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“You're leaving again?” my husband asked, his hands tensely gripping the steering wheel. “I guess I'll have to make plans with someone else this weekend.”
“Don't give me the Leo guilt-trip,” I responded coldly, staring at my reflection in the side mirror as I applied lipgloss. “Since when do we do anything on the weekends?”
The truth is we don't. The truth is we hardly have anything in common. Someone recently pointed out how interesting it was that I had a relationships column but rarely talked about my own. So here it is: the truth.
My husband and I have been married for almost two years. Once, we thought we had everything in common. In fact, before we got married, we sat down and discussed the terms of service of our relationship. But people are not static. We grow and change, and with us, our expectations, desires, goals, ideals, and dreams change, too.
We had changed. Sometimes change brings you closer, sometimes change sends you in different directions. It's a matter of how much you're willing to give.
He had discovered that he wanted a wife that would stay beside him, have a job, but dedicate herself to him and his career. I tried to be her—as a freelance writer, I could accommodate him, but I wanted my own career, one that would continue to take me places and expose me to new things and people. Telecommuting was simply not doing it for me. Never knowing whether I would be in our house in Arizona or California made any form of connecting with any other person in my life nearly impossible.
For a year and a half, I lived in limbo trying to be bend myself like origami into something I wasn't, watching opportunities for my own development come and go. When I finally asked my husband to support me in my own growth, he refused to compromise.
It's heartbreaking to give so much to a relationship and find that the person for whom you've compromised so much is unwilling to budge an inch for you.
So I started leaving. Honolulu, Lima, Las Vegas—I racked up the frequent flier miles. In these places, away from home, I could be myself.
But you can't live your life on a permanent vacation. Eventually you have to come home and face reality.
“Let me take you out on Valentine's day,” my husband told me over the phone at some point over the weekend.
I said yes—but only if he showed up with my favorite flower. A simple request. Any man who knows me for more than a minute knows that among my many obsessions with flora, the tulip has my heart. And we'd had a conversation just a few days prior about it, for some other reason.
But he couldn't remember what it was.
That Valentine's Day, my friend Atherton Bartelby wrote about an online experiment by Paperwhite Studio that asked visitors to fill in the blank in the phrase “I love you more than __________.”
“Could I, if I were in a relationship, be able to honestly fill in this blank?” he asked himself.
Someone had filled in the blank with the word “myself.”
I love you more than I love myself. I thought about this. I loved my husband more than my country, which I left when he asked me to come to him in the United States. I loved him more than my friends, whom I left behind to be with him. I loved him more than my own trajectory, which I changed to conform to his.
I did all these things. I loved him more than I loved myself.
And now?
Atherton had posted a quote by Joan Didion from Slouching Towards Bethlehem, which I had to read thrice to understand:
To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference.
If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out—since our self-image is untenable—their false notion of us.
We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gist for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give. Of course I will play Francesca to
