Anatomy of a Marriage Break-Up

On the lighter side of things, one has to laugh………………………………………

The 1st Affair

A married man was having an affair with his secretary.

One day they went to her place and made love all afternoon. Exhausted,
they fell asleep and woke up at 8pm.

The man hurriedly dressed and told his lover to take his shoes outside
and rub them in the grass and dirt. He put on his shoes and drove home.

"Where have you been?" his wife demanded.

"I can't lie to you," he replied, "I'm having an affair with my secretary.
We had sex all afternoon."

"You lying bastard! You've been playing golf!"
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The 2nd Affair

A middle-aged couple had two beautiful daughters but always talked
about having a son.

They decided to try one last time for the son they always
wanted. The wife got pregnant and delivered a healthy baby boy.

The joyful father rushed to the nursery to see his new son.

He was horrified at the ugliest child he had ever seen. He told his wife, "There's no way I can be the father of this baby.

Look at the two beautiful daughters I fathered! Have you been fooling around
behind my back?"

The wife smiled sweetly and replied, "Not this time!"
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The 3rd Affair

A mortician was working late one night.

He examined the body of Mr. Schwartz, about to be cremated, and made
a startling discovery. Schwartz had the largest private part he had ever
seen!

"I'm sorry Mr. Schwartz," the mortician commented, "I can't allow you to be
cremated with such an impressive private part. It must be saved for posterity."

So, he removed it, stuffed it into his briefcase, and took it home.

"I have to show you something you won't believe," he said to his wife,
opening his briefcase.

"My God!" the wife exclaimed, "Schwartz is dead?!?!"
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The 4th Affair

A woman was in bed with her lover when she heard her husband opening
the front door.

"Hurry," she said, "stand in the corner."

She rubbed baby oil all over him, then dusted him with talcum powder.

"Don't move until I tell you," she said. "Pretend you're a statue."

"What's this?" the husband inquired as he entered the room.

"Oh it's a statue." she replied. "The Smiths bought one and I liked it so
much I got one for us, too."

No more was said, not even when they went to bed.

At around 2:00am the husband got up, went to the kitchen and returned with
a sandwich and a beer.

"Here," he said to the statue, "have this. I stood like that for two days at
the Smiths and nobody offered me a damned thing."
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The 5th Affair

A man walked into a cafe, went to the bar and ordered a beer.

"Certainly, Sir, that'll be one cent."

"One cent?" the man thought.

He glanced at the menu and asked, "How much for a nice juicy steak
and a bottle of wine?"

"A nickel," the barman replied.

"A nickel?" exclaimed the man. "Where's the guy who owns
this place? He must be losing money hand over fist!"

The bartender replied, "Upstairs, with my wife."

The man asked, "What's he doing upstairs with your wife?"

The bartender replied, "The same thing I'm doing to his business down here."
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The 6th Affair

Jake was dying. His wife sat at the bedside.

He looked up and said weakly, "I have something I must confess."

"There's no need to," his wife replied.

"No," he insisted, "I want to die in peace. I slept with your sister, your
best friend, her best friend, and your mother!"

"I know, I know," she replied. "Now just rest and let the poison work."
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“He went the way he had to go; rather nonchalantly and unsteadily, whistling to himself, gazing into vacancy with his head tilted to one side. And if it was the wrong way, then that was because for certain people no such thing as a right way exists. When he was asked what on earth he intended to do with his life, he would give various answers; for he would often remark (and had already written the observation down) that he carried within himself a thousand possible ways of life, although at the same time privately aware that none of them was possible at all………………”

(From Tonio Kroger, by Thomas Mann)

************

If you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there.
(George Harrison – Any Road)

************

If you don't know where you're going, you won't know it when you get there.

************

"Come, it's pleased so far," thought Alice and she went on. "Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"

"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.

"I don't much care where--" said Alice.

"Then it doesn't matter which way you go," said the Cat.

"-- so long as I get somewhere," Alice added as an explanation.

"Oh, you're sure to do that," said the Cat, "if you only walk long enough."

(Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll)

************

"If a man knows not what harbor he seeks, any wind is the right wind."
(Seneca (c. 5 B.C.-A.D. c. 65), Roman writer, philosopher, statesman)

************

"He goeth the furthest who knows not whither he is going." --(Oliver Cromwell)

(More extracts from Tonio Kroger by Thomas Mann; translated into English by David Luke)

How it hurt to feel the upsurge of wonderful, sad, creative powers within one, and yet to know that they can mean nothing to those happy people at whom one gazes in love and longing across a gulf of inaccessibility! And yet – alone and excluded though he was, standing hopelessly with his distress in front of a drawn blind pretending to be looking through it – he was nevertheless happy. For his heart was alive in those days. Warmly and sorrowfully it throbbed for you, Ingeborg Holm, and in blissful self-forgetfulness his whole soul embraced your blond, radiant, exuberantly normal little personality.

More than once he stood thus by himself, with flushed cheeks, in out-of-the-way corners where the music, the scent of flowers and the clink of glasses could only faintly be heard, trying to pick out the timbre of your voice from among the other distant festive sounds; he stood there and pined for you, and was nevertheless happy. More than once it mortified him that he should be able to talk to Magdalena Vermehren, the girl who was always falling over – that she should understand him and laugh with him and be serious with him, whereas fair-haired Inge, even when he was sitting beside her, seemed distant and alien and embarrassed by him, for they did not speak the same language. And nevertheless he was happy. For happiness, he told himself, does not consist in being loved; that merely gratifies one’s vanity and is mingled with repugnance. Happiness consists in loving – and perhaps snatching a few little moments of illusory nearness to the beloved. And he inwardly noted down this reflection, thought out all its implications and savoured it to its very depths.

“Fidelity!” thought Tonio Kroger. “I will be faithful and love you, Ingeborg, for the rest of my life.” For he had a well-meaning nature. And nevertheless there was a sad whisper of misgiving within him……………the hateful, pitiable thing was that this soft, slightly mocking voice turned out to be right. Time went by, and the day came when Tonio Kroger was no longer so unreservedly ready as he had once been to lay down his life for blithe Inge……….………

And he hovered watchfully round the sacrificial altar on which his love burned like a pure, chaste flame; he knelt before it and did all he could to fan it and feed it and remain faithful. And he found that after a time, imperceptibly, silently and without fuss, the flame had nevertheless gone out.

But Tonio Kroger stood on for a while before the cold altar, full of astonishment and disillusionment as he realized that in this world fidelity is not possible. Then he shrugged his shoulders and went his way.

I have recently read a translation by David Luke of Tonio Kroger by Thomas Mann (the German author, best known for Death in Venice), which was written in 1903.

The main character of this short story is a writer……………“who sets no store by himself as a living human being, seeks recognition only as a creative artist, and spends the rest of his time in a grey incognito, like an actor with his make-up off, who has no identity when he is not performing.”

I wanted to share some passages taken from this story with you, as they strike a certain chord, capturing and reflecting the thoughts and feelings about the “unobtainable object of one’s love":

Ingeborg Holm, the daughter of Dr Holm who lived in the market square with its tall pointed complicated Gothic fountain - the fair haired Inge it was whom Tonio Kroger loved at the age of sixteen.

How did it come about? He had seen her hundreds of times; but one evening he saw her in a certain light. As she talked to a friend he saw how she had a certain way of tossing her head to one with a saucy laugh, and a certain way of raising her hand – a hand by no means particularly tiny or delicately girlish – to smooth her hair at the back, letting her sleeve of fine white gauze slide away from her elbow. He heard her pronounce some word in a certain way, some quite insignificant word, but with a certain warm timbre in her voice. And his heart was seized by a rapture far more intense than the rapture he had sometimes felt at the sight of Hans Hansen, long ago, when he had still been a silly little boy.

