It should surprise no one for me to say that, since my marriage fell apart, I’ve been angry at Jen for giving up on it, blowing up our lives, and abandoning me. It’s been four or five years now (depending on what end point I’m counting from), but I’m still angry. Sure, the intensity of my anger has lessened with time, and the frequency with which it occupies my thoughts has decreased even more. I’m not a seething cauldron of rage; my anger doesn’t render me dysfunctional, or prevent me from ever being cheerful, or from trying to move on with my life. But it’s still very much there—and I don’t foresee that changing any time soon.
For a time, a couple years back, I felt like the appropriate thing for me to do was to try, however gradually, to purge myself of this anger. To try to forgive Jen. But here’s the thing: I was wrong. I needed to make peace with my anger, not let go of it. (She never put it in these words, but it strikes me in retrospect that everything my therapist said to me when I was struggling with this pointed in this direction.) I mean, sure, I’m very glad that I’m no longer as angry as I was, say, for most of 2017…but paradoxically, I think that one of my biggest steps toward recovering from the blow that was our divorce came when I released myself from any obligation to forgive Jen. The notion that I ought to do so had, after all, been born mostly out of misplaced guilt: It’s not okay to be mad forever at this person whom I loved so much. When you’re mad at someone, you’re eventually supposed to forgive them. I’m being petty. Anger at Jen is my way of hiding from my own role in what happened—whatever that may have been. But this last notion, in particular, was not actually true. The fact is that before, during, and after our final split, I had spent plenty of time and energy worrying about and trying to address any shortcomings that I could identify in myself as a spouse. But it didn’t matter, because whatever our marital troubles and regardless of my part in them, Jen had at some point committed the cardinal sin in any marriage: she had stopped trying. After more than twenty years together, she violated her most fundamental promises to me and discarded me and our relationship like so much trash—for reasons (?) that she was never able to communicate clearly to me, in a manner that was rarely very honest or respectful, and definitely without making any effort first to work through, together with me, whatever had gone so wrong for her. And as far as I know, she still sees no real problem with her behavior, but rather understands it as something that she needed to do and regrets nothing about it. How could I possibly not be angry?
There is, though, a seemingly ubiquitous point of view—a horribly jaded but superficially sophisticated-sounding piece of modern conventional wisdom, if you will—that would have it that I’m being unreasonable here. I encounter this kind of thinking everywhere: from friends and acquaintances, in movies and TV shows, in articles that I read online. Marriage is hard, this point of view assures me. Look at the divorce rate, after all. Sharing everything with one other person—living space, finances, daily routines—and sustaining an intimacy with, and excitement about, that person, over a period of decades, is next to impossible. When the specific subject under discussion concerns people who married young, as Jen and I certainly did, it’s even worse. You/we/they were just kids! No one has any idea at age 20 about who they’re going to be, or what they’re going to want, at 25 or 30 or 40. From this point of view, for Jen to have fallen out of love with me over time was, more or less, only natural. This is just what happens as people mature out of the rashness and naivete of their youth. It’s regrettable, perhaps, but it’s not really anyone’s fault. When married couples do stay together for life, it’s probably more out of obligation or inertia than actual desire. Lots of married people are miserable, but cling irrationally to to their belief that marriage has to be permanent and thus never consider ending it. I should be glad, these voices suggest, to have escaped such a fate. Presumably, Jen simply reached a point where her self-actualization required moving on without me; I should accept that, and try to embrace my own newfound freedom.
In a word: Bullshit.
