I tell myself two stories. In the first one, my husband and I are outliers: the happy couple amid unhappy couples. The one you see sitting side by side in a booth in a restaurant, not looking at our phones, or around at other diners, but talking. We gladly spend most of every day together, eating breakfast and lunch at the kitchen island, working from home in upstairs offices close to enough to yell between, and watching Netflix or going out with friends in the evenings to nice restaurants with good wine. We have two dogs and no children, exactly as we want it. We have our problems, of course. Too little sex for his liking, my boycotting of his family (deer hunters and Republican-leaners), the way I never admit I’m wrong. But we’ve been at this for thirty years now, and we know how to navigate our differences. Our life together is satisfying and uncomplicated.
In the second story, I think about leaving my husband every day. I know exactly what I would take with me (dogs, computer, photo albums, journals; this is also my “fleeing a tornado” list) and exactly where I would go (to a very small house with a fenced yard). I’m not angry or disappointed in him; my husband is an extremely easy man to live with, and doesn’t let misunderstandings build up. He’s never done anything to hurt me (nor would he), and there’s no one else—real or imagined—that I want to be with.
Once, a friend who is a life coach tried to get me to role play how the breakup scene might go. What would I say? What would he do? Then you could see how it might feel to leave. I couldn’t do it. I don’t want to even think about hurting him. I have no shocking revelations to share (beyond the obvious, that I think about leaving) and no ax to grind.
It’s confusing (to say the least), as well as troubling, to feel so in tune with your partner and at the same time so removed. From the time I was a teenager, I was eager to share my life with a man. Maybe we would marry, or maybe we would just live together, like I saw my sister do. It didn’t matter; I wasn’t a stickler for formality. I thought some about what the man might look like: tall, with thick, dark, curly hair, and his religious leaning: Jewish, like me, and I was certain we would make a happy and interesting life together doing happy and interesting things. I was also not a stickler for detail, so I didn’t know what these things might be, but this didn’t matter either.
Nor was I particularly romantic. I entertained no fairytale projections about unrelieved bliss or a supposed eternal flame of passion—just a few of the elusive rewards my friends were certain were in store for us once we found life partners. I didn’t see marriage or living together as an opportunity (or a requirement) to subsume my identity to someone else—to become, like the couples I saw on TV and in the halls of my high school, starry-eyed caricatures of ourselves consigned to running alongside each other in a chummy, clumsy pantomime of togetherness. Early on, I understood that humans are fallible and partner with other fallible humans. I needn’t have looked further than my own parents to see that this was the case. And while they did not hammer out an agreement for how to cope with their disappointments, they showed me the importance of doing just that. I knew that when I found my partner, we would build our relationship on a solid platform of communication, and as such, we’d be able to weather any challenges. In other words, I was naive.
*
I met Daryl when I was twenty-seven and working at a community mental health center as a therapist. He was half a year older, and had just been hired to start an occupational training program at our satellite center. He likes to tell the story about how, immediately after we were introduced in the hallway at work, he followed me back to my office, where we sat and talked for three hours. Ignoring the logistics of this—how did we have three hours with no work to do? —and the creepy factor—who follows a female co-worker to her office and makes himself at home for three hours? –the fact is, we did become fast friends that first day. Within a few weeks we were dating, and his girlfriend, and my boyfriend (a Jewish man with thick, curly, dark hair straight out of my teenage imaginings), were relegated to fond history.
We were crazy about each other from the start. He had a silly sense of humor and I found myself laughing more than I ever had with anyone, but when I asked him one night, over salads at Applebee’s, if he also had a serious side, he stunned me with an expansive, well-thought-out philosophy of life. I could see that he was compassionate, affectionate, and extremely sensitive. And while he found much to love in me—my creative drive, my passion for saving animals, how I insisted on speaking my mind even when it was a bad idea to do so (like at work), my long, ropy black hair and the fact that I was tall and thin, like him—there was conflict, too. He was a lapsed Southern Baptist, more agnostic than religious, but even so, and despite the fact that I hadn’t been to synagogue in a decade, that he wasn’t Jewish troubled me. He was naturally upbeat and optimistic; I on the other hand had struggled with depression my whole life. It had worsened in recent months as my father, who was only sixty-one, had died the previous year. And when it came to our careers, too, we were opposites: he had his sights set on upper management, and his approach was professional and dogged. I was burned out at my job and had my sights set on quitting. My father’s death had made finding work that made me happy and that allowed me to express my creative side feel suddenly urgent. Lacking a plan, however, I simply complained a lot. Luckily, Daryl was a gifted caretaker, able to pull me up and out of the mire of my discontent and set me on my feet again and again.
