“She said she didn’t think she could be true to herself if she also had to take care of me,” said an attendee named Ben. “I realized I didn’t need to fix the marriage. I need to fix myself.”
This last winter, we had a big conversation. She was tired of carrying our relationship, doing the emotional heavy lifting. Didn’t I see the distance between us? Didn’t I care? “Where’s the vulnerability I see in your books and articles?” she asked. “Why don’t I get to experience that side of you at home?” The conversation was long and nuanced, but the look on her face at one point, more despondent than anything, lingered in my mind. I went to bed angry. I woke up intensely sad. I’d always thought of myself as even-keeled, nonchalant, a steadfast partner. What if better words were disconnected, closed off, an insecure leech? I felt like a failure. What kind of man had I become?
My wife and I met in our 20s. We fell in love and quickly married. There’d been ups and downs, of course, but while friends had affairs, friends divorced, I thought we were unicorns; I thought our bond was invulnerable to the problems most long relationships faced. Recently, though, we’d hit a low point. I’ll tell the truth: I kinda hadn’t noticed. She’d been making a sustained effort to work on herself, develop interests, build a wide network of friends, whereas I was so focused on my career as a writer, I’d turned into a ghost around the house. I was infrequently “present.” Often noncommunicative, or avoidant, on matters bigger than what to make for dinner or watch on TV. I let my friendships falter and fed off hers.
One of the next to speak was a man around my age from North Carolina. I’ll call him Ben. Last winter, his wife told him she wasn’t sure she wanted him around anymore. He’d gotten too needy, too defensive, always tip-toeing around her. Where was the guy she married? The next day, he told the group, he drove to work, spent a half hour with his team, then continued on to a nearby Harris Teeter, where he sat in the parking lot for five hours and cried. He didn’t know where to go. He didn’t know what to do. “The only thing I could do for myself was to sit in my truck,” he said. So, five days straight, that’s what Ben did. Not knowing if he and his wife had a future. Not knowing, if they separated—when he was a kid, his own parents went through an ugly divorce—whether his children would be screwed up by it or ever want to hang out with him again. “I just sat there, talking to myself for like five or six hours straight,” he said. “It was horrible.”