The Question That Ended My Marriage

Our marriage was perfunctory at best.

No passion. Rare sex.

But I’m an optimist. And we were naïve.

We felt that we could overcome the compulsory and distant character of our relationship and establish a strong family from our shared history and the same ambitions.

To this purpose, we attempted marital therapy. Twice over the course of a few years, we went to specialists to bridge the distance between us.

The initial effort lasted only one session. The therapist definitely wasn’t listening when we described our relationship’s beginning tale of an unplanned pregnancy. She lamely questioned us, “What made you two fall in love?” He and I stared at one another in a moment of uncommon togetherness and knew we wouldn’t be going back.

We tried again with someone supposedly more observant, who saw us together and apart. This effort ended a few months later, when, after an argument, he informed me that the therapist had recommended him: “If her behavior doesn’t change, you should leave her.”

I never did find out whether he was giving me the truth. If so, that therapist was both unethical and inexperienced in personality disorders and attachment patterns. If he was lying, well, then, it was simply another example of his using a person of authority to poke at my humiliation and drive me away.

The tries sum up to…?

The year our kid was four, we made a large journey across the nation, from Virginia back to our origins in Northern California. The thought was that because we weren’t succeeding on our own, maybe familiar locations and people might salvage our marriage. This includes a family voyage to Alaska with my in-laws and our kid for my 38th birthday.

It was uncomfortable at best. Aboard the cruise ship, my spouse and I still weren’t interested in the same activities.

So I experienced some very fantastic stuff. Alone. Or juggling a tricky four-year-old child on my own.

Chekhov’s gun. Shades of the single parenting to come.

My pulse quickened as I trailed a pod of orca hunting seals at nightfall.

My teeth hurt at the eery, echoing, hissing snap of glaciers calving. I watched with fascination and fear as big pieces of ice crashed into the water, their rippling waves sending kayaks surfing.

I sat bundled in my warmest garments at the rear of the ship. My lonely heart’s longings drowned out by the thunderous noise of the gigantic engines and calmed by the trembling deck and churning wake.

Loneliness redefined

In a way, the relocation back home and the vacation had worked. I felt comfortable and rejuvenated enough to seek treatment and put in additional effort to keep the marriage alive. I sought my in-laws for guidance. I attempted to be(come) the wife his mother always believed he needed. Naive optimism struck again.

My counseling psychology courses put light on what I’d been feeling throughout my adolescent years: a personality disorder rooted of childhood trauma. I underwent individual therapy to mend my unseen scars.

I dove into my position as a stay-at-home parent while completing grad school and teaching yoga part-time. I purposefully sought intimacy with my husband at the advice of my new therapist and got pregnant with our second kid. right after getting our son a dog for his birthday. My life and heart were full. Overflowing, in fact.

And there was the issue.

All of my energy, attempts and emotions were greeted with even more of the same chilly avoidance I had grown to expect from my spouse.

Again, my psychology studies shed light on the experience: he has an avoidant attachment style, which includes feeling discomfort with most anything to do with emotions: emotional intimacy, engaging with his own emotions, empathizing, trusting, prioritizing others, and 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 master's, 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 were 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-wrenching 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, and 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 different virtual jobs like so many parents during spring of 2020 was like rowing a two-person canoe.

When the front and back paddlers aren’t in sync, disagreements erupt or escalate.

(They’re called divorce boats for a reason.)

One especially heated disagreement full of personal accusations highlighted exactly how out of sync my spouse and I were. I could feel myself slipping into the typical internal mess of dysregulated emotions. I was going back on the rollercoaster, ready to shield myself with wrath, 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 like I had done so many times before, I followed him, albeit this time seemed different because I could feel. I wasn’t detached. My senses were engaged. My feet connected with the soft low-pile carpet. The cartoons on the TV weren’t muted, but raucous and loud. The forms of plants in the sunlight garden were crisply outlined.

It was a moment of clarity.

A minute of dull agony.

Something had undermined my customary protective wall of wrath, leaving me susceptible to actually experience the feelings that had been hidden during the preceding nine years. Fear accelerated my pulse. Disgust wrenched my stomach. Sadness caught in my throat.

I strolled over to where my spouse sat close to our kid on the sofa. Stopped within talking distance. He peered at me sideways with an I dare you expression. He was anticipating additional friction, conflict, escalation. Then he went back to pretending to watch the animation on the TV.

In a mildly hoarse and remarkably calm voice I asked him,

“Counseling…or…mediation…?”

In retrospect, I can see that I didn’t pronounce the phrases marriage and divorce in a sort of higher knowledge that the power was in the unsaid.

He responded plainly. “Mediation.” His eyes didn’t shift from the TV.

In that moment I realized the distance between us would never be spanned. That any future attempts to overcome the remote character of our relationship and build a healthy family would be in vain. We were going toward the end of our marriage, the beginning of our divorce, a life of separate houses, custody negotiation, co-parenting practicalities, and a whole lot of uncertainty.

I responded, “Ok,” turned and walked away, left the room, and went to be alone with the storm inside of me.