My husband and I had been married for eight years when a casual conversation one night ended with him saying he felt disconnected from his friends and from me, and that he wanted to get into a car and drive off somewhere so he could leave behind all his responsibilities.
My husband loved his friends more than family and he had, I thought, loved me as well. I’d had no idea he was feeling this way, other than a lessening of hugs and kisses which I thought was related to the rigors of a new job. He had never brought up any problems he had or even hinted at any of these feelings when I mentioned he didn’t seem to be as affectionate anymore.
So I was alarmed by the sudden changes in him, and urged him to see a therapist. I asked if he would consider going to a couples’ therapist with me to work on what we were going through, and when he agreed, I made all the arrangements. He didn’t have a history of depression, either personally or in his family, but he sounded depressed and I was worried about him.
Less than two weeks later, after his second individual therapy session and within 10 minutes of our first couples’ counseling session, he said that he didn’t think there was any way of making our marriage work.
I did not take this news well. In fact, I cried, screamed, and swore. I thought we were going to counseling to try to make things better, I said. Why was he breaking this news to me now, in front of a complete stranger, and what was the point of us even coming to therapy together if he had already decided how things would be?
Because, he said, I just figured this out an hour ago and we had already made the appointment.
He moved out that night, and I was left grappling with what remained of my previously happy life. My husband had never volunteered any information about his feelings to me, and even the little information I now had was based on questions I had asked him. Apparently both of us, my husband felt, would be stronger people without the other. We had already tried, he thought, and failed. He was tired of making sacrifices, and by sacrifices, he meant being accountable to another person, having to tell another person when he would be home and where he was going, and having to plan his life with another person. He loved his new job, and hated the rest of his life.
It is a strange thing to go from being in a loving partnership, dividing the bills and chores, invited jointly to events, to suddenly being alone. What my husband sees as weakness — two people sharing a life, balancing work and enjoyment, and willingly making certain sacrifices, is what I saw as strength.
By necessity, you give up a part of your individuality when you get married. I gladly gave this up because in return, I got the chance to make myself a better person, one that was shaped by love, acceptance, and the sheer selflessness of learning to live with another person. My husband brought out the best in me, and now his leaving has brought out the worst.
I still don’t know if he is depressed and if the depression is clouding his real feelings, or if I’m just grasping for explanations and refusing to accept that he’s just been very, very good about hiding his feelings from me. I swing between wanting to call him and wanting to call a divorce lawyer, simultaneously worrying about him and weeping uncontrollably at the thought of my life without him.
If my husband, who can sound rational even when he is not, who is undergoing changes so drastic that no one who knows him can understand this, is depressed, I want to be there to support him. But right now I can only watch him push me away with his words and deeds while I wait.
I am not waiting for anything in particular — no specific event or miraculous occurrence that I expect to return my life to what it was before, only better and stronger. Instead, I am merely counting time. Day by day, hour by hour, I look at the clock and wait. One hour gone means one more hour I have survived with half my soul missing. These days, that is all that counts as strength.
When I arrived on my virgin flight on Virgin America at 7 AM, my first thought was, “This airline is AWESOME.”
As a frequent flyer of JetBlue Airways, I was used to seeing a personal TV monitor embedded in the seat in front of me, but Virgin America had touchscreens with a wide selection of movies and premium TV, an airplane chat room, computer games (the easy kind that required pressing only four buttons at a time, not 25), and to top it all off, Magnetic Fields on their music channel.
But by hour 3 of my flight to California, my excitement over the flight offerings had waned. I had already constructed an elaborate playlist of music and then not bothered to listen to it. The “email/text” option on the touchscreen was not yet enabled for inflight use, thus preventing me from emailing everyone I knew with such crucial information as, “I AM EMAILING FROM A PLANE!!!!” And though the airline had lots of movies I wanted to see, I didn’t think that paying $8 to watch one on a tiny screen less than a foot from my face was a good financial decision, given that I had elected not to pay $8 to watch the same movie in a first-run theater.
Finally, after I had finished reading the book I’d brought with me, I brought out my Nintendo DS. Apparently inspired by this sight, the kindergartner sitting next to me, who until now had been quietly mesmerized by his TV screen, decided to tell me about his own Nintendo DS. He had one just like mine, he said, and a white one which his father had owned but then given to him.
Not satisfied with this verbal explanation, he asked his mother to take out his DS so he could show me. He then explained how his SpongeBob SquarePants game worked, in the direct way of young children, by describing exactly what he was doing. This narration was accompanied by tilting the DS screen away from me and rapidly moving his stylus so that it covered the entire screen and I was unable to see anything.
Social intercourse has never been my strong point, so I was initially stymied as to how to indicate my interest — and later, my desperately growing disinterest. It turns out, though, that a conversation with a 6-year-old boy requires only that you glance occasionally at him, say “Uh-huh,” and “Oh, neat,” and “How many lives do you get?” and you have won his attention forever.
Let me repeat myself — you have won his attention FOREVER. If you are anxious to appear polite, as I was, you will feign interest to the point of suddenly finding yourself trapped in an endless monologue about the pros and cons of something called Bakugan.
From what I could determine, Bakugan are basically Transformers with game cards, but instead of transforming from vehicles to robots, Bakugan transform from random shapes into other random shapes. Apparently this is entertaining.
The little boy next to me proceeded to explain and demonstrate every attribute of all eleven Bakugan he owned, even though by the third Bakugan I had stopped pretending to listen and was openly jotting notes about our conversation in my notebook.
This did not deter the young boy, who continued to explain which of his Bakugan was his favorite, and then the next favorite, and then the next one, and then he related the following insightful story about a Bakugan whose name sounded like Boba Fett:
Boy: “He took off his eyes and put them on his tail!”
Me: “Ew!”
Boy: “I know!”
He then acted out various Bakugan battles in which he had participated in the past. These demonstrations appeared to primarily involve smashing two toys together. Also, and this is just a guess, I believe he was farting during my entire conversation with him.
Finally noticing my distress, the boy’s mother slipped a pair of headphones on him so that he could watch TV and presumably stop attempting to talk to me. Unfortunately, his TV screen was tuned to an episode of Pokeman, which meant that the boy was obligated to recite the names and descriptions of every Pokeman he could remember to me.
“How many Pokeman are there?” I ventured to ask finally, interrupting him mid-stream.
“A lot,” came back the grim answer.
He had, he explained, a book describing all the Pokeman and it ended on page “Thirty Hundred.” This was indeed a lot of Pokeman.
Once we approached California, the TV screens blanked out so the boy shifted his conversation accordingly, to the subject of his cat(s).
“You know why I named my cat Squeaky? Because it makes a noise like SQUEAK!”
and
“One time she took off her collar and slept NAKED! I said to her, ‘why are you sleeping in my bed? This is not YOUR bed!’”
and
“One time my cat got sick and almost DIED!”
Thinking this last statement referred to his current cat, I asked, “Is she better now?”
“Oh no,” he said, matter-of-factly. “She’s in a box now. She’s dead.”
How does one end a conversation with a child? The answer is, you don’t. All you can do is wait for the flight to end when you both venture forth on separate journeys — he to visit his siblings, and you to demonstrate your newfound knowledge to unsuspecting people with, “Say, have you heard about this thing called Bakugan? Let me tell you about it…”
I logged into WordPress today, and it has already greeted me with, “WordPress 2.8 is available! Please update now.”
I JUST UPDATED TWO WEEKS AGO. This is why sometimes, I hate you, WordPress.