Marriage superpositions
I can tell I’m arriving into middle age, as if I’m riding a train from one city to another, because some of the heterosexual women in my life are starting to explain to me that their husbands get one more chance. “I have one more try left in me” and “If he doesn’t listen this time and make serious changes, I can’t do this again.”
My friends cradle a tender confusion about what their relationship has become, and how far they’ve drifted from who they understood themselves to be. The struggle to make sense of it all dotted with arguments and escalations and bending over backwards to accommodate him. The contour of a new internal monologue that gives the silence between them a distinct shape. The meandering roads out the window are becoming more dense and grid-like, green forest dissipates into houses closer together. The topography of their relationship becomes foreign and hostile. You recognize where you are only after you’re there. Blink and you’ll miss it.
The liminal space, the blink between married and divorced is where these women in my life sit. Years of health issues that manifest differently, but always depression and anxiety, and usually therapy. More focus and energy into their careers, because if home life is going to be miserable, work better damn well be lucrative to counter-balance it. The extra money doesn’t hurt, just in case. Time apart without labeling it separation. A gym routine. A sub-let, a stay with family, a carefree girls’ trip. Yours and mine. Future in the singular. Not yet collapsed into certainty: yes, this relationship is over.
Some of them might find the means to get off the train, somehow, and catch a different one on its way to a secret new destination. But I’m pretty sure this is the stuff of legend, and Oprah’s podcast: repair and rebuild is possible. Construct a new marriage from the salvaged bits, with new tools they learned from books and in couple’s therapy, or something. Men expressing gratitude for the grace their spouse provided, so that they could grow up.
But this seems entirely dependent on the husbands joining in the work that the women have been doing this entire time. It requires a recognition that they’re traveling through space and time toward a destination that he might not want to arrive at, if he knew where it was they’d end up. Imaginary men who love their partners, who are capable of the self-awareness and reflection needed to grow into their wives the way their wives have made a study of them, highways weaving through mountains.
I hold space for optimism and hope, but for some of them, secretly I can smell how relieved they’ll be when they admit they’ve arrived and that it’s time to disembark.