We Are Still Married (1998)

 Date: Mon, 24 Aug 1998 13:08:58 -0400

From: Victoria

Subject: not sure if i should send this, but...

i’m back again, sorta.

back from the east coast anyway, where i went for a week or so to get my thoughts together, decide why i wanted to kill/hurt/maim myself as badly as i did, why i was so paralyzed with fear over turning 30, why i was so desperately, miserably unhappy.  i learned that i have very few boundaries.   i learned that many parts of me that i’m ashamed of having are part of me whether i like it or not, and i’m going to have to learn to deal with them (for further clarification, read “two women” by denise levertov). i learned that i am not in love with my husband anymore.

it’s that last one that’s throwing me for a loop.

it’s that last one that’s eating me apart inside.

<snip>

....i’m just trying to get a handle on this.  i’m wondering if anyone else out there has felt this, is still married, and why.  please don’t write and quote me all the sanctity-of-marriage verses in scripture:  i know them already....

<snip>

has anyone else ever been here?

i’m desperate, or else i wouldn’t be telling a bunch of people that i really don’t know.  answer me privately, if you wish.  i want to want to work this out, but if i were flat-out honest i’d rather be anywhere than here.

i never knew love was this fragile.

victoria

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Hi, Vic.  It’s Izzy, lifting the title of someone else’s book.  You say:

>i learned

>that i am not in love with my husband anymore.

to which I say “So what?”

Alright, now that your hackles are up, let me expand.  And I’ll try to have something practical after I ramble through some theory...

SWMBO and I recently celebrated our 15th anniversary.  This is something of  milestone for us, since we now figure we have half a chance of making it.  Well, actually, it’s not that WE figure, but... Well, the first Sunday back from our honeymoon, one of our elders came up to us and said, “If you make it 15 years, I give you half a chance.”  Gee, thanks for the encouraging word.

But he wasn’t too far from wrong.

We had a longer honeymoon than most (about four years), but for most of our married life we have not been “in love”.  Some of the time, we haven’t even liked one another all that much.  But we made the decision before we were married, and vowed to one another in the ceremony, that we would make the effort to love one another, and so even when we don’t like each other, we try to love one another.

There have been times that I have carried this marriage on my back alone.  And there have been (probably more frequent) times that SWMBO has carried it on hers.  In retrospect, had we treated marriage like a 50-50 partnership, it would have dissolved years ago.  Instead, we try to treat marriage like a 100-100 partnership.  Now at any given time, the total effort going into this thing called our marriage may only be about 70% total, instead of the 200% total for which we claim we want to strive.  This has been enough, so far, to get us over the bad patches.

OK, I know I haven’t been too encouraging so far, but here’s the thing.  Yes, there have been bad patches.  Yes there have been times when we didn’t like one another all that much.  But we have found it well worth getting through the bad patches because the good patches are so much better when we get back to them.  I personally don’t put a whole lot of stock in being giddily in love; I know how volatile emotions can be.  And yet, even after fifteen years, we still hit times when we are just plain stupid in love (we’re leaving one of those periods right now, and on a downhill ride toward being friendly roommates.  God willing, we will rise again.)  And quite a bit of the time, we function well as a team now.

SO here’s the deal: after years of training one another, we fit well.  We anticipate each other’s stupid jokes.  It’s harder to arrange a surprise for each other (but what’s life without a challenge or two?).  We’re already starting to remember shared stories differently (it was during the summer of ’91 that we...  No, it was ’92; I remember because Aunt Flo...  But Aunt Flo was in Utah in ’92...)  And when we take on responsibilities, we apportion the work well and collapse into a comfortable heap afterwards.  People accuse us of being cute.

As for the notion of being “in love”, I think it’s one of the most overrated and damaging ideas invented.  Desires in general are aimed at extinguishing themselves.  If I have a real hankering for chocolate and indulge that desire, I satisfy it and the desire is (at least temporarily) dead.  The only way to hold onto a desire for any length of time is to never fulfill it.  And being “in love” is a desire.  Think about all the TV shows that keep us going from week to week with a “will they or won’t they” plot.  Now think about the shows in which they “do.”  Either the shows lose their impetus, or we have to start throwing new obstacles in the way of the new lovers.  Why?  Because being “in love” is by its very nature a transitory thing.

