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I've previously confessed in this space that I find marriage improbable, slightly ridiculous, and also impossibly hot. And I reached that conclusion not as a sheltered rube leading a charmed, naive life, but as a survivor of divorce.
So try to picture the directions in which my mind raced when I read last week's Modern Love column in the New York Times, titled "Those Aren't Fighting Words, Dear." Author Laura A. Munson describes to us in great detail the bounty of her 20-year marriage and her happiness with it, right up until her husband declared he was done. And she refused to believe him:
Here's a visual: Child throws a temper tantrum. Tries to hit his mother. But the mother doesn't hit back, lecture or punish. Instead, she ducks. Then she tries to go about her business as if the tantrum isn't happening. She doesn’t "reward" the tantrum. She simply doesn’t take the tantrum personally because, after all, it's not about her.
Let me be clear: I'm not saying my husband was throwing a child's tantrum. No. He was in the grip of something else — a profound and far more troubling meltdown that comes not in childhood but in midlife, when we perceive that our personal trajectory is no longer arcing reliably upward as it once did. But I decided to respond the same way I'd responded to my children's tantrums. And I kept responding to it that way. For four months.
Munson goes on to detail the following months, during which her husband was given a free pass to come and go as he pleased. He, in response, played the petulant child to the hilt, forgetting her birthday and eschewing family events in favor of... well, we're never really sure what. But Munson's story has a happy ending; the husband returns to his family, whole again, with a newfound appreciation of what he already had (and, one assumes, gratitude towards his longsuffering wife).
Munson tells us in no uncertain terms that this is a success story. She is able to avoid taking his "personal crisis" as an indictment of herself, she determines that he needs time to work through whatever's going on, and she gives him the space without letting him off the hook of their marriage. And she claims to have done so with eyes wide open and dignity intact.
By the time I arrived at the happy ending of the story, I wasn't sure what to think.
On the one hand, I sort of wanted to applaud Munson for being perhaps the only person on the planet to have a strong enough sense of self to manage to withstand the ego-battering a rejecting spouse supplies, and to do so with such apparent clarity.
On the other hand, I won't lie -- part of me wanted to shake her and say, "Hello? Instead of giving him a divorce, you just gave him carte blanche to be a jerk? Because why, exactly? And the happy ending is supposed to make us believe this was a good and strong choice, rather than desperate cowardice?"
Please understand, I don't know this woman or her husband or her marriage. I have no information beyond what she wrote. But I found myself unable to reconcile what I'd read. It seemed both an unlikely tale of incredible strength and a sad story of... I'm not even sure. Settling. Refusal to let go. Denial.
I've not been able to stop mulling it over in my head. Why has this story grabbed me so?
Not surprisingly, I suspect it pokes at me because there's an argument to be made that I decided to end my first marriage while my husband was in the midst of "a profound and far more troubling meltdown" such as Munson describes. One that was intensely personal. One that arguably had nothing at all to do with me.
In my case, though, it had everything to do with me, because it affected me, it affected my children, and it rocked our entire household. Though she glosses over it, I fail to believe Munson's children weren't similarly affected. How does one separate out a "personal issue" when it touches the entire family? Should I -- according to Munson's logic -- have given my ex-husband time and space and unlimited understanding while he went and "worked it out?" How much time does one allow for that? How much patience is too much or not enough?
I don't have any answers. Just as I believe I made the right choice for