That evening her image remained imprinted on his mind: her thick blond tresses, her rather narrowly cut laughing blue eyes, the delicate hint of freckles across the bridge of her nose. The timbre of her voice haunted him and he could not sleep; he tried softly to imitate the particular way she had pronounced that insignificant word, and a tremor ran through him as he did so. He knew from experience that this was love. And he knew only too well that love would cost him much pain, distress and humiliation; he knew also that it destroys the lover’s peace of mind, flooding his heart with music and leaving him no time to form and shape his experience, to recollect it in tranquillity and forge it into a whole. Nevertheless he accepted this love with joy, abandoning himself to it utterly and nourishing it with all the strength of his spirit; for he knew that it would enrich him and make him more fully alive – and he longed to be enriched and more fully alive, rather than to recollect things in tranquillity and forge them into a whole…………

It was thus that Tonio Kroger had lost his heart to blithe Inge Holm…………

(Later, at a private dancing class in the drawing room of a wealthy family’s house, attended only by the best families and led by the dancing-master, Herr Knaak, who came once a week specially from Hamburg for the purpose, Tonio goes on to observe):

……he could not fail to notice that Inge, blithe Inge Holm, would often watch Herr Knaak’s every movement with rapt and smiling attention; and this was not the only reason why, in the last resort, he could not help feeling a certain grudging admiration for the dancing-master’s impressively controlled physique. How calm and imperturbable was Herr Knaak’s gaze! His eyes did not look deeply into things, they did not penetrate to the point at which life becomes complex and sad; all they knew was that they were beautiful brown eyes. But that was why he had such a proud bearing! Yes, it was necessary to be stupid in order to be able to walk like that; and then one was loved, for then people found one charming. How well he understood why Inge, sweet fair-haired Inge, gazed at Herr Knaak the way she did. But would no girl ever look that way at Tonio?

Oh yes, it did happen. There was the daughter, for instance, of Dr Vermehren the lawyer – Magdalena Vermehren, with her gentle mouth and her big, dark, glossy eyes so full of solemn enthusiasm. She often fell over when she danced. But when it was the ladies’ turn to choose partners she always came to him; for she knew that he wrote poems, she had twice asked him to show them to her and she would often sit with her head drooping and gaze at him from a distance. But what good was that to Tonio? He loved Inge Holm, blithe, fair-haired Inge, who certainly despised him for his poetic scribblings…………He watched her, he watched her narrow blue eyes so full of happiness and mockery; and an envious longing burned in his heart, a bitter insistent pain at the thought that to her he would always be an outsider and a stranger………

Apparently "obsession" is a form of madness. Research using brain scans has also shown that being "in love", suffering from obsessive compulsive disorder and being addicted to drugs activate the same areas of the brain.

Is it any wonder then that there are so many errors of judgement in marriage decisions and relationship breakdowns - because of the intensity of such in-lust feelings or when the reduction of such intensity is misinterpreted as having "fallen out of love"?

Maybe we should all take up the study of biochemistry. If we understood our bio-chemical reaction to others for what it was it would certainly spare us a lot of pain and heartache.

Professor Larry Young, of Emory University in Atlanta, suggests that if the secrets of love are unlocked, the path is then clear for finding ways of enhancing it. He suggests that: "Genetic tests for the suitability of potential partners will one day become available, the results of which could accompany, and even over-ride our gut instincts in selecting the prefect partner".

I don't think so somehow, despite the trauma and expense of divorce. Whilst I find trying to understand the pattern, the process of love and how it evolves fascinating, I suspect that we would find reducing it to that level of "science" all a bit too clinical. We would still prefer to live our love lives in this fog of "romantic mystery".

What if I were able to slip a "love potion" in her drink - and if I could - would she realise that's all it was, would she care?

But I think I would care!

...I lock my door upon myself,
And bar them out; but who shall wall
Self from myself, most loathed of all?

