Anatomy of a Marriage Break-Up

Yesterday, I had to sanction the solicitor’s letter to be sent to my wife, inviting her to agree and sort out our separation/divorce affairs (through a Collaborative Process hopefully, rather than the more confrontational court route). Today, she will have received it.

I did not want to have it posted - I had “sat” on the draft letter for a few weeks. But, my wife has made it eminently clear that she will not relent and do one of her famous handbrake turns that she is so proud of.

It seems that I have no option – matters cannot just be allowed to drift on indefinitely as they are. My life has been “on hold”, in limbo, since the end of August – she might contend, possibly even longer.

I need to start the process of getting some closure, to wrap this beautiful period of my life (despite its ultimate, truly tragic, disappointing end) carefully in ribbons and lace, and place it into my box of memories.

But that is so hard to do. I still cannot believe it is over, finished, gone forever, at a stroke. The door was opened, love walked out and slammed the door shut firmly behind her.

It is truly “The Saddest Day of My Life”.

The irony is that at the end of next week will come the anniversary of our wedding day, the day my wife has always (not just distantly) described as “The Happiest Day of Her Life”.

Why was it so? Was it the fact that she was placed high on a pedestal, the focus of everyone’s attention, it being very much her day? Was it that, as events go, it had been superbly managed and choreographed, by her with all her superb organisational skills and creativity? Was it that she had at long last realised a “dream” by getting married? Was it that we had many of our friends, as well as family members (on my side at least), gathered together? Was it the combination of all these factors all brought together?

She now tells me that she "never wanted to get married"............was it a shot-gun wedding then? She does have Italian connections after all. Confusing? Of course! It must have been one of her other personae that I married, rather than the one I am left with now.

She was certainly the focus of all our attention on that very special day. She looked "my dream", absolutely stunning in her orange, yes, orange (her favourite colour) wedding dress of her own design; and with her long dark red hair sprinkled with orange rose buds. She looked so radiant and so very happy.

She still makes my knees go weak when I see her looking her best, looking good and ever so radiant as she can be. But that is no longer an appearance that is reserved for me. I feel so sad that she cannot feel like that for me, in my presence any more.

I wonder if she still thinks back to that day in the same fond way or whether it has now just faded into another bad memory? Does she have regrets like I do, not of the day itself, but of the way through the carelessness of us both, that we allowed things to develop as they have? To reach a path that, with only very small steering inputs and corrections, we could have avoided going down altogether?

Surely, if she really, really thinks back to that happiest of days for us all (not just her’s and mine, but for the two children too, who were already born) there must be enough of a germ of something “warm” still there, in her memory, something to salvage and build on to get us out of this scenario. Is it really not worth the effort? Is it really all we can do to simply place these memories, the cards, the photographs, all neatly away in a box and move on?

If she was prepared to search out a wonderful fireplace in the salvage yard, why not seek out and try to fuel the (dying) embers of what we once had between us? Can she only look through her dirty, smudged glasses?

Engaging reverse gear is impossibly hard for her, does not come naturally, goes against all her principles, even when stuck on the level crossing with an express train bearing down upon her.

To keep charging ever forwards, “head on”, as the Taurian bull that she is, is all that her instinct, her “gut feel”, has taught her to do. Her pride would countenance nothing else.

And, as an Aries, I keep butting my own horns against the brick wall.

On the lighter side....................

A friend told me of a report in the paper yesterday on the effects of the Credit Crunch. A City worker, who was asked about how they had been affected by it, was quoted as saying:

"It's worse than divorce. I've lost half my money, but I still have the wife."

It did make me laugh.

A few posts ago, my wife states that she realised (though she did not comment to me on the fact of her observation at the time) that I had removed my wedding ring.

This was in the context of a post debating whether or not she should take up an invitation to attend a firemen's party; and whether or not wearing a wedding ring might give off the desired right or wrong signals as to one's "availability".

Her inference and insinuation being that I might have removed mine for some such "predatory" reasons.

