Life, Work & Wonder

Tag: marriage

  • I Never Ever Thought I’d Experience Divorce (1st of a series)

    The one thing I thought would never happen to me was divorce. Turns out, I was wrong.

    I met my future ex-wife when I was 23, we moved in together when I was 24, and we married when I was 26. For five years the marriage was nice, then for 15 years it was sometimes okay and sometimes frustrating, but always seemed pretty much rock solid. 

    It wasn’t a perfect marriage. My ex wife and I didn’t always align on things like money and aspirations. And we didn’t really align on important things like romance and intimacy. But I always thought we were friends, and for the most part it was a good enough marriage and sometimes a really fun marriage (my ex could plan a fun vacation with the best of them). 

    I remember volunteering for the crisis line in the late 2010s, before I realized my marriage was going to end. I had a few callers who were fretting about a failed marriage or a pending divorce, and to be honest it bothered me that I couldn’t really identify with them on that piece, because after all I myself would never be divorced. I’d experienced a lot in my life, including my own near death, but divorce wasn’t going to be one of them, so I felt like that was a gap in my ability to fully help those callers whose desperation stemmed from divorce. So I read a book then two about divorce, so I could have a better feeling of what my callers were experiencing and thus maybe be in a better place of helping them. That was in 2019.  

    Then almost overnight my marriage just fell apart. 

    Like most things that come to an end, it was a gradual then sudden process. It began with some yelling (her yelling at me) then apologizing, yelling then apologizing. In the beginning this would happen about once every week or two. Within a few months it seems like every single day she was just so angry at me about one thing or another. Along the way there were other signs: she started spending less and less time at home, more and more time with friends or focused on her career path, and increasingly she was just ignoring me when we were at home. She started questioning me all the time, usually on the theme of why hadn’t I been more successful in life, with success being defined here as making exorbitant amounts of money and commanding exorbitant amounts of prestige. It was like she’d decided at age 50 that I was a total failure because I wasn’t a roaring success, and she resented me for that. 

    Still, even after 11 months of this, I still didn’t think that divorce was a possibility. It was just a rough patch. It would pass. I even asked if she would be interested in marriage counseling, which she didn’t appreciate at all: “Don’t you see how busy I am??? Why would you ask me that when you know I’m so busy!”

    The moment I realized that divorce was a possibility was the rainy evening she was hollering at me, and then she said, “We’ve been together for 25 years. I don’t want to get a divorce!” Huh?? Clearly divorce was on her mind. 

    To summarize what was maybe the longest month of my life, a few weeks later she asked if we could talk. And she said, “I can’t accomplish what I want to accomplish and be married to you.” And just like that the marriage was over. Something (divorce) a year earlier that I thought was something I’d never experience was suddenly very certainly happening to me.

    I remember the Frasier episode where he says, “My wife left me, and that was painful. Then she came back, and that was excruciating.” The end of my marriage was painful, sooooo very painful, and shocking to live through. And it was a very stressful two year process to get divorced that witnessed me age 15 years in that time (I’d been 51 and looked maybe 40, and then suddenly I was 52 and looked every bit of 52). But ultimately, my life is so much better now that I’m divorced, and it would have been a lot more excruciating in life had my ex wife stayed with me or tried to come back to me (not that either one of us would have allowed that to happen by that point).

    So I never expected to get divorced. But of course life doesn’t listen to me. And then it was so painful, first the very long process of divorce and then the even longer process of healing. Of truly moving on. The bad news is I had to go through that, but the good news is that a) I’m in a much much much better place now than I was during my first marriage and b) I can honestly empathize with and maybe even help anyone who is going through the unthinkable: the premature end of what was supposed to have been a lifetime together. 

    It has been five years. For the most part I’ve moved on, although I still harbor some hard feelings at times. And there is no question that I’m better off. So I am beginning the journey of writing down my process in case it benefits someone else in the mist of a divorce or a failing marriage. This is the first of a series of posts I’ll be making about my failed marriage, the divorce, the healing process, and ultimately redemption as I discovered a much better life for myself in the years after the divorce.

  • I’m Grateful That Online Chess Is A Mirror For me

    I love playing online blitz chess.

    Sometimes in life we need a mirror.

    To tell us how we’re doing, how we’re coping, because sometimes even the best of us need a little outside perspective to keep us grounded. For me, that’s occasionally my spouse, who thankfully isn’t afraid to point out my bullshit in real-time when it happens. But a spouse shouldn’t also have to always be our mirror.

    Which is why I’m so grateful I have chess.

    When I have a few minutes and only a few minutes to kill, I play online blitz chess. I like that it’s quick (a maximum of 20 minutes but often less than 5 or 10 minutes), forces me to think, and also provides some competition against strangers (I don’t like competing against friends and loved ones since I feel guilty when I win).

    Despite my chronic fatigue I am restless and impatient by nature, so I want a quick unpredictable game and so play aggressively since it creates a faster game with fewer moments of predictable sloggery. Sometimes playing aggressively means I win quickly, and just as often it means I end up looking pretty silly.

    This is where the mirror is.

    When my head is clear and I’m feeling okay with my current daily life, I win a lot more often than I lose. I beat some pretty good players, often by checkmate, and my score climbs to the 1000s (which isn’t great for a serious player but is okay for a hack like me). When I’m tired or stressed or pre-occupied with something in life? My score plummets. Today it was in the 800s and sinking fast, and I am making some pretty foolish errors.