I Lock My Door Upon Myself - Christina G. Rossetti

The apparent emotional immaturity referred to in my previous post is one of the most difficult things that I have had to deal with as the tragedy of our marriage separation has been unfolding. She has boasted of her witch’s hair; how fast she drives; her blue/green nails, six-inch heels and six-inch hemlines; of young men who are willing to pay for her drinks in bars in exchange for a kiss – whilst our lives and that of our children potentially stand to be torn apart.

She has spent endless hours writing blog entries to elicit numerous replies of ‘go for it’; ‘you deserve to be free’; and ‘you have a beautiful soul’ - while her husband is set to move his office into the very house that she told him all along would make her happy, in order that he is better able to face and manage the bleak reality she will leave behind (especially given the current economic climate of which she seems oblivious) and to be more readily there when the children come back from school.

She flaunts her bohemianism and independence while appearing to despise her husband for having had (not out of choice) to work long hours and as a result “not being there” – for the very virtue that has provided her with every conventional comfort and financed her "freedom" - despite both accepting that his long and tiring commute was a price worth paying for a beautiful home in an "idyllic" setting and a "country" lifestyle for the children.

In the last months, I’ve shut my eyes to so much, being too frightened to see too clearly - and now I find that, while I wasn’t looking, silently and slowly and surely, all that we had has almost drained away.………..but I try to hang on to the last few remaining drops.

I became resigned to my wife’s decision to leave me, some time ago. Since then, I have pieced together enough of my shattered self, to wish that she will find happiness again. I know that she could still find it with me, if only she would just open her eyes and be prepared for us to try, given everything that we now both know – very different to 4 months ago. But to her, keeping to her “principles” once the line is drawn in the sand, means no turning back, but continuing like a lemming, blindly on a set course come what may, regardless.

Admittedly, there was a time when I begged her to stay; words of love and cruelty in equal hopeless measure. Unfashionable as it may be, I had hoped to stand at her side holding her hand forever, through good times and bad; loving no one else; wanting no other life for myself.

The pivotal moment was not the acceptance that she did not love me any more as I still loved her but, much later, the realisation that my enduring love for her meant nothing, changed nothing; was no match for this quite relentless, unassailable resolve of hers. Yet, at one and the same time, she says that she wants “to be adored”. How much more “adoration” can a man exhibit than I have tried to show through these pages?

I have loved, lost and grieved, but the dark days have given way to a heavy readiness to return to life, unafraid of the echoes and shadows she will leave behind; I have already grown used to them in these last few empty months………….…where day after day, she has restated her determination to leave our marriage so that she can find “herself” (though her loving, strong, vulnerable, imperfect, perfect self is already there – and I know where she keeps it), but all she seems (desperate) to do is to search for someone else, almost anyone else, who will pay her attention – such a lonely search for a mythical, but all too fleeting, fantasy lover over whom she can exert her power and control, and feel the excitement, the fear and challenge of new attraction.

But this will only be followed again by her inevitable need to feel safe and secure once more within this new “relationship”, which will require fresh mutual commitment, and ultimately result in the same apparent loss of “passion” – and so the pattern will be repeated.

I’m not blocking her way. She has locked the door upon herself. My tears have oiled the hinges and my heart has broken the lock – so who can explain why I don’t tell her so, with a last gentle push, that the door is open? I still do not want her to leave, but I am not the one stopping her.

The fact is, I am the one who is imprisoned, not her! It is hard to move my life forward when I seem to have my very own “Mrs Rochester” in the attic, someone both beautiful and “mad” as she is to me.

I know that deep down (though she would never admit it) she needs me……….as I need her. As we have so often said to one another in the past……….”Who else would put up with you?”………………but, she will no doubt keep forever looking and hoping to find another non-existent such one, in all the dark corners and amongst all the other recycled discards.

(or Why We Need to ‘Get Over Ourselves’)

We all have emotions and insecurities; things we want to keep hidden and things we need to explore; things that will hurt us forever and things that we learn, with time, to embrace. Thus far, we are all the same, but it’s how we deal with our emotions that defines us. But before I go on, I’ll try to explain the title I’ve given to this post.

