Chasing a Chameleon: Post-Mortem of a Marriage (Part II)

(This post picks up where the previous one left off, still on the subject of my efforts, in the years following Jen’s and my divorce, to grapple with her claim that she had spent decades “adapting to my ways,” until ultimately she had needed to leave so that she could discover her own “ways.” I ended part one talking about a partial epiphany that I had in the summer of 2018, but how I still felt unsatisfied and unsettled about the whole thing even with the insights that I had gained.)

Fast-forwarding roughly eight months: In the late winter or so of 2019, I found myself sliding into a bit of a depression, despite the fact that the past year had been a pretty good one, in which my post-divorce life had stabilized and improved a lot. When I noticed my thoughts starting to dwell more, again, on what had happened between Jen and me, what it meant, and how to move forward from it, I took two main steps to try to deal with this: One, I resumed going to therapy—and two, I decided to write a detailed account of the year (2015) in which our marriage had unraveled. I wrote this not for anyone else to read, but for my own benefit (and indeed, at 279 pages by the time I finished it about a year later, my “2015 story” would doubtless exhaust the interest and patience of almost any prospective reader long before they reached its end). I just needed to revisit the events of that year—to recapture the full context of individual memories, to retrospectively assess my own thoughts and feelings and actions, and to try to make meaning out of a period of time about which I had a lot of intense and unresolved feelings. In the end, my writing project was enormously beneficial in helping me to adjust my thinking about lots of things—the topic at hand very much included.

In essence, Jen’s “adapting” narrative amounts to a claim that she never really figured out how to balance “being herself” with being married to me. Supposedly, she came to feel overwhelmed, and ended up checking out, because of a mismatch between the way that she was living and her “true self.” After taking the mental journey back to 2015, though, and recalling in detail all the things that actually happened between us (then and earlier), I no longer give this notion any credence at all. It gestures, I think, in the vague direction of the truth, but doesn’t capture it remotely accurately. What I think, rather, is that Jen never figured out how to engage with me, emotionally, at any level other than either 100% or 0%. But the problem wasn’t that she “couldn’t sustain” the 100%. Quite the opposite, actually! It was more that she realized, eventually, that she couldn’t have 100% engagement—that I, like anyone, could not possibly, alone, fulfill all of her needs, or be absolutely everything to her. I think that, on some unconscious level, Jen had felt threatened enough by the emerging differences between us from the very beginning (going all the way back to when she started really getting into skiing again) that her instinctive response had been to push and push for me to adopt her obsessions along with her (as I mentioned in part one of this post)—and that when that didn’t work, she ultimately (and just as unconsciously) reacted by de-investing in our relationship and pouring herself wholly into those obsessions, unable to find any middle ground. Not being able to fully share everything that mattered to her with me morphed into not being able to share anything that mattered to her.

And so, Jen let herself grow apart from me over time—and, displaying an astonishing lack of self-awareness, she managed to do so without even noticing it. When I began sensing it, and trying to talk about how I felt like we were finding less time to really connect, or like spending time together was becoming less of a priority for her, she would just dismiss my concerns. But finally, in 2015, she began to recognize what had happened. By that time, though, she found that she didn’t really care anymore; the de-investment was too complete to be reversed. After that, she began cherry-picking various unconnected events and remembered feelings from among the totality of our two-decade-plus relationship and cobbling them together into a narrative designed to explain away her own unconscious torpedoing of our relationship. This didn’t immediately give rise to the “adapting” narrative; that didn’t surface until later. In fact, one of her earlier explanatory forays may actually have been closer to the truth. In the summer of 2015, Jen once suggested to me that her de-investing in “us” could be traced to a period of a few months, eight years earlier, when I had been too busy with a really hard class that I was taking to have time to spend with her (!). Realizing that she was too dependent on me, she claimed, she had started looking for other ways to get her needs met, and had ultimately swung too far in the opposite direction. She was grasping at straws here, and plenty of things were ridiculous about this claim…and yet, it does track perfectly with the interpretation that I outlined in the paragraph above. At some point, though, Jen seemingly reinterpreted her remembered frustration around not being able to make me adapt, as having been about her being forced to choose between either adapting or asserting herself (ignoring, apparently, the fact that if so, she had clearly chosen the latter course years ago).

