Diaries

I had 2 resolutions: I wanted to get in shape, and I wanted to deal with my marriage.

On New Year’s Eve, 2014, my best friend and I exchanged resolutions, and I made two: I wanted to get in shape, and I wanted to deal with my marriage. My husband and I had been married for almost thirty years, and, as I told my friend that evening, we’d enjoyed a good marriage for the first twenty. Then we started to move in different directions, and over several years, our relationship slid into mediocrity. In my mind, he had lost his sense of adventure and generosity and seemed negative about all manner of things.

Now we lived separate lives side by side

united mostly by our love for our daughter. But she would finish high school in June and leave soon after that for university. What would keep us together then?

Establishing a fitness schedule proved a simpler New Year’s project than approaching my husband about the state of our marriage. By February, I was already on track with a regular running schedule and feeling more fit, but I had not yet said a word to my husband.

One day, I flipped on the radio in my car. A man was speaking — I don’t know who he was — about couples growing old miserably together-couples who’d long since grown apart, or, worse, harboured real animosity toward each other. I kept thinking about his words.

I respected and cared about my husband, and I knew he was a good person.

 

 

But what if I lived for thirty more years? What if I only lived for one more year? Either way, I didn’t like the idea of spending that precious time in a relationship that had gone stale.

He and I were both finance professionals and had enjoyed successful careers. Now we were in our fifties. I’d asked him how he pictured retirement, and though we’d once agreed, I could see that his priorities had changed — and the life he longed for sounded lovely, just not for me. I liked my career and engaged in community building. I sat on a number of boards, and I wanted to do more, working with organizations I believed in. I wanted to continue enjoying adventures and travel, experience new places, and hike up new mountains. I realized my husband was no longer interested in the same things.  We simply had different ideas of what a fulfilling post-career life looked like.

By March, I planned each evening to broach the topic of our marriage the next morning, but it never seemed like the right time. Finally, one day mid-month, I told him I wanted to sit down to talk about our marriage and our future. It wasn’t my style to spring this conversation on him out of the blue, so we planned ahead for a time when our daughter would be out.

When the time came, we sat down at the kitchen table. We were both calm and collected. We had rarely fought in three decades, and we were not prone to raising our voices. We never accused each other or insulted each other or swore at each other. R and I were both composed as a rule, certainly not cold, but never out of control emotionally. We approached life’s problems calmly and systematically; these were traits we’d always had in common.

I said, “This doesn’t feel like a great partnership anymore. I think we need to consider going to counseling or separating.”

To my surprise, he said I was overreacting — that we were just in a funk. I’d assumed he was just as dissatisfied and frustrated as I was.  Our relationship was in a funk, I agreed, and had been for quite some time. I didn’t want to go on that way. He asked if I was angry because he hadn’t congratulated me on my recent appointment to a high-profile board. It wasn’t a great sign, I agreed, that he had failed to comment on such an appointment. But I wasn’t angry. I just didn’t want to live with a man I barely spoke with. I really couldn’t believe that he was content to leave things the way they were — didn’t he want more? I asked him to consider whether he wanted to go to counseling, or to separate. For me, those were the only viable options.

 

Something had to change.

The next day, he surprised me again. He said he’d made up his mind: he wanted to “separate-no counselling-the sooner, the better”.

Diaries

Verbal, Economic, and Physical Abuse

You can read Part One here:

When my husband and I decided to separate, our daughter still had three months of high school, along with final dance competitions-the culmination of years of dedication. She studied and practiced whenever she wasn’t at school.
Of course, we didn’t want to burden her with the shock and stress of our separation while she was under so much pressure, so we agreed to wait until the end of June. Then we would tell her about our plans.
Until then, we’d continue to live together as always, which was not as strange as I might have expected. We had been amicable but distant for years already, so we just kept behaving the same way. Even sleeping on our own sides of the bed, with little interaction, felt better than upending her world.

When he and I were home without our daughter, I tried to discuss with him how we should proceed. We were both well-versed financial professionals (he a partner at one of the large professional services firm, and I running my own corporate finance advisory firm); surely, we could sit down and divide our assets and liabilities fairly. Whenever I tried to broach the topic of dividing household contents, he became agitated. One day, when I asked which of our furnishings he’d like to keep, he yelled at me, stabbing his finger at me.

“You initiated this!” he told me. “Go f*** yourself!”

His anger showed itself more and more, until he was yelling at me regularly, once even in front of our daughter, his face contorted with anger. One day, as we drove home from an event of our daughter’s, discussing logistics of our separation, he yelled uncontrollably at me again. We drove into the garage, and as I got out of the car, he came around the front, charging at me with his head forward, yelling and his shoulders back. I believe he was close to hitting me when I pushed his face away. He stole himself, turned and entered the house.

For the last three months of our marriage,

 

I watched my husband of nearly thirty years transform.

Clearly, he was overcome with rage, and that baffled me. He had chosen for us to separate. He had agreed that our marriage wasn’t thriving. He knew I had no malicious intentions toward him; I had imagined an amicable and simple split. I thought we would remain friendly, that over the years to come we’d meet for birthdays with our grown daughter and we would wish each other well as we moved forward in our own directions. I was truly shocked as this person, whom I had known so well for so long, became someone else. Someone whose actions I could not understand and could not predict.

Several months into our separation, I made a list of eleven separate actions that he would have found obtuse when we separated and that he now engaged in shamelessly.

They included verbal, economic, and physical abuse, and mistreatment of our daughter and housekeeper.

 

The theft of my personal belongings, misstating financial information to the bank and lying about buying a suit for no apparent reason.

 

 I brought that list to a psychologist, because I needed help understanding how a person could undergo such alarming changes. And how could I reverse the trend. I will not narrate all eleven of those incidents here, but I will recount a few of them-partly because they led to the nightmare process that unfolded over the next few years, and partly because I want to show the aspect of the divorce that others may not anticipate.