This post is something that I’ve needed to get off my chest for a while. Its subject is something that I spent roughly three years wrestling with before finally, earlier this year, coming to what feels like a more settled clarity on it. That increased clarity, in turn, is probably the closest approximation that I will ever have to a true understanding of what actually happened between Jen and me. (I’ve ended up having quite a bit to say about it all, too, so I’m actually breaking this up into two separate posts; this is part one.)
The closest thing that Jen ever gave me to a cogent explanation for how she came to disengage from me/”us,” and why she ultimately chose to give up on our marriage, came in an email that she wrote to me a few weeks after our divorce became official. We had already been separated for over a year at that point, and yet, prior to this email, I understood next to nothing about what had gone so horribly wrong—or why she had been unwilling to stick around and work on fixing it with me. I had been begging her for answers for some while, but she had mostly been unable or unwilling to offer any. Then, finally, came this:
When we got married, I had a much greater deal of anxiety and depression and the accompanying insecurities and self-doubt than I realized at the time and a much more limited understanding of myself and who I would be in the future than I thought I did. I thought that the fears and insecurities and self-doubt would just always be part of who I was, to the extent that I recognized them, and I didn’t see just how much they were resulting in the chameleon effect of me just reflecting the people around me because I didn’t know how else to be. So when you and I got married, I wasn’t fully aware of how much energy and effort I was putting into adapting to your ways of doing everyday things and communicating and things like that. Over the years, though, I couldn’t maintain it and at times would completely shut down. As I gradually built up more self-confidence and self-awareness, I realized that I needed to do things differently in some cases, but I didn’t know exactly how or how or why a different way would work or be better for me.
My initial reactions to this were all over the place. First, I felt grateful that Jen had finally made what seemed like a genuine effort to look inward and then explain to me where she was coming from. Second…aspects of what she said here were not entirely new—we had had at least one conversation, a few years earlier, in which some of this stuff had come up—but she was putting it in a larger context and expressing it in a different way, and this provoked mixed emotions. On one hand, I perceived that there was at least some degree of truth to the perspective that she was espousing (in contrast to some of the blatantly self-serving nonsense that she had occasionally offered up in the past). But on the other hand, the idea that our marriage had been, on some level, unsound from the very beginning, all those years ago, felt like a knife to the heart. Had the person with whom I’d fallen in love—the partner with whom I had shared my life so fully for so many happy years—never actually existed!? Had this person, whom I had seen and understood and connected with so naturally from the very first time that we had ever talked, and with whom I had always had an almost uncanny amount in common, only ever been something like a projection of myself onto a relatively blank slate? Had Jen, unbeknownst to me, actually been miserable during what I remembered as the good years of our marriage—constantly exhausting herself by trying to be that imaginary person? These were not thoughts that sat easily with me, or that I could easily accept. They threatened to destabilize everything for me, and I would spend the next few years trying to make some kind of sense out of them.
Also, there was something (or a set of somethings) that didn’t quite add up, I quickly realized. Many months before this email, I had found myself reflecting on the fact that it was easy to identify major aspects of my life and identity that were results of Jen’s influence on me (loving tortoises and being in community band were two of the most obvious ones)—but hard to think of even a single thing of similar significance in Jen’s life that was a result of my influence. How did this observation fit with the idea that she had been “adapting to my ways” throughout our marriage? Besides, Jen had never struck me as fundamentally pliant or adaptable in any way; quite the contrary, she had had been (and had self-identified as) incredibly stubborn for as long as I’d known her (something that I had always alternately admired and found frustrating about her). In our various conflicts, as our relationship started to unravel, it had generally been only me (I had eventually come to realize) who had been expected, or willing, to make any “compromises” (scare quotes here because a true compromise, of course, would not be one-sided!), too. But that was once things were already falling apart, of course. And yet, as I had contemplated the “influence disparity” between us (and again, these thoughts went back to around eight months before the email from which I quoted above; I know, because I have some journaling that I did about it at the time), I’d found myself wondering: Had Jen, in some sense, never truly “let me in,” or been open to being changed by me, to at all the same degree that I had willingly allowed myself to change in response to her? In fact, I went even further in my journal writing at the time (I’d forgotten some of this until just now when I went back and read it). “It seems like it was never really ‘okay’ with Jen for me not to adopt her passions and interests as my own,” I wrote, “while at the same time, she rarely adopted any of mine to any significant degree.” I was particularly comparing Jen’s increasingly obsessive absorption with both skiing and running over the years against various hobbies of my own. “Looking back now, it kind of seems like for a long time, I have been relentlessly pressured to invest myself in any of her passions that I didn’t just naturally take to, no matter how many times or in how many ways I tried to explain that I wasn’t able to do so, all while she has pretty much just flat-out proclaimed disinterest in many of my passions in a way that brooked no argument.” In 2016, when I journaled about this, I wondered what it meant; “now,” in 2017, I also struggled to reconcile it with Jen’s perception that she had spent the entirety of our marriage molding herself in my image, or whatever.