She decided that it was "hypocritical" - on the basis that I was not wearing mine (not for any other reason) - for her to hang on to her wedding ring, so she followed suit.

Had she asked when and why I had removed my wedding ring I would have told her. Not at all for the reason she supposed.

It was during a christening church service that we had been invited to attend a couple of weekends ago.

I knew that, despite being very much more the conscientious church goer than I, she had felt uncomfortable about attending and had held off accepting this invitation, because of the "hypocritical" scenario it would have placed her in.

However, I very much felt that it was the "right" thing for us to attend; as the family concerned were close neighbours (and will continue to be for me at least) and had been very good to us. There was no reason to appear to "snub" them in this way, whatever our situation. If anything, it was I who would feel uncomfortable at the gathering, knowing that most already knew of our impending situation, directly or indirectly through my wife; but would not know whether or what to say to me.

Ironically, the service included a sermon on the subject of "Happiness and How We Find It". It was whilst listening to this that I was struck by the irony of the message, and how it would clearly go right over my wife's head.

It was at that moment that I removed my wedding ring. I put it in my pocket and actually felt like throwing it away afterwards on the way to the christening reception party. However, I have put it away for safe-keeping, a souvenir to add to the collection.

No, I did not remove it because I thought it might "enhance my prospects"!

From everything I read in blog land, it would appear that having the "married status" label is the more sought after and desirable - it suggests only an interest in casual sex, no commitment, less "complication", likely dissatisfaction with what one has and therefore "up for it", lesser expectation, an easier prey, a take it or leave it attitude.

Maybe she should keep her wedding ring on.

Reading the post of another (anonymous) fellow blogger I came across this quote:

"When I was very, very young I used to think that I would find someone who would be the other half of me who would be able to take all this away and make me feel part of a whole, who would be able to neutralise my sadness and loneliness and make it all better, but that was a childish fairy tale. Everything in life that I have ever thought would make me happy didn’t. I will only ever find happiness if I can find it within myself and I have no idea how to even start."

Even though she does not have a clue as to how to start to address her own demons, at least she has the right idea as to where the true happiness she seeks might lie.

It is down to ourselves to find and develop our happiness from within, by nurturing what we already have, not by readily discarding what we have that is anything but rotten fruit.

Happiness is not to be found by seeking this Holy Grail externally, as though it is something that will be readily obvious and dangling, waiting there for us, to be plucked off another fruit tree........just like Eve in The Garden of Eden thought she would find.

“I did not mean to hurt you……….” – well what exactly did you expect might result from what you did?

“Short of getting back together, I will do anything not to see you hurting like this……” – well what else apart from that is there that you could do to stop me hurting?

“It’s all about me, it’s not about you…….” – well, that makes it alright then.

Do wives/husbands/partners really think about what they are saying before they come up with “kind”, vacuous statements like these? Are they just trying to deflect their guilt?

We are not teenagers or “boyfriends or girlfriends” breaking up - and off to the next.

You are talking to someone who has made a life-long commitment to you, and you to them. Someone with whom you have had children. Someone with whom you have been living for 8 years, who must have had some positive redeeming features to them that you recognised along the way.

They deserve better than such flip remarks.

They deserve better than a shallow analysis of whatever their failings might have been to lead you to reach the conclusion that breaking up is “for the best”.

They also deserve that you are fully prepared to examine your own contribution to the situation. You deserve that too. Because if you don't, you not only risk throwing the baby out with the bath water, but you too may well repeat your own mistakes in the future.

They deserve better than “instant dismissal” – after all employees are entitled to a “fair” process of consultation compared to this.

They do certainly deserve a chance of redress if that is what they want, uncomfortable though that may be for you.

Stop ignoring and exorcising the guilt. You feel it for good reason.

My wife makes reference to her feeling of “guilt” in a number of her posts. These references were usually followed by reassuring fellow blogger comments that she should not feel that way because she “is doing the right thing”.

All of us at various times talk of “feeling guilty”. What is this guilt, where does the feeling come from and, more importantly, how do we attempt to deal with it?

