantic) with others who treated me better and whose personalities “meshed” better with mine, to fully admit to myself just how much was missing in our relationship. It was also partly because I was relieved and couldn’t fathom that we had not only been keeping our ultimately crippling unhappiness secret from everyone important or major in our lives (including each other), but also from ourselves for so long.