What made these mental gymnastics possible, I think, was the fact that by 2015, she genuinely had come to feel exhausted and overwhelmed by the demands that our relationship placed on her. But this was a result (not the cause) of her disengagement. She had simply de-invested in our marriage so thoroughly by this point that she now experienced any demands or obligations that I (or our relationship) placed on her as resented burdens. She could no longer attach importance to my wants or needs or feelings if they made any kind of claim on her that detracted from her own selfish wants; thus, any pressure to do so felt, to her, like pressure to “adapt.” The result of this, ironically, was that Jen actually became utterly and inflexibly unwilling to adapt or compromise, or just ever to give anything, in our relationship—while at the same time demanding ever-escalating sacrifices and compromises from me. I was blown away by the extent and the egregiousness of this pattern when I revisited our final year(s) together in detail. So, at the admittedly considerable risk of this post devolving into a one-sided re-litigation of old arguments, I want to go into a handful of examples here (drawing heavily on my writings about 2015) that illustrate the pattern.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the pattern that I’m talking about actually goes back further than just 2015. I have a sort of letter that I wrote to Jen all the way back in 2013, talking about some then-recent conflicts that we had had around household and everyday responsibilities—and it’s pretty illuminating. In it, I (among other things) discuss several incidents in which one of us had “failed” the other in some way, and the very different ways we’d each reacted. When Jen, for the umpteenth time, had left her things in a big heap near the back door rather than putting them away (per a solution that we had mutually agreed to), I calmly brought it to her attention and asked if our solution wasn’t working for her. In response, Jen blew off my concern and said that if I wanted her stuff put away, I could do it myself. But when I forgot to pick something up at the grocery store that she wanted, Jen snapped angrily at me and coldly demanded that I rectify the situation. I did not, in turn, respond by telling her she could do it herself (!). I also didn’t mention that I had gone to great effort in order to be sure we were stocked up on another item that she’d wanted, even though our regular grocery store had been out of it—nor did I “mention that even though I am in school and have lots of homework and no time for my own interests and priorities, I took the time during my weekend to do the grocery shopping (and take out the garbage & recyclables, and load, run, and unload the dishwasher, etc.), whereas you didn’t even manage to get the remainder of the previous weekend’s laundry put away during your weekend.” Similarly, there had also been a recent incident in which I had made dinner but forgotten to cook a squash that she wanted with hers, and she had “stomped around and responded to me as though the situation were a total disaster,” rejecting my sincere apologies and my efforts to ameliorate the situation as meaningless. And in general, I related, “when you ask me favors, your tone is often such that I don’t really perceive declining to be an option, even if I’m in the middle of doing something else,” whereas “when I ask similar favors, I often get the response that you’re busy and I’ll have to wait.” Upon revisiting all of this, the blatant inequality that had somehow become normal in our relationship just seems breathtaking. As early as November of 2013, I was carrying so much for Jen—single-handedly keeping our household together so that she could spend her time flaking out and doing whatever the fuck she wanted—yet when I slipped up in any way at all, it was the end of the fucking world, and I had damn well better fix it pronto. Jen, meanwhile, seemed to feel entitled to just shrug off things that she had explicitly agreed to, and if I didn’t like it, I could do them myself. (“Adapting to my ways”!?)

The tensions around laundry that Jen referenced in her email about “adapting” (even if she later seemingly took this back as a relevant example) also illustrate the pattern. For a time, as one measure to try to make the balance of responsibilities more equal between us, we had tried making laundry “her job.” Alas, the outcome had been that laundry got done on a highly erratic schedule if at all, and almost never got put away after coming out of the dryer (instead sitting perpetually in baskets on the floor in our bedroom—with the baskets typically placed in the narrow walkway between the wall and my side of the bed, where I would trip over them in the dark and hurt myself). Or, if it did get put away, my preferences for how my clothes should be put away were ignored. Eventually, I got so fed up that I went back to just doing the laundry myself. Jen later cited these events in support of her bogus narrative: even when laundry became “her job,” I couldn’t relinquish control and let her find her own way of doing it; I had to insist that she do it “my way.” But this ignored the fact that Jen had plenty of specific requirements for how to treat her clothes, which she insisted on me adhering to when I did the laundry. When Jen took over the task, she rigidly insisted on doing it “her way” without showing any regard for my needs and preferences, even though I had always done my best to accommodate hers. Only her needs mattered, it seemed. So, again—who was “adapting” to whose “ways,” here? My expectations were merely for Jen to match me in engaging in the ordinary, two-way accommodation required in any relationship. But, as I observed above, she had become unwilling by this point to make such compromises—about anything, ever—so she experienced any pressure to alter her behavior in order to accommodate my needs as an unacceptable demand that she “adapt to me.”