“I’m a helper!” he said, cheerfully and often. “It’s what I love to do.” And so, rather than feel bad that I relied on him to make me feel better, I came to believe that I was helping him by letting him help me. And really, where was the harm in that? Didn’t couples help each other all the time? Wasn’t that exactly what couple-hood was about? When we looked at our relationship through the lens of our mental health training, it appeared that we were fashioning a relationship that was mutually beneficial without slipping into dreaded “codependence,” the jargon du jour of the 1990s. We were the healthiest couple we knew—maybe the healthiest couple ever! Four years later and none the wiser we moved in together, and seven years after that, feeling confident we’d mastered the relationship thing, we married.
*
I once went to a Halloween party dressed as a sense of impending doom: using aluminum foil and wire, I fashioned a hatchet and secured it above my head, aimed down at my skull. This is the image that came to me the morning after we took our vows. Looking around our living room at the shipyard of extravagant gifts from a hundred of our closest friends and family, the magnitude—and the finality—of what we had done alarmed me. I had expected to feel a twinge of anxiety—you don’t defer marriage until you’re nearly forty and not wonder if matrimony won’t feel a tad confining, or that you’ve endangered a perfectly good partnership by insisting upon its forever after-ness. But the hatchet was a surprise.
As we were that couple who processed everything in the interest of good communication, I presented my conundrum to Daryl. I was so happy to be with him—you’re my bunny! —but perhaps we’d made a mistake by marrying. The feelings of doom and entrapment (did I actually use those words?) might be a passing phase, but what if I felt this way forever? What if we had ruined the wonderful thing we had by putting a fence around it, insisting it be tamed?
“Maybe it would be better to quietly divorce and return to living together indefinitely.” I said this last part as statement, but really it was a question. “I know it sounds improbable,” I added, “but please just think about it.”
He did not think about it. His face fell. His mouth formed a “What?” and then a “Why?” Tears queued up in his bright blue eyes, which quickly darkened in anger.
“Oh, we can definitely divorce,” he said at last. “But I’d be a fool to stay around if we did.” He went on to make some very good, if obvious, points like, “You can’t just act like a wedding never happened” (especially, I supposed, one that happened in front of a hundred people, many of whom drove or flew to attend it from hundreds or thousands of miles away) and “Why didn’t you think of this before we exchanged our vows, since you had literally years to think about it?” and “It’s like you’re just playing with my emotions, did you even think about how this would make me feel?”
Out of everything he said, what I heard was: We can definitely divorce. The fence had a gate! This love we’d corralled could be turned loose! That was all it took to put thoughts of leaving behind me. I apologized for my temporary lapse of good sense (what, in my memory, I called “ . . . after-the-fact cold feet”), and I did not speak or think of leaving again. For a while, anyway.
*
A few years into our relationship, I finally did something besides complain about my job burnout: I left mental health work to pursue writing and art full time. I started working on a book, and got a job as a newspaper columnist. I took pottery classes and learned to paint. I joined the art festival circuit with my work and started exhibiting at outdoor shows all over the southeast. It was a wild hair of an idea, planted by two friends who were doing well on the festival circuit. Daryl and I were both excited about the change. He had grown discouraged by the middle management lifestyle; if I could make the art thing work, then maybe he would try it, too.
“That would be amazing,” I said, because I never thought it would actually happen. He’d never expressed an interest in making art before, while I was always writing or sketching or painting.
After a year or so I found my “artist voice,” and I started to make good money at festivals—enough, in fact, to support us both, in the unlikely event he actually decided to try his hand at art. My self-confidence skyrocketed. My depression, so prevalent throughout my life, abated. I had found a career that rewarded my creative side, and it impacted the entirety of who I was. Using the money left to me in my father’s will, I bought a house in the country on ten acres and got two horses, something I had always wanted. I quit a seventeen-year, two pack-a-day smoking habit. I made a whole new cache of friends on the art festival circuit, in cities I might otherwise never have visited, and discovered that I liked the company of others. I no longer depended on Daryl to pull me out of the mire of my unhappiness. I’d found my own way out.
