The Slow Death Of A Marriage Is Even Worse
When Death and Divorce Collide
While admittedly not an expert, I have a pretty good grasp on this one. My father died suddenly in April of 2022, and my marriage entered hospice mere months later. I can say definitively the latter, which was long and protracted, was worse. For those of you who are familiar with my work, this one might have more bite and less pithiness than usual, but I think it’s important to lay some groundwork for content that will follow. Hang in here with me!
Why Death Feels Final While Divorce Lingers
I have talked about my relationship with my father and how complicated it was. Our relationship was fraught with conflict and tension until sometime in my early 40s. As an adolescent, I learned to stay in a hypervigilant state, and I carried my defensive shields and offensive swords into adulthood.
The irony here, that has him laughing in his ashes, is that my dad LOVED college football, specifically the Crimson Tide. I grew up hating football because his Saturdays were consumed with it, and his mood was dictated by the outcome of SEC games. He’s up there chuckling at me trying to effectively use terms like offense and defense as it pertains to him.
The good news about my father and me is that when he died, our conflicts had long since been resolved. Sincere apologies had been offered, past grievances had been forgiven, and grace and understanding permeated the latter chapters of our lives together. That is a blessing.
Having said that, had he passed with our relationship in tatters like it once was, I would still argue that it would have been an easier life event than going through the demise and ultimate death of my marriage. Why? Because one of those that hurt me is dead, and there is finality. The other one is still very much alive – the pain, I mean. That is still raw and real.
The chapters where my dad’s story and my story intersected were good ones. The chapter(s) where my ex-husband’s, John, and my stories intersected and continue to intersect? Not so much.
The Pain of a Marriage Falling Apart
I’ve touched briefly on the implosion of my marriage in 2017, and the following 5 years where we limped along trying to salvage what was left of it. I’ve dubbed it “the Slump.” I’ll expand a little bit on what happened, from my perch, during the Slump.
We were 14 years into what I thought was a healthy marriage. I mean, I knew things had hit a lull and were a bit stymied, but what marriage doesn’t go through its ups and downs? That is all normal. As it turned out, only one of us knew that the marriage was in far more trouble than it appeared to me.
To this day I can only surmise that as a result of years of uncommunicated unhappiness on his part, there was a straw that broke the camel’s back. In a single night that included a fatal lie (his – the first one to my knowledge), a fatal threat of divorce (mine – not the first – insert hand raised asshole emoji here), a fatal argument (ours), and the entrance of a third person into the relationship (who turned out to be a likely innocent), everything imploded. Kah-fucking-boom.
Coping with Rejected Apologies and the Need for Next Steps
The next morning, after our emotions had settled and the wine and gin and tonics had worn off, I went to him to apologize. I can say with full honesty – it was an authentic apology. It was resoundingly rejected. And just like that, my marriage flatlined.
Over the next couple of weeks, I went into save the marriage/save the family mode because I am good in a crisis. It was clear that he was “out.” Still, I managed to resuscitate the marriage by convincing him that we needed to go to counseling (for the first time) before throwing in our respective towels. If nothing else, we owed that to our then 8- and 11-year-old children. But the relationship was on life support, and it remained that way for more than 5 full years.
Trying to save a marriage for years at a time, in and of itself, is common, especially when kids are involved. However, the circumstances I was dealing with certainly were not normal, and in retrospect, were prohibitive in being able to save the marriage.
Living Apart Together
Our house had two stories with an unconventional layout. The master bedroom, kitchen, living room, and kids’ rooms were on the second level. On the first level was an office, a guest room, and a recreation room.
After the night of the implosion, we would not share a bedroom again for another 5 years. That was his choice. Day in and day out, he worked in his home office downstairs next to the guest bedroom, which he had fully moved into – toothbrush and all, until dinner time. He would emerge, have dinner with the family, spend some time with the kids, and then he would retire back to his office for a nightcap and a novel. More often than not, the homework, teeth brushing, and the wrestling away of the phones and iPads was left to me (ironic given his line of work…). For most nights, I was a single parent.
