Both Sides Now

[In case you're just jumping in here, this is the second of three posts on marriage.  The first can be read here. The second can be read here.]


Alright, then.  One more and then I'll shut about marriage.  If I were writing with my journalist hat on, I would have put this right up front so you could judge whether I had a conflict of interest.  Because I'm not, I didn't want you to.  The truth is, I think that most readers, armed with this information ahead of time, would probably not have taken the time to read the other posts, or at the very least would have inferred certain things about my mindset and dismissed any thoughts I have on the subject as irrelevant and jaded.

I am an ex-wife.


Three years out from my divorce, I can write that phrase and although it still gives me the willies, it doesn't feel like being punched in the face anymore, and I no longer allow it to define who I am.  I had been seeing a therapist for several months before I decided to end my marriage, trying to wrap my head around...well, my head and what was going on in there.  I'd been very open with him, cried my way through dozens of sessions, but I remember that when I told him that I'd actually done it, told my husband that I was leaving, I was fairly matter of fact.  It wasn't a casual decision.  I'd weighed everything out and even though it felt unbelievably shitty and there were a million ways that I was punishing myself about it on a regular basis, I knew it was the right one.  But when I'd finished explaining the basics of how I felt about it, I paused and burst into tears, "I'm going to be an ex-wife!  Ex-wives are horrible!"

I was kidding, in a morbid sort of way, but it summed up not just my own self-loathing for being a failure at marriage (and the instigator of its demise) but also my certainty that the recrimination I directed at myself was only the tip of the iceberg compared to the swift and terrible judgment soon to be rendered unto me by, well, everyone in the city.


The years that have followed have been a long, torturous, fascinating lesson learning curve.  For the most part, I doubt that anyone, my ex-husband included, judged me more harshly than I did myself, but there were definitely some haters.  Most people turned out to be too wrapped up in their own shit to bother with mine (possibly the most valuable lesson I learned, and one that made a huge difference in this people-pleaser's life).  But there was a also a large contingent who were so awkward and uncomfortable that they might as well have been judging.

It's probably apparent by now that I'm difficult to embarrass.  Easy to shame, but difficult to embarrass.  For pretty much everything I do or have done, I'm willing either to defend it or admit my error.   And in turn, I'm game for pretty much anyone wants to tell me.  In fact, I'm like a weird inverted gossip.  Everybody's got something going on that makes them feel like a freakish outsider, but because we feel that way, we rarely share the information.  I suspect that if everybody was more open about their lives, we'd all be shocked at how much "abnormality" we all share.  Look at the Republican party.  For all their judginess about each others' foibles, there's nary a one without a foible waiting in the wings.  We're all killing ourselves to hide our idiosyncracies and be "normal," based on a radically inaccurate picture of what normal is.

But wait, I was talking about marriage, right?  Right.  Much like people are uncomfortable when someone their age dies because it brings home their own mortality, divorce makes people uncomfortable as though it were a contagious disease.  


My husband was a smart, funny, talented man. He still is.  He loved me, and if he feels about me like I feel about him, he still does, in a different, distant way.  We spent a lot of years together.  We experienced some hard and beautiful things.  I'm not interested in sharing the particulars of how our relationship ended, because while I'm an open book, the co-author of this particular volume might not appreciate it. And ultimately, although there were various contributing factors, the thing that I understand now is that I do not want to married.  Period.


As I talked about in the first post of this series, marriage is a powerful cultural phenomenon and most people are raised either explicitly or implicitly to expect that the end game of romantic relationships is marriage.  I certainly thought so. My parents were divorced, and I had no intention of every letting such a horrible fate happen to me.  In retrospect, I can see how artificial the actual, "getting married" part was relative to the actual, lovely substance of the relationship we were in, but at the time, it seemed the natural next step, a big deal, the grown up thing to do.  It was all very theoretical, really.  Because hey, what's the difference between the first five years you're a couple and the years you're married?  A technicality, right?


Well, yes.  But here's why I firmly believe that it was not my marriage that didn't work for me, but marriage in general.  As a life-long people pleaser, I have an extremely difficult time protecting and cultivating my identity as an individual within the structure of a relationship.  That's not to say that my partners have been monsters or bullies, but that I will, incrementally and in subtle ways, defer to their plans, prioritize our plans and goals as a couple over mine as an individual.  It's not something that causes me to suffer necessarily. I don't lament these things, and I rarely notice until after the breakup, but I do it.  In my relationships prior to marriage, including the years in which I was dating my future husband, I would right the ship after the initial infatuation and get back to the business of being me.