It wouldn’t last. Daryl did try his hand at art, applying the same doggedness to learning photography that he had to working in mental health management. Rather quickly, he hit on an urban, contemporary style of photography that had wide, popular appeal, and over the next several years, his career gained momentum, then surpassed mine. Instead of being excited for him, I felt eclipsed. Like the house on ten acres, like the horses in the barn, art had been my dream. I’d grown up in the shadow of two more-accomplished siblings; couldn’t I ever be the star of the show? I knew how petty and childish I sounded when I confessed my envy to friends. To make matters worse, they didn’t understand.
“You’re a team,” they would say, “His success is your success!” But to me, this harkened back to my fear of consigning myself to another’s identity, to not being a star in my own right, but one whose light is merely a reflection of a bigger one. Occasionally, a friend would whisper in confidence that they couldn’t be in a relationship with someone who was doing better in the same career field, and in those moments, I felt less petty and small. But little by little, my excitement for painting waned. I had a hard time making work for shows, and not surprisingly, my income nosedived. Soon I was having to rely on Daryl’s income, at which time my narrative about being a strong, independent woman started to ring false in my own ears. We tried to talk things out —after all, we were the happy outliers, the always-talking couple! —but we kept coming up against the same wall: I was envious, and the only thing that would change that was if he stopped doing art, which, because he loved it, neither of us thought he should do. Instead, he would try to fix my career. Maybe if he told me what to paint, shot slides of my work, applied to shows for me, he could get my career back on track. It was an idea rooted in his helper’s canon. It came from kindness, but it just made me feel more inept.
It was around this time that I read an essay in Granta by Kathryn Chetkovitch, the girlfriend of writer Jonathan Franzen, called “Envy.” She and Franzen were both working on books when his novel The Corrections was published to widespread acclaim. Chetkovitch wrote in shattering detail about how Franzen’s success—or rather, her envy over his success—started small but quickly escalated, eroding her feelings of self-worth. At her lowest point, she felt she had no recourse but to leave the relationship. The message was clear. While I might not be able to salvage my art career, I might be able to salvage my sense of self. But not from within the fence of our marriage. I started to think again about what it might be like to leave.
In our neighborhood there were a fair number of large, older homes with small, detached carriage houses. There was one carriage house in particular that I was drawn to, which I passed on my walks with my dogs. It was simple and unassuming, a tan stucco single-story home with four steep, rock steps that led from the tiny, well-kept yard to the narrow front porch. An older woman lived there with her little old dog, and sometimes, in the evenings, I’d see a little light on in the front room, where I imagined she sat in a recliner quietly reading with the old dog snoring beside her. For months, I pictured myself in that small house, sitting under the circle of light. It was the place I went to in my mind where I didn’t feel so insignificant, so lost.
That winter, an art-festival friend offered us her house in Puerto Rico for four nights. The house was on the beach, and we would be able to swim in the ocean and walk to nearby restaurants and bars. It would be a much-needed break from our real lives, which had become marked by tearful, angry fights followed by long, uncomfortable truces.
Things went off the skids immediately. Our luggage was lost in transit, and it would be two days before we would see our warm weather clothes. The house was so close to the ocean that the spray of salt water coated the windows, leaving a slick, foggy film that somehow seeped into the main sitting room, so that everything—the tile floor, the sofa, the coffee table—was perpetually damp and sticky, and gritty with salt and sand. The beds were cheap and the box springs squishy, and we woke in the night with agonizing back pain. Naked and wrapped in bedsheets, we wandered through the dark, damp house in search of a dry patch of floor on which to lie.
It was here, in the lap of epic discomfort, that I would have a kind of epiphany that would change the way we related forever. I’d been going to therapy for quite a while, talking about how I felt I was disappearing, and how I feared the only way I could reclaim my selfhood was by leaving my relationship. But each time I talked about it, I came back to something Chetkovitch had said in her essay. After she left Franzen, she realized she’d made a mistake.
“I still wanted him,” she wrote, “and my pride, already inflamed, now fairly throbbed at the idea that it was my own weakness that kept me from having him. I was in a pitched battle with myself, and the wrong side was winning.”
