The Truth Matters

Well, a lot of water under the bridge since my last post. Sheila and I now have separate apartments that we go to when it's not our turn to stay with the kids at the house. Not my cup of tea at all, and totally unsustainable financially, but tolerable in the short term, until this summer or so.

I have gone through a lot of changes. Steady therapy (individual and couples), part-time life as a single dad (cooking meals, organizing the kids, being a single adult around the house weekends and at night), self-reflection, some meditation. I opened up the floodgates of online dating, but closed them after a couple of weeks. It was good to know there are some excellent people out there who I can relate to, and I connected heavily with one woman in particular, but realized almost immediately that I wasn't ready for all of this. Too much else going on in my life that requires my attention, and I would be neglecting my real priorities if I flew off into a fantasy relationship, no matter how stimulating it might be.

But the real impetus for blogging again is that I still am not satisfied with the story of what really happened to break us apart. Sheila said last night that I was not a good husband for her, and that's got me stirred up. It wasn't said in anger, it was in one of our occasional (now) late night conversations that always end now with her saying we're talking in circles and she's tired and needs to go to sleep. I don't want to be talking in circles. I want to get to the bottom of what really went on to cause us to split up. We know pretty well that my inability to really "understand" her, and my benign neglect of even realizing how important this was, combined with her lacking the ability to help me to understand this point, led her to steadily (pretty much from the first year of marriage until a few years ago) lose interest in me and in our marriage. That much seems plausible, if pathetic because any kind of intervention could have helped lead me to the understandings that are all so clear to me now. But the part that I still don't "get" is this: why accept failure, and all the consequences of divorce, when there was a legitimate chance to fix things? That seems to be where we disagree: I think there was a legitimate chance, given that I'm not an idiot, and was just missing some important information/understandings of our situation; Sheila thinks that after she reached that point there was never, and will never be, a chance, because she doesn't love me anymore and believes that I am not for her. This is the crux. Once her will to carry on in the relationship was gone, there was no well to draw from for her, and she couldn't -- didn't even want to -- materialize one, so that was that. No pheonix arising from the ashes for her; no amount of pursuasion could bring her back to the table to consider trying to build something new. It took a few years (the past few years) to arrive at the decision to split up, but during that time she was really just working on overcoming her fear of the consequences. At no point was she questioning her feelings, or whether there was ever going to be a chance for us to get back together again emotionally. This strikes me to this day as immensely irresponsible, negligent, disloyal, weak, and any manner of other awful character traits I should want to avoid in my partner. Which doesn't make me want her any less (well, a little), it mostly makes me want to shake her and get her to acknowledge these things. We disagree about how responsible she is for the breakup, and I want us to agree that this is entirely her thing. I take full (half) blame for the dysfunction that caused us to become distant from each other, but I see that as entirely distinct from the responsibility we both hold for trying to bring our marriage back together.

I think it would be enough for us to finally agree on what really happened her, so I can be legitimately pissed off with her, and then go from there. What I can't stand is being expected to buy into a BS story about how she really did try to help save our marriage, when in fact the considerable efforts she expended were on enduring our marriage -- being a martyr -- instead of actually trying to help it. If I'm wrong about this (and as I write this, it doesn't make any sense why she would be all of these things), I need to come to a real understanding of the situation. It's not that I'm looking to absolve myself of guilt in our breakup -- I would embrace the reality that I am equally -- even fully -- responsible for our divorce, if that is the truth. I just need to know the truth before I can process it. Processing untruths is deeply unsatisfying, and immensely distracting.

Okay, so having written about my frustration, now I'm going to present her case as best I can. Maybe she really does have the story right, and it's just a very painful one to tell me. From her perspective, early in the marriage she started to realize that I wasn't satisfying something inside her. She yearned for a kind of connection that I was oblivious to. She didn't know how to explain this to me, and I wasn't clued in enough to see that I wasn't providing something for her that she needed. She thought that the problem was really hers -- that it was unrealistic to expect me to know what she wanted -- and so she internalized this unhappiness and soldiered on. And yet, her soul remained unsatisfied, and increasingly over time she felt angry at her predicament, and at me for being so blind. This anger spilled out sometimes, and she even articulated her discontent, but I seemed incapable of understanding what she was on about, and worse, not that interested in really pursuing it. She encountered this stark reality repeatedly, and yet even this anger she turned inward, since she didn't see any alternative but to carry on. Eventually, it got to be too much to bear, and she shut me out altogether, resolved to no longer look to me for satisfaction, comfort, connection, pleasure, happiness. There were many other aspects of our marital partnership, and our family, that were clicking along very smoothly, but this overriding reality that we were not "connected" became sometimes the only thing that really mattered. Only after she started to overtly express this detachment in a way I could really see did I clue in and wake up to the realilty that we were in a crisis. By then the damage was done. While I count time from that point on, for her the marriage had already ended, and the chapter that began for her then was all about what to do with this stark reality that the marriage was dead, not how to go back and try to resuscitate it. This was a terrifying realization, and her first plan was to simply endure it -- accept it -- and look elsewhere in her life for satisfaction. Divorce was off the table, because of all the hardship it would cause the kids, and the immense hassle factor. But over time, I became increasingly agitated by our situation, unhappy with the prospect of living a life in limbo, and irritatingly insistent that we try to reconcile things. She saw a therapist who helped her sort out her thoughts, achieve a compassionate detachment (through forgiveness) towards me, which helped her gain independence and strength to confront reality. Over time she grew to see that divorce did not mean the end of the world, and that it could open up new opportunities for happiness that were really inconceivable while bound to a tiresome, husband whom she didn't love. Once that vision became clear, it was unstoppable. In her mind, my beliefs, my opinion, my love, and my wishes were frustrating, but they didn't change the reality of her vision. Any guilt towards me that surfaced could be rationalized through the belief that all of this was a direct consequence of my blindness, my benign neglect. Life has consequences and hard lessons, and this is one of them.

So, some important elements that should probably be injected here. Loyalty, commitment, responsibility for the kids. No one, including Sheila, is perfect, and I can't fault her for making some mistakes, but it does seem short-sighted to me that Sheila could not consider the possibility that I could change, learn to meet her needs, satisfy her soul, mind, and body, and otherwise become a really excellent husband and all-around healthy guy. She has said many times that she has lived with me for 18 years, that she knows me, and knows that I won't change. I disagree. I have changed, I have learned, and I demonstrate my newfound abilities, and insights, daily.

Wow. As I write this, and explore the pieces of what she has told me, it does seem pretty believable that she could get to a point of no return. What's more, she has said that she forgives me, and while at the time those words irked me, I see now how this pieces well into her story. She developed a strong anger towards me over those years, even while she was rationalizing and outwardly tolerating my behavior. All that anger didn't go away, it got bottled up inside her. And her early sessions with her therapist were partly about learning to really forgive me for my negligence, and neglectfulness, over all those years. Whereas I would have preferred she go even a step further and accept that I have changed, and could now be a good partner for her, that seems to be too much to ask. Her forgiveness is for her benefit -- it allowed her to let go of the anger she felt for me, and agree to let it pass as water under the bridge -- but she cannot forget that it actually happened. I have asked her to come back to me, now that I understand what she needs and why it is important that I satisfy this in her, but she doesn't want to anymore.