I honestly expected that getting married wouldn't really change anything except to allow him access to my health insurance, but over a short period of time I began to feel as though obligation was supplanting mutual support.  We started a business together before we got married, his dream job, and I worked the day job to support it, with the expectation that when it got on its feet, I would have a turn. Again, I'll skip the details, but after we were married there came a time when I felt that our mutual life (maybe buying a house or having children, etc.) and the possibility that I might have a chance to explore my interests had been sacrificed.  I take responsibility for allowing that to happen. And I know that in similar circumstances with financial and legal obligations tied to another person, I would, against my better judgment, let it happen again.  People love to give the relationship advice that you shouldn't expect the other person to change, that you should go into it anticipating and accepting their faults.  I would add the also seemingly obvious but often ignored idea that you should do the same for yourself.


Divorce was easily the most horrific experience of my life, and ours was relatively amicable.  I think people expect that the person who does the leaving gets off easy, but I'm here to tell you it just isn't so.  Both parties walk away feeling broken, disappointed, frustrated confused.  It's crushing in ways you can't imagine unless you do it, and I strongly recommend you take my word for it.  My husband (for the same reasons I dislike the baggage that goes with the term "ex-wife" I hesitate to use the term ex-husband. Besides which, since I will not marry again, he is the only person I could be referring to when I say "my husband") has a girlfriend he's been with for years now and is the stepdad to her children.  I have been in a relationship for the same amount of time.  We're both satisfied with our lives, and when we run into each other, we're glad to have a chance to catch up, although we don't go out of our ways to make plans with each other.


My boyfriend and I are in love.  Both of us are personally strongly opposed to marriage, although we are equally adamant supporters of gay marriage as a civil rights issue.  After three years, we don't live together, which suits us just fine as we're both fairly finicky sorts who enjoy time to ourselves.  We're comfortable saying things like, "I think I need to just be on my own for a few days," and comfortable hearing it as well.  We have mutual projects including a band that is his project originally but in which we are partners, and we're supportive of each others' individual ventures, and participate in them as much as we are welcome and/or comfortable doing so.  I don't think it's fair to hold up any relationship against another one, but I will say that the lessons I learned in the course of my marriage and divorce have allowed me to be a better partner, both more responsible to myself and more cognizant of the health and balance of the relationship I'm in.

That I'm not cut out for marriage is fine by me.  I think there are people who are suited to it, and beyond that people who thrive in that situation.  Those people don't need an advocate because the world is set up to embrace them.  I didn't write this series because I'm a bitter divorcee hell bent on exposing the failures of the institution that ruined me, I wrote it because I firmly believe that the divorce rate should not be as high as it is, and the corollary is that the marriage rate should not be as high as it is.

The bottom line is that there are a lot of things we'd prefer not to see so much of in our society: divorce, abortion or robbery, for example.  But as much as we punish and marginalize people who are "guilty" of those activities, obsessing about the actions is an exercise in futility.  These are effects, and the only way to get real results in reducing those effects is to give some serious, honest, unflinching thought to the causes.  We need to re-evaluate our assumptions about marriage, get serious about sex education and de-stigmatizing contraception in places where stigma still persists and allocate at least as many resources for the war on poverty as we do for the war on drugs.  We're a talk-show culture, eager to dissect transgressions against our accepted norms, but too intellectually lazy to a) stop it or b) change our conception of what the "norm" is in any given arena.


So yes, I'm an ex-wife, a current girlfriend (which, though diminuitive, is at least less de-humanizing than "partner") but more importantly a proponent of living an examined life regardless of its resemblance to cultural expectations.

Loving Life, or, Oversharing by Way of Introduction

I have, by my reckoning, lived a charmed life.

I come from a large, close, sparkling family of gifted people: an ivy-league educated gentleman carpenter, an international law enforcement consultant, writers of the fiction, non-fiction, and poetry stripe,socialites, an Ultimate Fighter/ceramic artist, and our matriarch who was a basketball ref, dental assistant, and single mother of five children in the days when all three were unlikely positions for woman to find herself in.  The crown jewel for me is my mother, a kind, adventurous, underestimated lady who made me feel like the MVP of the world.  All of them are flawed, naturally, but in ways that are harmless and (mostly) adorable and mostly serve to make them attractively human and accessible.

I got some pretty awesome genes from them and whether by nature or nurture managed to pick up pretty respectable skills related to all of the categories above. (Except Ultimate Fighting.  Maybe I'd be good at that too, but I'm satisfied to leave that in the realm of speculation). As a kid I was a model student, played the viola and soccer, read early and often, wrote well and often, drew, sculpted, photographed, cooked, ran, played varsity tennis, cultivated a small circle of tight friends and got along easily with everyone else, and generally had a hell of a time.