We were living apart together. While this can work perfectly well for some couples who are in mutual agreement that it is healthy for the marriage, that was certainly not the case here. I was steadfast in my opinion that he shouldn’t move back into a shared bedroom where he didn’t want to reside. I tried to be supportive of whatever it was he was working through. But that meant that I went to sleep every night and woke up every morning with a sense of loneliness, sadness, and rejection. Every morning and every night for 5 years. Oh, and I was expected to be calm and pleasant throughout it all. Apparently, “changes he needed to see” as relayed to a mutual friend but not to me, weren’t happening. To this day, I don’t know what those necessary changes were.
Important Side Note: My Ex Is Not An Asshole
I want to make it clear that John is a wonderful human who has brought many great things into the world. The negative picture I may be painting is limited solely to my, and my children’s experience, for a snapshot in time. My intention is not to bash John, but to give context to the circumstances that led me to dim my own light and to try to make myself smaller.
John is a very steady person. He’s an optimist who, unlike me , wakes up on the right side of the bed the majority of the time. He would often say to me that he can find a way to be at the very least, content, if not happy, in pretty much any circumstance. That attitude is what he projected during the entirety of the Slump. In fact, he expressly told me that he was perfectly content with the separate living arrangements and couldn’t quite wrap his head around why I wasn’t also content with the “good enough” marriage.
Enter Living Apart Together AND Living Apart...Literally
So, we had separate residences within our own home. A source of unwavering, relentless pain for me. But it didn’t end there. Around the time of the implosion, John’s business was beginning to take off, and he was feeling the pressure to relocate to one of 4 cities: Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, or Atlanta. We had discussions about the pros and cons of each and only settled on one particular thing – Atlanta was the one place I was not yet ready to go. The unwitting third party in our relationship lived there, worked for his company, and he intended to go to an office with this person daily. The marriage was just too fragile for me to feel comfortable with uprooting the kids and relocating there. Everything else was still open for discussion. Or so I thought.
Not too long after the implosion and before the agreement to enter into counseling, John went on a business trip to Atlanta. He came back with not only a 2-year lease on an apartment, he had begun to put into process a physical location for his business. He announced this over dinner between the two of us, along with his plan to travel between our city and Atlanta – two weeks on & two weeks off. The decision had been made and inked unilaterally. Talk about dropping a bomb. You would think I’d have thrown in the towel then, especially after he causally dropped an identical bomb onto our kids in a diner over breakfast that didn’t include me. But nope. Turns out I can be a real glutton for punishment. I can take solace in the fact that it was for a righteous cause. And by that, I mean my children.
Holding It All Together…Barely
So, for the next 5 years, we lived separately together and separately literally. Oh, one other thing that I should mention. I was expressly uninvited to visit either his apartment in Atlanta or the business he was establishing. I’m talking full ban. I don’t remember the exact quote, but it was something to the effect of “I don’t want the stress you would bring to invade the spaces where I am happier.” That in and of itself was, to put it mildly, particularly brutal. I say to put it mildly because that just doesn’t seem strong enough, but my trusty thesaurus isn’t giving me a stronger word. Despite my clear distress, John maintained his pleasant, “it’s good enough” for me, demeanor while I was barely holding it together at the seams.
For 5 years, I allowed it to go on for 3 critical reasons: first, I vowed to be able to look both of my children in the eye and say with one hundred percent honesty that I had tried to do everything I could to heal the marriage and keep the family together. Secondly, I vowed to be able to look into a mirror and say the same thing to my reflection. And thirdly, John and I weren’t at each other’s throats (sure, there were arguments, but it wasn’t a regular occurrence), nobody had cheated (to my knowledge), nobody had eviscerated our bank accounts, nobody was throwing pots and pans. Other than the palpable tension in the air – likely radiating mostly from me – it was business as usual.