Look, obviously no one sort of experience is universal—and not all troubled marriages can, or even should, be saved. Some people absolutely do marry rashly or choose incompatible partners. (Indeed, some people wind up in marriages with overtly abusive partners. I would hate for anything that I say here to be read as suggesting that those people, especially, have any kind of obligation to “try harder” or make their marriages work.) But there are also thousands and thousands of people who stay happily married for life. Many of these people, too, married just as young as Jen and I did. My own parents were almost exactly the same age when they got married as Jen and I were when we did. To dismiss all happy couples whose marriages endure (as intended) throughout their lifetimes on some arrogant presumption that they must be “settling” at best (or miserable, at worst) strikes me as beyond ridiculous. Besides…you know what? Okay, yes, obviously my marriage ultimately tanked; at some point, for sure, what had previously worked between us stopped working. But before that happened, it had “worked” for over fifteen years—and during those years, I would not have agreed, if asked, that sustaining a happy marriage over time was so very difficult. It was not at all my experience that our intimacy inevitably waned as the years passed; rather, I felt it deepening. And while I won’t dispute that there is a certain audacity inherent in making lifelong commitments at a young age, it doesn’t seem to me that most people are any more self-aware by 30 or 40 than they were at 20. I would suggest, in fact, that the kind of thinking that I am criticizing here exists, in part, to permit people to rationalize and justify relationship-ending decisions in their 30s or 40s or 50s that are delusional, selfish, and short-sighted in exactly the same ways that they retrospectively reassess their younger selves’ decisions to get married in the first place as having been. A saner outlook would acknowledge that, sure, no one (at any age) can reliably predict how they will grow and change over time. But any reasonably thoughtful person, who is sufficiently dedicated to self-awareness, honesty, and genuine engagement with a person whom they actually love and are (currently) compatible with, ought to be able to make, and follow through on, a commitment to nurture that compatibility over time, and to monitor and guide their own growth and change in ways that continue to prioritize it. The real “work” of a marriage isn’t about making soul-crushing compromises, or struggling not to let familiarity erode passion and enthusiasm, or learning to “settle,” or any of that nonsense: it’s work on yourself, in partnership with another person who is doing parallel work.
So, no, I don’t forgive Jen for allowing herself to drift unconsciously through her life (all the while talking a good game about her dedication and commitment both to self-knowledge and to us) and then eventually succumbing to some bullshit midlife crisis in which her every major life choice was suddenly to be revisited, and her most sacred commitments to be regarded as disposable. Outside of certain extreme circumstances, I don’t accept that giving up and bailing on one’s marriage without even trying to save it, even if it has become difficult, is particularly forgivable (absent remorse about it, at least). I believe that personal growth and self-actualization rarely (not never, but rarely) require discarding and abandoning the person you love, and with whom you have intimately shared decades of your life—and I am deeply, profoundly disappointed in (and furious with) Jen, for adopting the facile view that hers did require doing this. These feelings, as I said, have dulled over time, and I imagine that they will continue to do so. Someday, maybe, they will even fade to the point of insignificance, as my life moves onward in whatever directions the future has in store. I could imagine myself potentially coming, eventually, to look upon it more or less the way I look back on being “dumped” by my first girlfriend, years ago: I don’t know that I ever really “forgave” her for how she treated me, per se, but there came a point (long ago) when it just no longer mattered to me. Whether something similar can happen with my hurt and anger toward Jen, if nothing ever materializes to fill the hole that her abandonment left in my life, I don’t know—but maybe.
None of this is to say that hurt and anger are, or should be, the only things that I feel where Jen is concerned. When I was still seeing my therapist, we also talked about things like honoring what the relationship meant to me, and holding on to the good memories, and taking stock of the enduring ways in which Jen, and our marriage, positively impacted me and shaped who I am today. Back when I was struggling over the question of what to do with my anger, for instance, I also was unsure how to feel about the many ways in which I continued, compulsively, to surround myself with pieces of this person who had hurt me: the tortoises, or various things that Jen had crocheted, or even the house that we bought together and put so much time and effort and love into working on and improving. Old pictures; recipes that she had introduced to me (not that there were many!); routines that we had shared. At no point have I wanted to let go of these things, but I used to feel weird about some of them. Was it pathetic to cling to such things? To cozy up, alone, under blankets that Jen had crocheted, or continue to venture out in winter wearing the hat and scarf that she made for me? How did this fit with my anger? How could I both reject her and cling to her? But in time, I realized that I get to decide what things to hold onto and what to reject—and that “what it means” for me to continue cherishing any given thing that came from or is associated with Jen is entirely up to me (and no one else) to define.