Like Chetkovitch, I understood that leaving the relationship because I couldn’t navigate my own envy was attacking the wrong problem with the wrong weapon. The problem wasn’t Daryl or his success. The problem was that I had always believed in the inevitability of my own demise. There had been a million moments in my life when I had seen the margins of my perceived advantage over others narrow and then disappear: as a bright, eager student when my peers unexpectedly surpassed me in academics; as a lanky adolescent who grew heavy and turned inward while the other girls grew lively and lithe; as a young adult who chose the wretchedness of anorexia while others chose professions, partners, futures. The list of defining disappointments is always, for everyone, long and at times seemingly trivial, but suffice it to say that when I built my new life around art, I somehow forgot to look over my shoulder, forgot to listen for the approaching footsteps of those in my inner circle who might seek to surpass me. I forgot to listen for my husband. The pain we suffer in relationships is always an inside job. But it took a while to understand that the source of my career breakdown lay not inside my relationship, but inside me. It was never inevitable, except inasmuch as I had deemed it so.
Incredibly, underneath the hurt and confusion and uncertainty, Daryl and I still wanted to spend most of our time together. But my staying would require that we change some things. I knew my failure narrative was a mess I’d have to clean up on my own. But as for how Daryl and I would relate to each other going forward, it seemed we needed some basic rules, for example, when I was depressed, I would not go to him. When I was afraid, I would not go to him. When I felt irrelevant and small, I would not go to him. I would learn to navigate my own emotions—and in doing so, reclaim the independent, capable woman I had been before it became easier to hand the reins to Daryl. At the same time, and just as importantly, Daryl would have to learn to feel useful and to show his love for me in some way other than by stepping in when I felt helpless. Sitting on the bleary, wet deck of the Puerto Rico house and watching the ocean roil, I did what I knew I had to do.
“I can’t do this anymore,” I said to Daryl. “We have to change the way we do things. You have to let me make my own mistakes. I have to take back control of my life.” I knew this meant destroying the very structure upon which we’d built our relationship. And I knew there were no guarantees that we would figure out another way of being together. But if we didn’t try, the relationship wouldn’t survive anyway. In calling off the rescue party, I started the process of reclaiming my self and, I hoped, us.
At home we picked up our lives where we’d left off. Daryl’s career continued to flourish, while mine continued to languish. But I worked hard to handle my own emotional emergencies, and he worked hard not to jump in when he sensed I was going under. Everything we did now—the way we spoke to each other, what we didn’t say—was new territory. We didn’t know if what we were doing would help, but there was the sense, for both of us, that this was our only chance. We often tiptoed around each other, unsure of what the rules were. If he made dinner for me, was that caretaking? If I talked about things that worried me, was I backsliding? Eventually we, the “always talking” couple, had to agree to not talk about my envy anymore. This was the place Chetkovitch came to as well.
“I . . . sensed, despite my recent conversion to the belief that problems are solved by talking, that this . . . was one that words would never fix,” she wrote. “It became, and remains, the thing we don’t talk about.”
*
It would be years before Daryl and I would find our way, before we could say with any certainty that we had changed how we thought about and related to each other for the better. He continued to make beautiful art, and to do well. I left art and moved on to freelance writing, finished my book, and found a publisher. I’m happy to say I no longer look to Daryl to fix me, and that he no longer needs to fix me. Our relationship isn’t perfect, of course. And I won’t lie; at times there is an undeniable emptiness in the place where his caretaking used to be, the echo of a well-meaning compassion whose absence leaves us both bereft. Sometimes the space between us feels too great, and I miss the days when I could collapse in his arms, vulnerable and incomplete. Other times the space feels just right, and I am grateful for what self-sufficiency has brought us: a profound appreciation of everything we are, and do, together and apart.
Now and then my mind goes back to the Puerto Rico trip. I think about the physical discomforts, the hard conversations, the awful disillusionment. But mostly I think about the sea: how it hurled against the windows of our borrowed house, leaving a film of salt and sand behind, and how we, in our nakedness, felt our way through the darkness in search of a comfortable place to land. And sometimes my mind goes back to the little carriage house with the dog, the promise it held when I was troubled, and needed somewhere to go in my mind. But mainly, I think, these are just reminders of what it took to get us here. There is aloneness in our healing, but in aloneness, freedom. This is how I leave. This is how I stay.