Unlike animals (though I do not know how we prove it), all human beings have been given a conscience. God gave us it. Even tribesmen in Africa, who have not heard of Jesus Christ, have a conscience. Whatever your religious belief, you have one.

Through our experiences and nurturing gained through childhood we acquire an intrinsic sense of right or wrong. But in some people this can be overcome or suppressed – bad nurturing or bad teaching can overcome the sense of social conscience that is enshrined in us all.

Guilt is God’s way of letting us know that we have taken an action that goes against our conscience. It is the soul’s equivalent of the pain we feel in our body through our nerve endings – which God gave us in order to preserve our lives, to sense when we are in physical danger. Feeling guilt and, more importantly, acting appropriately when we feel it is how we survive spiritually.

I am not referring to the kind of “guilt” that we all profess to have when we eat too much chocolate!

I am also not referring to the kind of guilt that might be felt when, for example, we have unintentionally hurt (or even killed) someone through our reckless behaviour. There is nothing we can do about the latter to undo the damage and make us feel less guilty. In such a case we need experienced professional help to remove and diminish this kind of guilt.

What I am talking about here is the guilt that we feel when we are aware that we have wronged others by our actions. Something that we have done over which we had a choice of action – whether it was motivated by malice, selfishness, greed, revenge or other self-interest – actions that we perform, the motivation for which is seldom laudable.

Such actions inevitably lead us to a feeling of guilt – the echo of our unheard conscience.

“You have done wrong – you should put it right!” is what our conscience is telling us. “Don’t do whatever you are doing that is causing you to feel the guilt.”

However, modern “faddy” psychology has dictated that having a “guilt complex” is “bad” for people. Feeling guilt is a “bad thing”. Therefore, rather than examining and eliminating the action or redressing the action that is causing the guilt, we are advised that we should exorcise the guilt feeling.

We have been made to believe that if we can only live “guilt free” we can lead happy and unencumbered lives. Let’s just pursue our “happiness”, irrespective of what that might do to others.

Is it any wonder that we now live in a society where we all just pursue “what we want to do”, where one’s obligations to another human are now ignored altogether and all that matters is the pursuit of our human “rights”?

The modern “mantra” is all about goodwill to self, pursuing our own “happiness” at all costs.

The first such “self-help” step was taken in The Garden of Eden in the conversation between the Serpent (Satan) and Eve. Eve had been told to “leave that fruit untouched”. However, the Serpent led Eve to believe that it was her “human right” to taste the fruit.

Ever since Eve’s particular action we have believed that we know what is right or wrong for us, and have not allowed ourselves to be bothered or dictated to by our conscience or any sense of guilt.

To experience a feeling of guilt is because you know what you have done is wrong. But, instead of addressing it in the correct way and putting right the wrong, we try to get rid of our guilt, suppressing it, ignoring it and trying to off-load it by finding blame in someone else for the actions that led to it in the first place - in this way, thus "justifying" our action.

The fragility that was always there, both physical and in her soul, and which perversely was such a key element of why I fell in love with her, wanting to "protect" her, is still very much a part of her. It will never go away, "hard" as she tries to portray herself now.

Nevertheless, deep down, she is like a frightened rabbit in the headlights, trying to be strong, looking for any escape route, any "safe" haven to leap into. But not mine.

At every opportunity I've agonised over what is really going on deep down within her, rather than on the surface. Flirting with strangers on the Internet is merely camouflage to bolster her self-esteem. Her self-image always was, and still remains, very frail and volatile.

I imagine that she probably feels a "failure" in having so much and yet, in her eyes, appearing to make so little "success" of it. It's easy for her to therefore tell herself that the circumstances are wrong. Possibly she feels embarrassed by the fact that she has not created the (real) friends, the social life, the publishing deal, the easy children (otherwise referred to as her "pests"), in the country idyll, which our "comfortable" life together should have facilitated.

So she tries to reject and change the things that are easy to blame, rather than looking within herself. She blames the (married) life she wanted and the life I gave her. She blames me, but I know that I am not blameless.