As with just about every important truth, the answers here were obvious once I arrived at them—seeming like things that I had actually known all along. I get to grieve my marriage in my own way and at my own pace. If I’m angry, I’m angry; if I’m nostalgic, I’m nostalgic; and if I’m both simultaneously, so be it! Even though my marriage failed, it doesn’t mean that I have to accept other people’s cynical takes on marriage—much less allow myself to feel shamed by them into letting Jen off the hook for her betrayal. (I know that no one ever intended the latter, and I don’t mean anything that I’ve written here as any sort of passive-aggressive jab at anyone who has expressed views to me like the ones that I’m rejecting. To the extent that we see these matters differently, I think we’re conscious of it, and it’s okay.)
Marriage is hard? Well, sure, I guess so. I mean, I’m not saying it doesn’t take work. But you know what’s really hard? Life after divorce! The former came pretty naturally to me; the latter, on the other hand, is something that I’m still trying to figure out…
I think what we could call the marriage model presents a specific template for how to have romantic relationships. Traditionally, said model is associated with a male and a female identified partner, childrearing, monogamy, shared finances, termination-at-death, cohabitation, the “relationship escalator,” gender-divided responsibilities, and a reliance on the other half of the dyad for the bulk of one’s emotional and domestic needs. The last sixty years have seen increasing challenge to 1) the necessity of marriage at all in relationships and 2) the need to define marriage rigidly along all those lines. Questioning either is a valid way of approaching relationships. If you choose the former, your relationships don’t have as much of a template, and YMMV with that. But if you do choose the latter, since we can actually define marriage however we want, the important thing is that all partners are reasonably self-aware and capable of resisting social norms that don’t work for them, and that they have that conversation–not just once, but constantly as time passes–and cooperate to stay connected. If you do that, there’s no doubt you can make a marriage last a long time relative to a human lifespan. The important thing is–are the needs of all parties suited by the structure they choose, and are they willing and able to grow together? Some part of growth might mean the ability to leave a relationship that’s no longer working for you (as you mentioned Jen simplistically emphasized at one point), but what about growing in the ability to be aware of one’s needs, affirm the needs of those we are close to, and communicate them? Pretty fundamental growth characteristics.
Side note: I am critical of people who make marriage “work” by going on autopilot and checking out from what they really want and need in life to one extent or another by following a template.(There’s no empirical basis for saying what percentage of married people are in that category; my bias suggests it’s a lot, and yours probably the opposite, but that’s really an overly simple way of talking about something complex, and who really knows?) But you can do that if you’re not married, too, so this is not so much a criticism of marriage as it is of lack of self-awareness and reliance on social norms to guide behavior.
There are definitely some people for whom all the above and other (usually tacit) assumptions of marriage as it has traditionally been defined work quite well, but some of these are really hard for many (I would argue most) people. In particular, the reliance on one person for the overwhelming majority of emotional needs for a community-driven species, shared finances (you have to be very much on the same page to want all the same things as your partner, or maybe just not be all that concerned with money, and there are other fair models for this that can be used to take pressure off a relationship) and monogamy. But any or all of those or the others can be jettisoned if the partners both find them limiting, and all of them do work for some people, who (especially in the internet age) can at least sometimes if not often find each other. So what are we really talking about here?