So, I was left with a choice – initiate a divorce which, as my 11-year-old told me would “be his worst nightmare”, or continue to try anything and everything to repair the marriage while holding myself together.
The Toll on Mental and Physical Health
I have always been someone who has had low-grade depression, and at some point, in my 40s anxiety made a lovely entrance into the picture. Which means that anxiety and depression were challenges I was battling through, alone, during this bleak part of our marriage.
At some point, about 3 years in, my physical body went haywire too. I was experiencing a whole host of random symptoms that were seemingly unrelated. Until then, I wasn’t someone who experienced frequent headaches, much less migraines. All of a sudden, the headaches came on fast and furious. The pain radiated through my shoulders, and it felt like I was balancing cinder blocks on each one. My hands shook, and I would navigate stairs like a frail elderly woman because my knees threatened to give out at any moment. There was brain fog, loss of memory, and a general sense of confusion. I weighed an unhealthy 108 pounds, and my hair started falling out. And a good night’s sleep? Not a single one.
My trusted doctor and I looked for answers from Western medicine (while I dabbled in everything “woo woo” on the side) – was it something obvious and detectable like a brain tumor or a previously undetected heart condition – or something harder to diagnose like Lupus, Multiple Sclerosis, Lyme disease, or Parkinson’s? I was scared, and very much alone.
To this day, I am still unsure exactly what it was or what I did to create such a canyon between us. I still fight the remnants of living with a person who found my very presence stressful. My sense of self-worth took a beating as did my physical health. I don’t know what I did, but I can say with confidence that the punishment did not fit the crime.
As it turns out, when I finally pulled the trigger on ending the marriage, my physical symptoms resolved in a matter of months. It was all stress, anxiety, loneliness, and worry about my kids. Please do not ever discount the danger of sustained distress on your body and your mind.
Accepting the Call to End the Marriage
There was a moment when it all came to a head. There’s a totally inappropriate pun in there; I’ll save that story for another time. Teaser alert! See? I will always try to lighten the mood with a tension breaker! But I will say this - I knew in that moment that I could look at my kids in the eyes and my reflection in the mirror and be confident that I had done everything I could. And so, I made the call to end a marriage that I did not want to end. It had to be done. But I did it because he refused to do it himself.
Should I Stay or Should I Go?
If you’re new to my work, I’m not in the business of giving advice. I’m just a truth-teller and life lesson seeker.
For me, I had two bad choices, and I chose the lesser of two evils. Staying in the ruined marriage, while suffering physical symptoms and seeing the effects that it was having on my now 13- and 16-year-olds was no longer an option.
What I can say (and remember there was no threat to physical safety or any cheating that I am aware of), is that I set criteria. When that criterion was met, I made the only call I could make and still maintain my own pride and hope that my kids would be proud of me one day as well. The latter remains to be seen. But at least they may know that their mother tried anything and everything she could to shield them the pain of breaking up a family. Time will tell.
Picking Up the Pieces After Divorce
After having spent a childhood living with a father who didn’t like me all that much (understatement) and 5 years of living with a husband who expressly told me that I am too stressful to be around, I am now working through little “t” complex trauma. It’s been a bumpy road, and I admit that the stifled resentment, anger and hurt has reared its ugly head towards John on many occasions. I still haven’t arrived at a place of emotional healing and recapturing my self-worth. But that’s just part of the journey, and writing my way through it is one of my vehicles.
Share Your Truth!
Thank you for the love and support you show me that keeps me going for this community of works in progress.
What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are, but how you deal with incompatibility.
Leo Tolstoy
Love and light,
mack
If you are faced with a “to stay or to go” dilemma – I hope you have people to rely on, people to relate to, people to get advice from, people to get help from, people who hold you when you need it... I’d love to hear from you. I won’t give advice, but I will definitely lend an ear!