I also often perceived that, of the two of us, only Jen was allowed to “have issues,” as it were. I was expected to be sensitive and accommodating in regard to the legacies of Jen’s various childhood traumas and other struggles (and for the most part, I think that I generally was). But it seemed like I was not extended the same courtesy—not allowed to have my own irrational hangups, or just to struggle and fall short sometimes and have that be accepted and okay. One of the clearest examples of this relates to tensions that developed between us around Jen’s marathon-running. Jen sometimes expressed hurt and resentment about me not being very “supportive” of these endeavors. This wasn’t quite fair, in my view (as I’ll get to), but she wasn’t entirely wrong about it, either; it’s something that I struggled with, and that I wish, looking back, that I could have found a better way to handle. And yet, could she not have extended to me, here, the same forbearance that I typically showed with regard to the things that she struggled with? Because the fact is that even accepting—much less being enthusiastic or supportive around—marathon running, was really hard for me, in ways that had everything to do with childhood traumas and lingering resentments and insecurities of my own. Yet not only was I expected to be “supportive” of Jen’s involvement in it; I was constantly badgered by others about why I wasn’t participating in it myself! This part wasn’t Jen’s fault, except to the extent that she had sometimes pressured me herself, and/or failed to call others out for it. But neither I, nor anyone else, ever pressured Jen to adopt any hobby or interest of mine (programming, gardening, etc.) that she didn’t take to on her own—yet when Jen’s running would come up in conversation, people would frequently turn to me and ask when I was going to start running races, as though Jen being into it constituted some sort of example that I naturally ought to emulate. Remember, though: the story of our marriage, allegedly, was one of Jen constantly struggling to adapt, like a chameleon, to fit with me.

Also, there was the issue that Jen’s running obsession became a priority for her on a level that left me, and our relationship, feeling distinctly secondary much of the time. When I was feeling neglected and unimportant to Jen because of her athletic obsessions constantly taking precedence over “us” time, it was hard to muster up the emotional resilience to “be supportive” of those same athletic obsessions. (Again, notice which of us was being pushed to “adapt” to the other here.) Just how much of a doormat was I expected to be, anyway? And on top of that, it occurred to me at some point to ask: Hey, wait a minute! When I routinely pick up the slack with regard to household chores because Jen is “too busy” with her marathon training & etc. to have the time or energy to do her share…how the hell is that not “supporting” her running hobby?!

In our over twenty years together, Jen and I almost never fought about money—but in the winter of 2015, when Jen unilaterally decided that she was going on a ski trip out west with some friends and didn’t even check in with me first about whether or not we could afford this, that changed. It wasn’t that I specifically thought we couldn’t afford it, even; it was just that our marriage had always been—economically, as in all other ways—-a partnership, in which major decisions were expected to be made jointly. But when I brought this up, Jen got really defensive. She interpreted my expectation of having some say in the matter as tantamount to a demand for veto power, and she seemed unable or unwilling to hear that this wasn’t what I wanted—or that there even was any other possible meaning of me “having input.” I pointed out that, even if I were trying to exercise a “veto power,” this wouldn’t be any different from what she actually was doing: i.e., assuming that she had the right to decide the matter unilaterally. I pointed out that our long-standing practice of checking with each other before incurring large expenses necessarily implied a process of negotiation in which neither person had absolute, sole deciding rights; instead, the hope was that we could work together to figure out what we could afford, and arrive at a consensus decision that we would both be happy with. In short, rather than either focusing on financial concerns or obsessing over who had the “right” or the “power” to decide what, my entire focus in this argument had to do with relationship dynamics: maintaining a harmonious and equal partnership, being able to reach decisions together. Hadn’t that always been the most important thing, for both of us? But somehow, in Jen’s mind, it could only be a straight-up power struggle; did she “get to” go on her trip (whether I wanted her to or not), or did I “get to” unilaterally deny it to her? I had often perceived, in recent years, that Jen was increasingly assuming/demanding an unequal share of the power in our relationship, but Jen tended to dispute this, and even to assert that the reverse was true. What I think this ski trip argument makes clear (at least in retrospect), though, is that if Jen felt powerless, it was only because she had come to equate having anything less than total power with having none at all—just like she experienced any pressure to accommodate me in any way as a demand that she one-sidedly adapt to my ways, and just like how, realizing that she couldn’t get all of her needs met by me, she ultimately distanced herself from seeking the fulfillment of any of her needs via our relationship. All or nothing; there was no in-between, for her.