I personally think it’s a slippery slope to danger to make promises about how one will feel in the future, and suggest the healthier approach is to accept that relationships ending is as natural in romantic relationships as it is in work, friendship, and elsewhere; relationships should end if they no can longer meet the needs of the people in them. I don’t think that should be a very controversial notion (though my dad’s voice argues it with me all the time). I also don’t think that relationships are best seen as failures because they end, even if we would very reasonably prefer some of them not to end when or as they do. But I also don’t think that has to be incompatible with what I see as very natural anger (rage, even) at someone for being oblivious and callous with respect to expressing their needs and cooperating with someone else in a shared venture of intimacy. The terms of any decent relationship, married or not, long-term or not, include *respect*. The fact is that Jen lacked the self-awareness and courage to have those conversations in a way that is necessary to have a long-term relationship, and fundamentally showed total disregard for you and your needs. And there was no way for you to predict that in advance. Why wouldn’t you be fucking pissed? All intimate human relationships are hard, so marriage is also hard, and that’s not a reason not to try to have relationships, including marital ones, on whatever terms your heart desires. The fact that your marriage to Jen ended is entirely about her and who she is. I don’t doubt at all that, imperfect as you may be, *you do* have the skills to make the kind of intimacy that you want in a romantic relationship, and that you had them in sufficient measure at age 20 to get married. As do many others.
Apart from some differences of emphasis in places, I agree with most of what you said here. It was ALWAYS a fundamental assumption of mine, and one that Jen and I used to talk about a lot, that we had the freedom to define *our* marriage however we chose. In terms of the “standard” components that you listed, we clearly embraced all of them except for child-rearing and gender-divided responsibilities (and I guess I’m not sure about the “relationship escalator”; you’ve talked about this construct to me before, but I don’t easily grab onto it as a model, unless it just stands for the tacit expectation that a romantic relationship will include most of the other listed elements, and progress at a relatively steady pace through its early stages). And, speaking only for myself, I rarely found any of these elements “hard,” at least until the entire relationship started unraveling. I don’t presume to speak for anyone else on this, but that was my personal experience.
(Something that invariably annoys the crap out of me is when I read articles about marriage and relationships in which the author makes all kinds of assumptions about what marriage is or means or can/can’t be, and proceeds to pontificate on the basis of those assumptions.)
I 100% agree that self-awareness and honest communication are the keys to everything. I’ll even go as far as to say that, hell, if two people find themselves in a situation where their marriage no longer inspires much passion in them or speaks to their deepest wants/needs in life, but they’re both more comfortable sticking with their status quo then disrupting it—and they have the self-awareness to realize these things about themselves, and can communicate honestly with each other about their expectations and level of investment in the relationship—who am I to criticize them? That doesn’t describe what I personally would want for myself, but everyone’s different. Someone else might conceivably criticize me for having come, in recent years, to a not dissimilar perspective with respect to my job/career situation, but personally, in that area of life, I’m good with it.
I do balk at the idea that making promises about the future of a relationship represents any kind of slippery slope, provided of course that both parties clearly understand the nature of the promise. I mean, sure, on some level all relationship commitments are really just promises to stay together unless something changes to make you not want to anymore. But assuming that it’s what both parties want, I think that the intention and expectation of permanence is usually a positive thing, not a negative one. And OF COURSE a relationship should end if it genuinely no longer meets the needs of the people in it. My beef isn’t with that idea at all. In the context of marriage-like promises, I do think (obviously) that each person owes it to the other to make a real effort to resolve any problems before just bolting, but it’s not like I’m arguing that divorce shouldn’t be a thing! It’s just…I don’t know that I can go along with seeing it as “natural,” or expected, or whatever. You said that a relationship should not be seen as a failure just because it ends; I want to break that down a bit. On one hand, I absolutely *refuse* to label my entire 20-year marriage a “failure” just because it ended. But I do view its ending, in itself, as a failure—as something that, from the perspective of who Jen and I each were (say) ten years ago, both needn’t have and “shouldn’t” have happened. That is definitely part of what I continue to be angry about, and to believe that I have a “right” to be angry about (and to be at peace with being angry about).
Just to comment quickly on the relationship escalator construct… it’s (as you say) the expectation that a romantic relationship will include most of the other listed elements, and progress at a relatively steady pace through its early stages… and tends to be associated with the idea that not moving toward the next stage at all times constitutes a problem. If one person has a need that looks like an earlier stage of intimacy, that’s a problem. If you dawdle too long before moving forward to the next stage, that’s a problem. It tends to be destination-focused. It tends to assume that people who aren’t doing it this way are wrong and taking advantage of you. If you’re on an escalator, after all, you can’t get off unless you reach the top (death, presumably) or jump off and probably hurt yourself depending at how high up you’ve gotten (constituting failure). A relationship could be healthy and look traditional, but if you’re following the script in an unexamined way, you’re on the escalator.
