Diaries
Diary 2: Chapter One
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”.