Mulling over these matters in an email that I wrote to her, I raised an important question about “where the line is between being genuinely influenced/changed as a result of your interactions with another person, vs. struggling to accommodate and adapt to that person.”
Presumably, the latter is a superficial change—you behave in certain ways even though it doesn’t come naturally or isn’t your preference, in order to please the other person—whereas the former is about learning and growing because another person helps you to discover and develop new things about yourself. Most relationships will involve some of both of these kinds of scenarios. You try new things at the urging of the other person, or agree to compromises or different approaches to things in deference to that person’s preferences, or whatever—and some of these new things “take” with you, while others remain things that you will only do (if you’ll do them at all) for the sake of the other person and/or the relationship. And of course, the line between the former and the latter is somewhat fuzzy. You might, for instance, participate with someone in an activity that they enjoy but that you would not have chosen to participate in on your own, and in doing so, you might discover some value in that activity—but it might still remain something that you mostly wouldn’t choose on your own. For instance, for me, skiing was like this. It’s not as though going skiing with you from time to time was some kind of big sacrifice or accommodation on my part; I enjoyed it most of the time. Still, on my own, I don’t tend to choose skiing over other activities.
Making accommodations of any kind for another person—whether it be putting up with ways of arranging day-to-day household things that don’t suit you, or engaging in activities that don’t initially seem interesting to you, or whatever—requires some degree of openness and flexibility. But I wonder if there isn’t a sort of paradoxical relationship between where something falls on this continuum between “chameleon-ing” vs. really changing/growing, on one hand, and how much flexibility and openness is required, on the other. Because, on the one hand, if I introduce you to something new, and you really take to it, and it leads you to discover/develop a genuine interest of your own in it, then you don’t have to continue being “flexible” or expending emotional energy trying to “adapt.” That’s the obvious side of the equation. But on the other hand, getting to that point may require a level of genuine openness to new things, and to letting those new things change you, that is, in a way, more demanding (and maybe even, in some circumstances, threatening) than the kind of flexibility required to merely compromise, or adapt, or go along with things because the other person wants to do them.
And this, then, leads me back to the question of what our relationship really meant to each of us, respectively. Is it possible, I ask myself, that—despite how things seemed to me—there’s a sense in which you never really, in all our years together, “let me in,” or opened yourself up to the possibility of genuinely being changed by anything about me that didn’t, in itself, already “agree” with you? And if so, could that be part of why our relationship had such a high “emotional cost” for you, and why you had to expend so much energy adapting and accommodating and compromising? Could this, in fact, be the other side of the coin to all the chameleon-ing? Was it always a case of “go along with everything, but remain aloof from the possibility of anything actually impacting who I am”? And could this, then, be why, in the end, you were so willing to shrug off our relationship when it got difficult, whereas I am still struggling to figure out how to even understand myself and my life without you? Because, in effect, you never really allowed me and our relationship to become part of who you are in the way that I did? It/I just didn’t matter to you the way it/you did to me?
