Some thoughts, early in the morning…
I’m still going through my little journey of change. People who are intimate touchstones in my life won’t be surprised by this. It’s actually a bit of an annual event, this retreat into myself, and was even a biannual event when confronted with the stress of law school. In response to complaints about my sudden social disappearance, I used to tell Janean that I was feeling very Zen these days. This announcement was always met with groans and more complaints as my Zen phases were synonymous with me suddenly becoming a pain in the ass as I refused invitations to the bar, locked myself in my apartment with my books, and systematically deleted all of my Facebook photos.
In reality, these phases aren’t very Zen. I do tend to lean towards complete simplicity, shedding my worldly possessions and breaking off all connections, but I don’t do this to achieve a balanced inner peace. I do this because the chaos and clutter of my life seems overwhelming all of a sudden and it’s all I can do not to just throw a blanket over my head. In truth, these phases would be more accurately described as having a nervous breakdown in slow motion, the only cure for which is time and Facebook-photo-destruction.
So why am I telling you all this? Wouldn’t the very nature of these moods (my strong desire to pull away from the world until the dust settles) mean that I’d be less likely to pour my heart out on this random public space? Well, yes. That’s why I haven’t been blogging much. But I have been receiving emails from readers even without blogging. Many of them have questions about other things, a few were gentle inquiries as to why I wasn’t writing, and a couple were complaints that I wasn’t supplying anything to entertain them and where the hell was I? I received one yesterday, though, that really snagged my attention and brought me back to the computer. It’s this email that I really wanted to write about today.
How’s that for the longest introduction in the world? I feel like Victor Hugo.
This email is from a friend. Granted, I do not “know” this person in my “real” life (excuse my “overuse” of quotations there), but this person is a long time reader and someone that I’ve had many conversations with on another forum. So while we do not actually know each other, there is a comfortable intimacy in discourse between us and, as such, she felt fine making inquiries into my personal life. Her email, gentle but blunt, simply asked if Kyle and I were having marital problems and if we were thinking about getting a divorce.
The email struck me as funny at first. With all of the unemployment and non-direction and living with my parents that’s been going on in my life, leaping straight to “are you getting divorced?” seemed to be quite the stretch. Then again, Kyle and I are still in that starter marriage part of our relationship timeline and we both have many friends who took vows and found themself divorced before the anniversary of those vows caught up to them. So maybe the inquiry wasn’t so strange?
In a simple answer, no, we’re not having problems. My life is chaotic and overwhelming in its sheer lack of importance, but Kyle is still the thing I’m holding onto to steady myself.
Honestly, if we were having problems, I would not be above writing about them on this public space, provided Kyle didn’t mind. We don’t have a Leave it to Beaver marriage and there’s no sense in holding it out as one. I once read a quote that someone had put up that said, “We have the greatest prenuptial agreement in the world. It’s called Love.”
I found that quote to be offensive on two levels. One, (as a lawyer) that’s just crap planning if you have any assets going into a marriage. Two, (as a wife) it would be arrogant for me to spend the rest of my life dependent on the emotions that we were feeling when he slipped the ring onto my finger. Things change, people change, and it isn’t too often that people walk into a marriage saying, “I doubt this will work out, but what the hell.” There’s a whole lot of love that precedes a whole lot of divorces. It’s unfair to assume that someone who is divorced just didn’t love the other person enough or wasn’t loved in return. Like marriage, there’s more to divorce than love.
That being said, I will of course qualify prior statements by saying that I don’t believe Kyle and I will get divorced and we didn’t get a prenuptial agreement either. Of course, neither of us own anything or have any real prospects, so our agreement would have just been a note to ourselves that said, “You want out of this? Well, maybe you should go home and try a little harder.”
You know, we’re almost to our one year anniversary, a thought that sends up a flutter of panic when I realize that I may only have 70 or 80 more years with Kyle and I’ve lost this first one so quickly. It’s been an amazing journey, this marriage stuff. I’m not one of those people who believes that you really get married on the day of your wedding. I feel like that giant party is a joyful celebration of the start of a really long walk. It’s in the days and weeks and months and years that follow that you start to knit together with someone, joining up a thread at a time, getting closer so that you will be stronger together when life tests you.
Our marriage is doing very well for only having one year behind it. It’s still a green, puny sprout of a thing, but we’re doing what we can to keep it healthy. You know, my husband is something of a physical hypochondriac, constantly concerned that we’ve got this or that illness or that we’re showing symptoms of chronic and life-threatening diseases. Heaven help our children on days of runny noses or bumped heads.
I, on the other hand, am something of a relationship hypochondriac. The first time I sense that we’re drifting apart or not truly communicating or snapping at each other a bit too much, I start Googling marital problems and imagining all of the horrible things that could happen to us if we don’t get back on the same page. The result of our hypochondriac double-teaming is that we take more vitamins and pills than you’d even believe and at least once a day we have earnest, soul-bearing conversations that are all full of eye contact and validating statements.
Is it overkill? Oh, definitely, on both accounts. But, it reminds me of something I recently read:
The average couple is unhappy six years before first attending therapy, at which point, according to “The Science of Clinical Psychology,” the marital therapist’s job is “less like an emergency-room physician who is called upon to set a fracture that happened a few hours ago and more like a general practitioner who is asked to treat a patient who broke his or her leg several months ago and then continued to hobble around on it; we have to attend not only to the broken bone but also to the swelling and bruising, the sore hip and foot and the infection that ensued.”
We may get the occasional emotional fracture, but you can bet your ass that I’ll have us knee deep in relationship books and marital counseling before you can even blink. And I’ll probably be blogging about it.
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Some thoughts, early in the morning…I'm still going through
my family came to phoenix the end of may. we shopped, went out to eat, went swimming and my mom and i played tennis almost everyday!! then my dad, andy and kel went back to utah and my mom and grandma stayed for another week which was more shopping, tennis and food!
at our clubhouse….
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