I was certainly guilty of too much devotion to duty, to responsibility, of carelessness perhaps, of working too hard - not to take care of my own "self-worth" at the expense of hers. She has always been jealous of the fact that I was able to gain my self-esteem from my work, but was unable herself to find the same reward merely from the role of mother. I worked hard, not to bolster my self-worth, but out of necessity, of wishing to better our lives and that of our children (or so I thought), of wanting to make a significant improvement for them on what I had experienced myself. I was guilty of having too many other plates (work / clients / candidates / employees / house / step-children / our children / my aging parent(s), not necessarily in that order) to keep spinning all at once whilst trying to give her and the family the best of what I could; naively believing that she of all would "understand" the sacrifice I was making. That, by acting so, I was not putting her “last”, but “first”.

But I did not sufficiently recognise the sacrifice in her “self-worth” that she herself was making, did not appreciate the extent of her need for complete attention from me to bolster her perhaps and, because of her insecurity, that she needed and expected this regardless of what was going on in my “other life”.

One of her biggest fears is financial insecurity, the fear that she coined as “ending up living in a cardboard box". And there I was never believing that, by doing my all to ensure that she never had to face up to that particular fear and reality, that it would come back to bite me with such irony. Now I am able to apply so little concentration to my work for all the mental distraction going on, her worst fears may well come true for all concerned, credit crunch or no credit crunch, still married or divorced. Just rewards indeed?

She has it “all”, too late, as she no longer needs it, wants it. But I cannot just stop being there. And I cannot stop her spirit still being here, in my singular world with me.

You see, it does not matter what acceptable part of you one tries to be, there is always another side of you that you could and should have been to her. One can never "win". We both can only lose. I don't think that anyone outside of her can make her truly happy, just for a brief while perhaps, but then her demons will return.

Only by addressing her inner self and what makes her so, does she have a chance of gaining true "happiness". Not by looking for someone else to do it for her.

Finding and apportioning blame is not the answer. Looking for "happiness" elsewhere will not change the underlying person. She will simply transplant herself to a different set of circumstances, but the recipe for more disappointment will still be there.

Meanwhile, she will have lost her only true bedrock, "restricting and choking" as she appears to now view it, the family (both immediate and extended) that she so much craved to have, to be a part of something, to give her a sense of belonging - what she has not truly had before from such an early stage in her life. At the same time, being part of a family seems to go against her grain, because she feels that she has become a "belonging" and that somehow I "own" her, because I provide for her.

Am I the one that is confused here? Am I not the one that is truly “trapped” – trapped by and shackled to an inescapable treadmill, whilst she in fact is already free - to a greater degree, not bound by work, but only by family duty – to choose how she deploys the balance of her life?

This is the same woman who virtually in the same breath states to me: "I shall never know about men - you men just confuse me."

I remember only too well how miserable she was in her previous life when I met her and how she saw me as her "knight in shining armour" who came along to give her everything she wanted then - not least, at one stroke, bringing her into an “instant family” (with my other children, her step-children; then aged 11 and 8).

She at a stroke became no longer the nomad, the gipsy. Despite the attentions of a multitude of journalists and other male work acolytes, she had always felt herself to be the one on the outside, on her own – as she was then – yet another “mistress”, Mr Bastard’s.

If she had not at the time gained a husband and children (she wanted five when I met her by the way. Phew…..I did escape lightly!) she would have felt a failure then....…………….and so the cycle continues.

At the end of the day, short-term "fun and excitement" attraction factor apart that she seeks to find, ultimately like all of us, she will still need and want someone to trust. Trust is such a long word in her vocabulary and such a big need for her soul. But is someone one is likely to meet who spends their time flirting on the Internet, whatever their own circumstances, worthy of such trust? Will they stop this addiction once they have met and become “attached” to you?

She needs someone who will be capable and willing to truly support and take care of her, not just through words and from the romantic viewpoint. Someone, who unlike the romantic dream that is divorced from reality, who will no doubt revert back to being relatively "dull" again like everyone else once placed in a real context and laden with their own set of responsibilities.