Although Jen did respond, in a limited way, to some of the questions that I raised in that email, she didn’t really dig into the meat of them, or express clear agreement or disagreement with the interpretation of things that I was exploring. Our email dialogue didn’t continue much beyond this point, either. Time passed, and I continued to ponder and question and obsess over the notion of Jen having possibly been a “chameleon” throughout our years together, filling the gaps in her own shaky sense of self by adopting bits of my identity and letting me, by default, be the one to order and define our lives. One thing that did occur to me was that, at a very early point, my friend group had become our friend group, and Jen had allowed herself to lose touch with all of her own pre-college friends. Was this an example of what she meant? Apart from this, the only senses in which I could at all see Jen as having “adapted” to me concerned matters that I tended to frame quite differently: I was the one who had always established most of our household routines, organized things and decided “where things went” in our home, made sure chores got done, managed our finances, did most of the planning and the packing when we went on trips, and on and on. I had done all of this, of course, not because I was a control freak, or out of some desire to be the dominant member of our partnership, but because Jen wouldn’t do any of it. This inequality in our respective contributions to the work of managing our lives was an enormous source of resentment and frustration for me, and it grew decidedly worse in the last few years of our marriage—both because Jen became less and less willing to contribute, and because I (maybe because I had gone back to school while still working full time, and was juggling all of that on top of household stuff now) became less and less tolerant of it. Jen had specifically talked, in her email, about conflicts that we had had over how, when, and by whom laundry would get done, as an example of how she had come to feel stuck and unable to function within my “systems and ways of doing things,” so I was not off-base in perceiving that these kinds of things were part of what she meant when she talked about “adapting to my ways”—but from my point of view, these matters were not best characterized as me deciding everything, or everything being done “my way”; they were, rather, about Jen not pulling her weight, and me increasingly letting her take advantage of me. And on top of that, there was that stubborn streak that I already mentioned, which asserted itself any time my “ways” really didn’t sit well with Jen—and meant that, even while doing most of the work of ordering our everyday life myself, I still had to accommodate her preferences, which could sometimes be ludicrously rigid and inflexible!
Throwing me into even more confusion, Jen seemed to change her mind, in the final email that she wrote to me as part of the exchange in which she had put forth the “adapting to my ways” narrative, about what she even meant by it. I had tried to engage with some what what she had said about our laundry conflicts and etc., defending my own point of view; in response, she now said: “I don’t really think that going through motions with things like cleaning and organization are part of the chameleon effect, though. I think of that as more focusing on and expressing parts of my identity that are more consistent with you and what you value and suppressing parts of my identity that are not.” Her main example for this called back to the fact that, in the first few years of our relationship, after I had responded with disinterest to a suggestion or two from her that we should go downhill skiing together (an activity with which I had zero experience and that didn’t really appeal to me), she had given up, and had not even gone skiing herself, post-high-shcool, until another friend pushed hard for a group of us to go together a few years later. And, yes, it was true that this had happened. To me, it seemed like focusing on the two or three years way back in the 90s when she had “given up” skiing after failing, via a token effort, to get me interested in doing it with her—and brushing aside the subsequent 18 or so years of her becoming more and more obsessed with skiing, and constantly prioritizing it ahead of practically everything else—was a case of grossly misplaced emphasis…but, I dunno. The way that she had experienced the first part, I supposed, had perhaps shaped her perceptions in a way that subsequent realities never managed to override. She pointed to one other example, too, of a time years ago when she had been reluctant to embrace a new interest (crocheting) until she was sure of my “approval,” but this one was even less convincing to me. I recalled that what she was talking about had indeed happened, but it had been a matter of a conversation or two over the course of a few days, and both of us adjusting our thinking a little bit. To me, in fact, it represented a success story—a time when we had processed her individual growth and change together, rather than letting it pull us apart. I could think of parallel examples where I, too, had felt weird now and then about wanting to evolve in a direction that felt slightly at odds with what I perceived as values or preferences that we had shared in the past, until we had talked about the matter and had processed it together. That was what was supposed to happen, wasn’t it? It seems natural enough to feel some amount of pressure not to evolve in directions that your partner might not understand or like—and, in fact, I always say that marriage vows imply an agreement to strive, through communication and mutual accommodation, to grow together rather than growing apart—but if a little bit of conversation, honest listening, and empathy are all it takes to resolve the tension, then you’re doing it exactly right, to my mind! So, anyway, I had ended our email exchange feeling profoundly uncertain how to understand what Jen had said about “adapting” to me: what she meant or didn’t mean, whether it was accurate, whether it was fair, etc.