    This means I have some things going on in my life. Or in my mind. Which in fact I do since I’ve had a busy week of commitments while also trying to send our youngest off to camp for three weeks which created some chaos in our house as we got her ready. I’ve also been working a lot for not a lot of money (a risk of my career).

    When life gets stressful, and my chess score plummets, this means I need to be extra mindful. It probably means my cortisol levels are up, and heart rate is a little higher than average. Which means I need to fight coping techniques. Maybe take some perspective that this too will pass. Or take a night to order some pizza and chill. Or take a nice walk next to the creek near our house. Or to just take some deep breaths.

    I think a part of being a healthy human being for working persons like me (I have no clue at all what life is like to be luxuriously rich and/or entitled), is being self aware. Of knowing when we’re under stress during a particular day or week or even month. Then doing what we can to take extra steps to bring the stress levels down.

    Sometimes (like this week) I’m not aware that I’m feeling more than average stress. In those weeks I’m grateful for a mirror. Sometimes that’s my awesome spouse. But thankfully — like today — it also is online blitz chess.

  • Last Night I Made Soup: The Recipe Was Delicious

    I never liked to cook. Eventually, I hated to cook. Finally, I refused to cook.

    In the beginning I cooked because I needed to eat. But I didn’t like it very much. It was just a chore I tried to get through as fast as I could.

    Then I had kids. And kids needed to eat. So for the better part of 20 years I cooked breakfasts, prepared school lunches, and made dinner. And since my now-ex was often gone, I was doing this while also trying to work, tend to the dogs, get the kids to their events and helping them with their homework. It was hell. I became pretty worn down, actually, and I remember in the late 2000s every night in the late afternoon sitting down with an espresso and a cocktail trying to motivate myself to cook yet another meal.

    Then my now ex started medical school. And somehow I was expected to cook for her (and her classmates) too. And to be supportive I did it. And that, among other things, broke me.

    For more than five years, I’ve all but refused to cook. I’ll be an assistant cook (“Rob, would you turn the oven on to 400”), I’ll prep cook (maybe), I’ll clean up, but otherwise I want to eat out at restaurants, eat take away food (note: I’m American but prefer the Brits use of Take Away over To Go 🙂 ), or warm up food, but I all but refuse to cook.

    But yesterday Larissa had a super busy day that went until the early evening. I knew she was tired, and didn’t want to go to a restaurant, and didn’t want to think about cooking food (she normally likes to cook but has been so busy the past few weeks), so I decided to take it off her plate.

    And I cooked.

    I spent half an hour researching “healthy hearty simple” soup recipes. I found one that seemed very very healthy and tasty, and had a prep time listed as 10 minutes. So I went to the grocery store, purchased all the spices and vegetables and broths, came up, turned the music up high, and started cooking.

    Did it take much longer than 10 minutes? Heck yes! These prep times assumes someone has a commercial kitchen with vast amounts of experience dicing and slicing things. But that’s okay. I got into a zen moment, did what needed to be done, and when Larissa got home a delicious soup was waiting for her.

    The recipe was amazing. I will use it again.

    Anyway, sometimes in life we have to break through our resistances. For me, that is cooking. I’m happy I cooked last night. I hope to do it again soon.

    RECIPE: https://www.loveandlemons.com/vegetable-soup/

  • A Night Of “Sunset Boulevard” And “Breakfast At Tiffany’s” (AKA The Risk Of Being Kept. Or Suckered)

    Last night, for the first time in maybe five years, we walked two movies back-to-back. It just so happened that both were classics.

    The first was Sunset Boulevard, picked for the primary reasons that we haven’t seen it in a long time, we love it, and it was free. The second was Breakfast At Tiffany’s, which I’ve seen twice (not in a long time) and couldn’t recall either of it other than it was two young kept people who develop a friendship. It was surprisingly good.

    It was interesting that we watched both movies on the same night because there is a similar string in a way. In essence, all the main characters are younger people struggling to pay bills who are at risk of (or dream of) becoming kept people by people with means.

    It is an interesting dynamic in a romantic relationship, a financially struggling person and financially comfortable person. Both people have to be totally grounded (I believe) and noble for it to work. The risks otherwise of course, is that one person takes advantage of the other. This can work how we might expect it to work, wherein the wealthy person exploits the poor person; in Sunset Boulevard, the struggling “hero” as consumed by the wealthy older person until he loses his independence and identity and becomes a virtual prisoner. But it can work the other way too, where the struggling person wraps their tentacles around the poor person.  In my own instance, I think of how I was 20-something with work ethic and a college degree and a savings account who met a high school dropout with bad credit and literally nothing to her name. I feel like she latched on to me and drove me to get what she wanted in life until such time 30 years later that I was no longer capable or needed and so was put to pasture, all the while gaslighting me. I was duped. I should have been wiser. Smarter. I became a victim. It worked out for me in the end (I was free!!!) but I lost 25 years of my life and my health in the process.

    So it definitely can be where a person-in-need becomes entrapped, but so too can it work the other way. So it’s very important always that we enter a relationship with our eyes wide open, and we are aware of the potential dynamics, and we work to stay on sound footing, whether financially or otherwise. Anyway, that was my take.

    I loved watching those movies last night. It was a fun way to relax on a stormy evening. And I liked Breakfast At Tiffany’s a lot more than I thought I would. And how much I wish I’d been wiser about relationship dynamics when I was 23.