She needs someone, who is willing to stand there beside her always, whatever is thrown at him and who will not run away. Someone willing to slay the demons and dragons (though she would have one believe that she does not have any that need slaying). Not merely someone who hides within the screen, at the end of a keyboard and does battle with a mouse (mind you, she has more experience of getting rid of real mice than I).

Unfortunately, this involves facing and dealing with reality, much harder than addressing a fantasy.

But she still remains both my fantasy and reality.

Like every other morning since my world was first shattered and broken, when I leave home to set off into my new world of "solitude", by the time I get to the office my legs have still turned to jelly and the pit of my stomach is knotted.

How do eight years of apparent love turn so suddenly to this? Will I be able to feel love for someone else, to trust someone again? Is this why I cling on so desperately to the memory of what I thought I had?

Everything about my world, my hopes, my dreams, my work has come to a complete stop and are going into reverse. Like when the earth stops spinning, and all is no longer held by gravity, things are falling off.

She admits to her own life having become stationary. But, mentally, she has already moved out. Moved on and left me behind. We are still in the same house, but alone, in our separate worlds.

But I can't help but think about her, even though her full presence is only now in my private world. All the time I think back on her many wonderful talents and qualities, our many good and loving times, and how I can never replace her.

I just wish I had told her enough, not that I didn't at all.

It's late in the day, the stable door is slammed shut and the horse has already bolted, but how much more attention can I give her than write a blog devoted to her for all the world to read?

Well, I could have taken up skywriting I suppose.

It's a bit of a reclamation yard the Internet it seems. There are some treasures to be found amongst old, discarded items and people do seem to look for them.

My wife found us an old fire-place at a reclamation yard. It looks rather forlornly at me as I sit and play the piano. But I can leave it behind me when I exit and close the door of the music room.

She also found something else on the Internet. But that's something I can't escape away from, wherever I go. It follows me, haunts me, everywhere. At work or at home. Day or night. Awake or asleep.

I hope someone comes looking for me in amongst the scrapheap.

Outside the window, here where I write, earlier on today there were some people with metal detectors in the ploughed field opposite. They are there regularly. Methodically searching.

They are looking for something.

Maybe they know that I am around somewhere nearby, but hopefully not in the ground.

Not yet.

Today I have had a preview of what it will be like when she goes. A reminder of life "on one's own" with nothing in particular to do, no-one to see. I remember it well from 10 years ago, in another place.

My wife went off at lunchtime with the children to see a lady friend of hers near London and to take them to the circus, possibly the cinema. They are not yet back.

I was hoping to try to see one of my brothers, who himself is going through a divorce process at present, to drown in our mutual sorrows. Talking to him and seeing his situation, actually "picks me up" would you believe? A great pair we would make around the dinner table!

His situation is worse than mine - his wife (who is French) wants to go off to France with their two children, to be close to her particular Mr Lost that she also found through the Internet. He's been off work on doctor's orders, stuffed full with anti-depressants. He finds it hard to sleep (on the couch). He could hardly find the energy to speak with me on the telephone, never mind get himself out of the house, he was so "tired".

I would have gone round to pick him up (about an hour and a half from here). But he declined. I went for some retail therapy instead and tried him again later in the afternoon. Still the same. I contemplated the idea of "going for a drink" on my own, but past memories told me it was too sad an option, so I decided to come home and talk to you kind people instead.

As I sit here, the following song by Burt Bacharach and Elvis Costello came to my mind. I'd like to share the lyrics with you at least, as you cannot hear my playing it on the piano:

This House Is Empty Now
Words and Music by Burt Bacharach and Elvis Costello (from the Album "Painted from Memory")
Copyright 1998 NEW HIDDEN VALLEY MUSIC and SIDEWAYS SONGS

These rooms play tricks upon you.
Remember when they were always filled with laughter?

So tell me how, how am I supposed to live without you?