A little over a year later, and with the benefit of many conversations both with friends and with my therapist, I took a significant step forward in coming to terms with these questions when it occurred to me that Jen’s narrative about having spent the whole of our marriage adapting to “fit” with me was just that: a narrative. I had been going around in circles for months, wanting to dismiss it as bullshit but afraid that this impulse was merely self-serving and egocentric, and unable to discount the possibility that there might be truth to it that I wasn’t willing to see. But in a bit of an epiphany that came while ruminating on things during my road trip to the Grand Canyon in June of 2018, I realized (owing a debt to past comments on other subjects by two different friends) that I didn’t need to either dismiss Jen’s narrative as nonsense or accept it as true, because it didn’t consist of assertions of fact. It was a story that she was telling herself—an interpretive framework and a set of value judgements build around selected facts, for the purpose of making sense of her own experiences and behavior. As such, it may well have accurately reflected her retrospective feelings about and assessment of our marriage, without necessarily implying a need to revise my own. Here is an excerpt from another bit of journaling that I did, a few weeks later, in which I recorded my thoughts:
After all, how much self-knowledge is “enough” to warrant entering into a marriage? And to what degree is it okay, or not okay, to allow being married to someone to change you? There is no clear-cut, “factual” answer to these questions. What does seem clear is that Jen answered them for herself in one way years ago, and is answering them in another way now. And I can acknowledge the factual underpinnings of her observations, without it meaning that I necessarily have to agree with her (current) interpretation of them—i.e., with the answers that she is giving, or the story that she is telling, in the present. These things are subjective, after all.
Furthermore, even if I were to buy into this story, it doesn’t actually follow that our entire marriage was somehow a mistake. We don’t, after all, know what alternative scenario might have unfolded had we not gotten married, so there’s no basis for comparison. The fear that leaps to my mind, of course, is that she now thinks that she would have achieved a degree of self-realization, and been happier, years earlier, had she been on her own rather than yoked to me. But not only is there absolutely no way to know if that’s remotely true—there isn’t even a reasonable basis for the assumption that she would have been “on her own” had we not married. We simply don’t know what things would have looked like in this imagined alternate history. In short, it’s a perfectly plausible story (equally as much so as hers) to suppose that, whatever her faults of self-knowledge or whatever at the age of 20, our getting married when we did was still the best choice for both of us (which, of course, is the story that I tell myself).
These, I think, were crucial insights. Certainly they were incredibly helpful for me, because they enabled me to let go of my anxiety over whether our whole marriage had maybe somehow been a lie, without feeling like I was just dismissing out of hand what Jen claimed were the reasons why she had checked out of it. And I still think that there was a lot of wisdom in the point of view that I came to here. Still, this didn’t represent the end of my struggle to wrap my head around Jen’s “chameleon” narrative. Even as I was working out these new ideas in my journal writing, in fact, I was already pushing past them a little. I wanted to understand why Jen was telling herself this particular story; what function did it serve for her? An answer that I found immediately attractive (paraphrasing here from my own journal writing) was that focusing on perceived shortcomings in her past self was a way for her to deflect attention from her present shortcomings. “Specifically, she reframes the whole marriage for herself in order to rationalize, and avoid facing, the fact that when difficulties arose in what had for years and years been a good marriage—when, in other words, it became hard work—she fucking threw in the towel, gave up, and ran away, rather than finding it in herself to (in equal partnership with me, of course) recommit, do the hard work, and find a way through the difficulties.” But even as I wrote this, I recognized it as a story that I was telling myself, and that, naturally, reflected my biases and my value judgements. And I wasn’t quite sure how to deal with that recognition; it was fine, to a point, to talk about different framings and competing narratives, but there was also a level on which all of this was profoundly unsatisfying, and didn’t speak to the raw, wounded, angry feelings that lay beneath all the philosophizing. So I had made progress, and I felt less distress concerning this subject than I previously had, but I still fell short of really feeling settled in my own understanding about it all.
(To be continued…)