A charmed life.  I counted my parents' divorce when I was a toddler as a blessing rather than a curse (children would rather come from a broken home than an unhappy one...that's right, I just quoted Dr. Phil).  There were no untimely deaths close to me.  I never broke a bone or suffered a serious illness.  I could offer a list of grievances to demonstrate that it wasn't perfect, but in the scheme of things, I really couldn't complain.

And I didn't, but somewhere around 13 or 14 years old, even in the midst of this great wealth of family, friendship, native gifts and good fortune, it became harder and harder for me to be happy.  If worrying about outrageously unlikely possibilities was a sport, I would have been the champ. Always a little reserved and introspective, I found that my brain, which had traditionally been a tremendous wellspring of outrageous plans and rewarding diversions, had morphed into an emaciated, slightly rabid-looking squirrel digging up a treasure trove of self-doubt, self-loathing, and any other self-hypen-negative-adjective you can think of.

I went to college powered by the last scraps of my confidence.  I quit. I went home. I slept on my mother's couch in what resembled a three-month sick day.  And finally admitted that I was depressed.

That admission was really the bottom for me.  Because I had a charmed life.  I could not, in good conscience, justify the depth of my despair when I held my life up for comparison with...well, in my estimation at that time, most of the world's population.  And adding utterly unnecessary fuel to the fire, it seemed hideously pathetic and unforgivable that, recognizing my good fortune, I could not pull myself up by my bootstraps and get happy, goddammit.

There was a therapist.  I hated him because he treated me like a silly child going through a phase.  I managed that quite well on my own, thanks. To this day, I think that the advice, "When God made time he made a lot of it," easily ranks among the stupidest, hollowest, most condescending ways to tell someone that they should let go of their total sense of failure as a human being.  I quit.

I'll gloss over the intervening years between then and now, by saying that they can be represented by increasingly shorter cycles of the same:  Infinite faith in the future, crushing sense of failure, repeat, repeat, repeat.

Make no mistake, in the "infinite faith" phases, I did a lot of great stuff, made a lot of awesome friends, lived some beautiful days that I held like totems against the bad times.  I learned to keep things on a relatively even keel so the landing during the  "crushing failure" times was less bruising.  I stumbled into an interesting and unlikely job that I still have today. I got married to a very good man.  I divorced him. I was elated, productive, miserable and sluggish by turns until finally I was just exhausted. 

And that's when I finally, after rebuffing the suggestion on the many occasions it came up over the course of fifteen years, waved the white flag and started taking an anti-depressant.

It was a big deal.  I'd resisted, vehemently, for a number of reasons. 

For starters, I prefer waiting to medical intervention just as a general rule.  I eschew aspirin and cold medicine. I've taken antibiotics a grand total of once in my life.  I've landed myself in the emergency room on morphine and fluid drips more than once because I thought I'd just wait out a flu or food poisoning.

The second, and probably most potent objection, was fear.  I was desperately afraid that the misery I wanted to escape was part of some kind of unwitting Faustian bargain, the price I had to pay in exchange for my talents, my victories, the stretches of enthusiasm and unfettered, childlike glee woven through the whole ugly mess.  It's not an uncommon fear.  It's probably true for some people, but I also think it's a naturally self-fulfilling prophecy.  When you've grown accustomed to exercising your gifts despite (or in a futile effort to alleviate) depression, it's easy to conflate the two.  Like an abusive spouse, your depressed self is horribly co-dependent.

But I did it.  I take a dose so low that I almost couldn't recognize the effects until I found myself in a typical trigger-type situation running the typical dirge-like internal monologue and had the remarkable epiphany that I was thinking depressed thoughts on auto-pilot -- telling myself that I felt awful, but feeling nothing of the sort.  Whatever was going on was annoying, unpleasant, a real day-ruiner. Not the end of the world or evidence of my fundamental fucked-upness, just a bummer.  It had been so long since something had just been a bummer that I actually cheered up at the prospect.

So that's how I converted to happy.  After years of torturing myself, I finally recognized the body I'd always considered a handy tool and a great ally was betraying me.  That in the end, I was literally my own worst enemy, my biology a double agent. 

I'm excited, engaged, delighted by chance encounters and small wonders.  And occasionally grumpy, which is awesome. Now I just have to deal with the repercussions of a different kind of emotional extreme.  I'm a 32-year-old 8-year-old, reconnecting with the dozens of things I love to do, exploring the hundreds of others that call to me.  Instead of figuring out what options will let me get by, flat out survive, I'm figuring out what I want to be when I grow up. It's exhilarating and liberating and more than a little scary and I'm infinitely grateful for the challenge.