A while ago, Derren Brown, on his television show, met around ten complete strangers and then wrote an in-depth analysis of their innermost feelings, for each one of them.

When interviewed later, all the participants were amazed at how accurate and incisive their personal assessments had been; that he had managed to perceive, magically, what no one else could ever have known about them. It transpired that every ‘assessment’ was identical! They went along the lines of:

‘I’m confident on the outside but inside…’
‘ I usually feel like I don’t really belong’
‘I’m always the outsider’
‘I have baggage from my childhood’
‘ I always feel I’m looking for something else’
‘ I often feel a failure’
‘My self-image isn’t great’
‘Others seem content, I’m not,’ etc.

This is a good way to remind ourselves that there are certain common themes of need and vulnerability in all of us and that ‘deep-down inside’ we are remarkably similar.

Another blogger on this site in a fairly recent blog also captured this perfectly in a post entitled “You”. Perhaps you reader(s) could look it up. The majority of people would recognise themselves to a greater or lesser extent in that particular post. The majority of comments left by others say exactly that, with awe, as if they did not know that this was the basis of the human condition.

Most of us understand that feelings such as these are part and parcel of the human condition and emotional development helps us to deal with them and put them into some kind of perspective. Those who understand this, know they must bloody well get on with it….…..thereby becoming the ones destined to support those who don’t understand……and who don’t seem able to get on with it.

People who don’t understand that we all have our emotional ‘hang-ups’ end up taking their emotions too seriously. They give them disproportionate importance – they never learn to ‘get over themselves.’

They think that they are “special”; that they are more emotionally evolved than others; that their feelings are stronger and more worthy of consideration; that life is more “painful” for them and that those who try to bring some balance to them are “controlling” and “uncaring”. They use their emotions to absolve themselves of the control, perspective and selflessness that others achieve with emotional maturity.

Relationships, of all kinds, are difficult to sustain for these people. They contribute little to the healthy balance of relationships, wanting to be equal but needing the constant emotional support of their partners to be so. Relationship difficulties are blamed on aspects of themselves that they see as admirable - their complexity, independent spirit or challenging intellect, for example – so they see no need for themselves to change.

Ironically, they ruin perfectly loving relationships because they cannot be convinced that they are loved enough. It’s almost as if they resent the strength of those who love and support them because their fragile egos feel subjugated and somehow diminished. They look at healthy, loving couples and ask why such a man could love such a fat/ugly/old woman – and they will never know the answer.

Looking for someone else to address these issues makes us high-maintenance, resentful and full of misplaced blame. It also keeps us forever seeking “something else”, while the problem travels with us wherever we go.

Eventually, they find that the only people who have time for them are those who employ the same kind of self-obsessed clichés and live the same kind of flawed reality. They can’t sustain relationships with those who are confident, balanced, ‘successful’ …or recognise why the people to whom they relate most closely, are troubled and alone.

Because they are always sub-consciously seeking emotional support, they lay bare their private emotions to anyone who shows interest. Every new contact becomes a new best friend or a new best lover. When each relationship ends, they view it as betrayal not failure, thus becoming the victim. They need to be adored while offering jealousy and self-obsession in return; no lover will ever make them feel secure enough and no friend will ever be blindly supportive of them enough.

They consider that they demand more of life than those who function uncomplainingly in the real world – those who aren’t praised for fulfilling their responsibilities; who are judged on just who they are, not how they look; who know when others need to come first even though they have their own personal disappointments to deal with; who are not the centre of anyone’s universe but are happy to make others the centre of theirs.

The all-too-obvious irony is that emotional obsessives will never reach emotional maturity because they are simply too wrapped up in themselves.

(This post has been brewing and festering for a while. My thanks to a dear friend for their great input and help in getting it to an end result).

I have tried to keep away from these pages for my sanity, and because of other priorities, but may occasionally dip back in as now:

My (nearly ex-)wife ponders how long she can hold a man to her, to get beyond the seduction stage to something more lasting and manage to maintain it? I ponder this general question.