By the way, the notion of “true love” was forged in the tradition of Courtly Love, in which the only real love is for an object that can never be attained.  Thus the world’s great love stories: Tristan & Isolde, Romeo & Juliette; they end in death.  Or Cinderella, where marriage takes the function of death and there’s some magic “happily ever after” that can never be spelled out.

Look, nothing can kill pure, spiritual love like putting flesh on it.  Suddenly, this great object of romantic passion reveals itself as a lump of flesh that makes funny noises and weird smells, that always stirs its coffee in that annoying way, that always leaves things in the wrong place.  This is what it means to live and to love in a fallen world.

SWMBO and I were called to love one another the best we can.  This means taking the bad with the good, as we promised in our vows:  “For better or for worse” assumes that there will be worse.  We just have to learn to get through it to the better again.

SO what has helped us get through the bad?  Well, in general, having good network of Christian friends with whom and to whom we are accountable for our actions.  Having in that network people who have been married and walking with God longer than we’ve been alive and being willing to go to them and bitch.  I think SWMBO would have killed me during our second year if she hadn’t been able to go to an older woman and complain about me, only to be met with some gentle laughter and similar stories from years before.  It helped SWMBO to have someone demonstrate that she had been there as well and that it was worth getting over it.  It also helped to have this same woman remind SWMBO of a number of my good points and to tell her how obvious it was to everyone that I was mad for my wife.

It has also helped me in those times when I wasn’t so mad for her to ACT s if I were.  Sometimes, I have been able to rekindle the feelings by acting on what I don’t feel.  So I’ll do something self-consciously sweet like send her flowers for no good reason.  And send them to her office.  And here’s what happens.  Her coworkers ask “Is it your birthday/anniversary/tpam?”  “No?  Well he must have *done something*.  What did he do?”  “Nothing?  Well, what did YOU do?”  Eventually they get the idea that SWMBO has received flowers for no particular reason.  This makes her coworkers jealous and makes her feel good.  And perversely, it makes me feel good to make her feel good in front of her colleagues.  And at the very least/worst/most selfish, her coworkers all think I’m hot stuff.  All this from doing something I didn’t FEEL like doing; much good from an act that could be viewed as hypocritical or cynical.

Alright, I’ve rambled on long enough.  The big message I have for you is this.  You are not alone; many of us have gone through bad patches and know that we’ll go through them again.  It is well worth the effort to figure out how to get to the other side.  The good patches get better every time.  And forget about this being “in love” shit.  Emotions are too unstable to form the basis of any relationship.  It’s great, even wonderful, when they fall into place, but don’t trust ’em, don’t rely on ’em.  Learn to love without being in love.

Pax,

Izzy

OK, one more story.  Sitting in a Greek class where the prof had been married only about 8 years, I had been married about the same amount of time, and my favorite classmate, Susan, had been married long enough that she had actually dropped a class a couple years earlier when she walked in and found *her son* enrolled in the same section — sitting in this class a fellow named Mark said, “I’m getting married soon, and I know a lot of you have been married for a while so I thought I would ask, what’s the secret to a lasting marriage?”

The prof said, “Well, you just take it one day at a time.”

Mark, never one to let people get away with non-answers like that, said, “OK, I’ve heard that before.  What does it mean?”

I leapt into the breach:  “It means you wake up, roll over, realize you don’t like this person next to you so much right now and you say, ‘Gee, I think I want out of this.  But is it going to be easier FOR TODAY to get up, get showered and dressed, eat my Wheaties, go to work for nine or ten hours, come home, have dinner, watch some TV, and go back to bed?... or is it going to be easier FOR TODAY to call in to work and get some time off, find a lawyer, and start divorce proceedings?  I think that FOR TODAY, it will be easier to just move along in this well-worn rut.’”

Mark and the prof stared at me, aghast at what they’d heard.  Susan looked at me and said, “You are wise beyond your years, child.”

Cynical, I realize, but there’s a grain of truth in there somewhere.

Pax Christi,

Izzy

who is constantly amazed to wake up and find that once again his wife has forborne to murder him in his sleep