When I wrote about this in my 2015 story, it reminded me of a particular type of very petty and stupid argument that Jen and I had numerous times in the later years of our marriage. It would start with one of us mishearing something said by the other, or one of us misspeaking without realizing it—so that there was a disagreement about what had been said (one person asserting that the other misspoke, the other certain that the first had misheard). As dumb and inconsequential as such disagreements were, it could be hard to let them go when they flared up, as neither of us wanted to admit that we were wrong. However, there would generally come a point when I would try to extend an olive branch by saying that while I still felt certain of my own perception, I recognized that she was equally certain of hers—and since one of us had to be wrong despite our certainty, I could accept the possibility that I might be that one. What I wanted, of course, was for Jen to return the gesture, so that we could dismiss the incident as unimportant and move on without either of us having to “lose”—but infuriatingly, Jen would never do this. Instead, she would either try to take my gesture as a concession that I was the wrong one, or—when I wouldn’t stand for that—refuse to see it as genuine at all, or as anything other than a ploy to get her to surrender. The dynamic here seems similar to the one at work in the ski trip argument; I pivoted to trying to preserve our relationship, by making room for us to each acknowledge the other’s perceived reality without either of us having to let go of our own—but for Jen, giving an inch somehow felt tantamount to total surrender. She would seem unable to see that all I was asking of her was to allow as much I as myself had allowed—to meet me halfway, for the sake of harmony and equality between us, while being free to still think that her perception was the accurate one (even as I still thought that mine was).

In short, it seems to me that somewhere along the line, something had just broken in Jen, leaving her unwilling to give virtually anything in our relationship: she couldn’t compromise, couldn’t make allowances for my shortcomings, couldn’t acknowledge her own, couldn’t do her share of the work, and increasingly, she couldn’t even make time for me. And so, because she couldn’t bring herself to do any of these things—but also couldn’t just own her changed feelings—she convinced herself that “giving” meant one-sidedly “adapting,” like a chameleon, and having no solid self of her own. That, in fact, it had always meant this, and thus that her present unwillingness to do these things represented growth. It couldn’t be that she had changed, and failed to prioritize keeping her marriage intact along the way (while dismissing, for years, my concerns that this exact thing might be happening). No, it was that she had been “adapting” and “chameleoning” all along, because she hadn’t known “how else to be”—and now, she was going to try something else. She needed independence so that she could figure out her own “ways.” For her, this was a convenient fiction in which to wrap uncomfortable truths about herself. For me, of course, it was hurtful and confusing and devastating.