Unlike the moth that she likens herself to, drawn to and forever burnt by the light, coming at relationships from the right perspective helps for a start.

It is easy to confuse love with the need to be loved. Before we are able to love, we must already be loved – by ourselves. Before someone else can love you fully it requires that you consider yourself worthy of such love.

True love is more than just a warm feeling in the chest. When it comes to romantic love it is more than just desire, but also a commitment to want to really know another human being, to want to care about them for the sake of the joy we experience when we are caring – not merely for the sake of manipulating them into caring for us.

Romantic relationships never turn out right for people who have not learned to love. Without a commitment to love, once the free fall of falling in love is over, the differences between us can be seen as deficiencies and our knowledge of them used to hurt one another rather than to love (I, too, have certainly been guilty of this).

It is ironic that complementary differences between us, that can form the very basis of a strong love-bond, can become the points of contention between lovers, impair communication and form the basis of hate.

Even if a couple were to separate to find other lovers, they will still need to first learn to love if they are not simply to repeat the pattern. It is so easy to forget love, and treat it as if it weren’t important to love consistently despite adversity. Shakespeare had it in his 116th sonnet:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is a star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error, and upon me prov’d,
I never writ, nor no man ever love’d.

For a truly successful relationship based on love, lovers need to be prepared to go beyond the initial superficial “attraction” and genuinely learn to appreciate the differences in one another and, through this knowledge, feed and help their relationship grow in a unique way.

In the film My Dinner with Andre, Andre says to his friend:

“Of course there’s a problem, because the closer you come, I think, to another human being, the more completely mysterious and unreachable that person becomes. I mean, you have to reach out……….
Have an affair and up to a certain point you can really feel that you are on firm ground. You know, the sexual conquest to be made. There are different questions. Does she enjoy her ears being nibbled? How intensely can you talk about Schopenhauser, (or) some elegant French restaurant? Whatever nonsense it is. It’s all, I think, to give you the semblance that there’s firm earth. Well, have a real relationship with a person that goes on for years. That’s completely unpredictable. Then you’ve cut off all your ties to the land and you’re sailing into the unknown, into the uncharted seas.”

A real relationship, based on love, is like sailing into uncharted seas. It is mysterious and unique - but you have to work at it.

(With acknowledgement to Blase Harris, M.D)

I have taken a few days out to rest and think and suddenly it’s clear that I have to say goodbye to many parts of my life - including my brief time on these pages (at least for now).

I have poured out my soul into this short blog for anyone to see. I’ve endlessly professed my love for my wife and my despair at the thought of parting. I’ve taken comfort and criticism from strangers and I’m grateful for both.

But I’ve been living in a fantasy world of hope and denial - and that can’t continue for all our sakes. I have to face up to the things I can’t change and get real.

I have four children to provide for, including two aged 5 and 7 who need their father’s focused love and reassurance; I need to maintain this echoing house to give them continuity when their mother leaves; I have to safeguard my business, with others looking to me to protect their jobs in these bleak times.

What use am I to those I love and have responsibility for, if I carry on as the zombie I have been of late?

In recent weeks I’ve felt that I have no influence over the situation - except to trap her with my pain when I couldn’t keep her with my love.

But I know now what I have to do….

I have to say ENOUGH – and set us both free. We need to stop the leaking tap and retain the last few drops of what we had, to sustain us in our separate years ahead. No more persuasion; no more harsh words; no more what-might-have-been; no more traps; no more guilt to hold her back…

Thank you for the happy times that we had and for our two precious children. We will be OK now….that’s my parting gift to you, my darling wife.

“Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose”.

The only certainty in life is that we continue getting older and then die.

How long can one keep "chasing and searching" outside for happiness, rather than trying to develop and make what one already has more meaningful and find greater happiness from within?

Too often though, we look at what we have and decide that the glass is half empty, rather than half full. And at least we have a glass.

No-one really knows how to get that glass completely filled up, but it certainly is less likely to happen by continuing to discard its contents and looking around, hoping to find another tap to fill it from empty, rather than from half full.