>> I’ll even go as far as to say that, hell, if two people find themselves in a situation where their marriage no longer inspires much passion…
There’s all the difference in the world in my mind between checking out in the relationships that are most important to you because you’re afraid of the consequences (not pursuing other things that matter to you) and consciously focusing on other things you decide are important. For most people, that would probably mean focusing on other important relationships. Are there good reasons for staying in arrangements of all sorts that aren’t ideal? Sure, there’s no rule you can’t use marriage for, say, childrearing, and pursue romance elsewhere, or forego romance if it doesn’t much inspire you.I’m not inclined to judge someone by the quality of their marriage but by whether they’re living with purpose and intention. Telling someone their marriage has to be their most important connection would be me doing exactly what I’m taking issue with, really.
>>I do balk at the idea that making promises about the future of a relationship represents any kind of slippery slope, provided of course that both parties clearly understand the nature of the promise.
I’m not sure how much we disagree here (as opposed to having different emphasis) given what you go on to say next about endings being okay, together with the fact that I see no issue with making a plan with someone to pursue shared intimacy and work together on maintaining that intimacy through challenges and changes in yourselves over significant time. I just think expectations of permanence, while understandably prompted by a legit need for stability, are more about reassuring yourself than actually creating that stability, and just generally at odds with not only the inevitable uncertainties of reality (and the deeply complex self) but also the inevitability of death (on some time frame). That may seem pedantic, and maybe it is a bit, but it just seems to me that change is inevitable, and personal change is inevitable, in the kind of context in which we exist. A human lifetime is not that long in the scheme of things, and lifelong relationships can endure partly because of just that. But suppose you didn’t die and the world went on much as it has. How long could a cohabitating monogamous relationship between people living intentionally last? Maybe a really long time in some cases, but however well you understand the promise you made, human brains don’t grasp scales (or infinities) very well. So eventually it would end, just as eventually we would all be ready not to exist in the same way anymore, given enough time to be. One way around this (not a full solution, but one that certainly prolongs a sense of connection in my view) in my opinion is to allow relationships a lot of space to breathe, which I think has potential to greatly deepen intimacy. (I should add that I don’t think this bears all that much on what happened with Jen, though; that was a case of someone being out of touch with her own needs and internal process, which doesn’t tell us much about how higher functioning people can cope in relationships.) For what it’s worth… like I said , this might be 95% a question of emphasis (and between that and semantics, that’s where most disagreement is found, anyway).
I think that, basically, your thoughts on these topics tend to be more broad-ranging than mine—which are mostly focused on my own personal wants, areas of experience, and governing assumptions. So I make statements that largely reflect those things, and you talk in terms meant to encompass a fuller range of possibilities and scenarios, and differences of emphasis inevitably emerge as a result. For example, granted, when I talk about an expectation of permanence, I’m thinking in terms of the sort of lifespan that I assume I’ll have, rather than the hypothetical of indefinitely prolonged lifespans. Also, the reason why I don’t connect readily with the “relationship escalator” concept is probably that it seems so far outside my experiences; romantic partners pressuring me to move forward with a relationship according to an unexamined script in their head in way that clashes with my wants or needs is just not something that has ever come up in my life, you know?
That makes a lot of sense and reminds me of this exchange, apropos of this site.
“Data, when it really works between two people, it’s not like anything you’ve ever experienced. The rewards are far greater than simple friendship.”
“How far, sir?”
“That’s what I’m hoping you’re going to find out.”
Or, of course, when it really *doesn’t* work between two people. :/
Seems like a fairly tenuous connection, but points for effort. 🙂 (By which I mostly mean: for involving Data.)