The other bit of truth that I continue to see lurking in what she said in the email that started this whole thing off doesn’t actually have anything to do with her “adapting” to me. Because, here’s the thing: Jen absolutely did lack self-knowledge, and did have far more profound “insecurities and self-doubts” than I think either of us typically recognized. At age twenty, Jen had no idea how to be an adult—her own, functioning, independent person in the world—and even by forty, she hadn’t made much progress in figuring it out. I say this not be harsh; I mean, we all have insecurities, and who among us (at any age) doesn’t sometimes feel inadequate to the realities of adulting? But when we got married, I clearly felt more equal to these challenges than Jen did. So I got busy with the process of ordering our lives—developing systems and routines that worked for me and enabled me/us to function in the word—while Jen…coasted, in many ways, because as long as I took care of things for the two of us, nothing forced her to confront those things herself. Note that this has nothing to do with her “expressing parts of my identity that are more consistent with you and what you value and suppressing parts of my identity that are not”; nothing to do with her changing interests and priorities, and the strife that they eventually introduced into our relationship. It’s entirely about mundane responsibilities—the “ways of doing everyday things” that Jen had focused on the first time she wrote to me about “adapting,” but then denied the relevance of after I tried to engage her in further discussion about them. Things like grocery shopping, and packing for trips, and organizing a household, and taking out the trash in time for it to be collected, and keeping track of bills and expense, and preparing meals. To this day, I half-wonder whether, at the end of the day, what actually, finally ended Jen and me might have boiled down mainly to me no longer being able to sustain managing 90% of all this stuff for the two of us on my own (because of going back to school to become a teacher while also still working full-time), and thus putting increased pressure on her to actually contribute. When writing, in my 2015 story, about that incident in which I had neglected to buy a grocery item that Jen wanted and she had gone ballistic about it, it occurred to me to add this extended parenthetical:

(It bears mentioning that if Jen had ever had to do the grocery shopping on her own—without the benefit of a list prepared for her by me, I mean—the number of neglected items would have been staggering; there was no way she could have been bothered to keep track, on her own initiative, of the various things that I wanted or needed, or to spend time going through the kitchen and making a detailed list before setting out, etc. Yet she took it for granted that I would do all this for her (keeping up, in the process, with all her constantly evolving food preferences & etc.), to the point of throwing a tantrum over one mistake…)

Again my point here is that the real dynamic between us, which Jen grossly misconstrued as involving her struggling to adapt to me, was actually more about me providing cover that kept her from ever having to adapt. I saw this, too, when I came to write about the weeks leading up to Christmas 2015. We had decided to separate as soon as we could work out the logistics; in the meantime, we had to figure out what to tell our families—and how to handle the coming holidays. And Jen, for good or ill, chose to leave these decisions up to me. This, I noted in writing the story, “reflected the long-standing relationship dynamic in which Jen would tend to abdicate responsibility and leave stuff up to me (the very dynamic that she would later distort in suggesting that she had been ‘adapting’ to me through the years).” And as chance would have it, the holidays were also the subject of a comment that Jen made to me a couple years later that pretty explicitly acknowledged the point that I’m making here. This was in the late winter or early spring of 2018, at a time when I was exploring whether or not I wanted to try to keep Jen in my life in any way, post-divorce. We met up and were just having a conversation, and at one point, she remarked—looking back a few months toward the most recent holiday season—that she was realizing, since our split, just how much she had been shielded from having to deal with “holiday stress” during all of our years together, because I had handled so much of it for us (finding the kinds of things that she had in mind, myself, mostly fun rather than stressful). I scarcely knew how to respond to this, so I opted to say very little. But wasn’t this her all but admitting that her chameleon narrative was nonsense, and that she had actually had things easier (not harder) because I took the initiative in ordering and managing our lives?

So, okay, I think I’ve said my piece at this point. I began this entry (well, actually the previous entry, of which this present one is “part two”) with the remark that it was about some stuff that I have “needed to get off my chest”—and, having written it, I feel like I really have done that. In fact, I find myself starting to feel like, having written this, I might just be done dwelling on and writing about the disintegration of my marriage, and my feelings about it. I mused in the intro blurb that I put on the front page of this blog that I would do well to guard against the possibility that writing and posting about this stuff now and into the future might actually do more harm than good, in that it could serve to keep me wallowing unnecessarily in stuff that I would otherwise be ready to move on from. Thus far, I think, it has merely provided an outlet for stuff that has been on my mind anyway, and that I’ve wanted to sort out and set down down somewhere in a coherent way (and where others might potentially read it). But I may now be reaching the point at which continuing to find stuff to dredge up and write about would cross that line into unhelpful stuckness. That doesn’t mean there will be no more blog entries, but it does mean that future ones will probably be less about dwelling on what went wrong and how awful it is, and more about either setting down positive memories, or working through more “current” issues and feelings. (After all, my marriage itself ended several years ago at this point—but figuring out life post-divorce remains an ongoing project!)