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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
Dealing with a life-threatening illness, resisting the urge to call off the wedding, searching for the desire to have children, and other tales from the front lines of marriage.
Jan 28, 2004 | Trials of the heart
My first marriage at age 18 was a predictable disaster. Coming out of an emotionally abusive family, I settled for the first person to say "I love you" without further questioning. My first husband had the emotional distance of my absent father and the abrupt rages of my depressive mother. After two children I woke up and left him, but only after he had an affair. The physical and verbal abuse wasn't enough to make me leave for good -- only his rejection of me got me out the door.
Many years passed -- 15 -- before I was willing to take a chance on marriage again. I had grown accustomed to single life and autonomy. I had the control over my environment that I had lacked in my childhood and first marriage. Now I was willing to share that control and to trust that this man would also keep our home peaceful and safe.
My second husband embodies many of the qualities missing in my early life and first marriage. He is funny, gentle and kind, he never yells at me, never insults me, is always willing to listen to any complaint I have and work out a solution. He makes me feel sexy and loved. The first few years went by quickly and happily. I never took for granted the peaceful way we worked out our differences. I knew what a rare and precious thing that was.
Then disaster struck. I was diagnosed with heart disease and immediately needed a quadruple bypass operation. I was 42, the same age as my mother when she had her bypass operation. I had thought I might make it to my 50s before the disease that killed both my parents struck me. My lifestyle was somewhat better -- I was vegetarian and a nonsmoker. I thought this would buy me time.
I am 14 years older than my husband. He was not expecting this old-age disease in our young marriage. He was in shock. He tried to soldier on. I tried not to burden him with my very real fear of dying. He tried not to burden me with his fear of my death or disability. We stopped talking in the deep, connecting way that keeps a marriage alive. And so our marriage began to die, slowly, almost imperceptibly at first. We gradually found ourselves going through the motions.
We knew we needed counseling, but we couldn't afford it. We would make feeble attempts at connecting as if trying to act out a memory of the love we once felt so keenly. Deep down we were encased in our shrouds of fear, my fear of dying or of being abandoned if my disease made me too needy or disabled, his fear of losing me or of becoming an around-the-clock caregiver.
Finally our financial life improved, we moved to a cheaper apartment, and we looked forward to finding a counselor and getting the help we needed. It was at this unexpected moment that my husband became drawn to a co-worker and began to move toward having an affair. Fortunately, the woman decided against it and I caught on to what was happening almost simultaneously. This forced us to deal with our problems, finally.
We are now in couples counseling and making progress. I am trying to find the faith to trust that he won't have an affair or abandon me if I have another heart attack. (I had one right after my surgery.) He is trying to find the faith to trust his ability to handle whatever happens to me. We are talking again and sharing our fears instead of bottling them up. I feel like I am falling in love again.
I can understand the temptation of divorce, and I have felt it myself. I can easily imagine creating a fortress in which no one can ever hurt me again. Yet I believe that there are lessons I can learn from sticking through these hard times that I will never learn by running away. It takes more than love to make a marriage work, and yet that love is what keeps me trying and keeps me believing our marriage is worth saving. I still love the kind and gentle man I married, and I know he still loves me.
-- T. McDaniels
Hoping for the best
We definitely fulfill the old adage that opposites attract. He's quiet; I'm not. He's rational; I'm way down at the other end of the emotional extreme. He is a computer geek; I'm still trying to find my desktop. He comes from parents who showed us the video of their wedding -- laughing and rewinding the good parts; my parents don't even have pictures of that ill-fated day. I've lived through three divorces -- two of my parents, one of my own; he was raised in a religion that believes that marriage is a sacrament.
I was talked into marriage once -- he needed health insurance, I needed to feel loved, and I needed to change him. One thing we didn't need was the standard definition of marriage; we were going to define it on our own. His mother, an ordained psychic minister, signed our marriage license and we went out to dinner at our favorite Chinese restaurant. After a year of coming home to empty beer bottles and a blank gaze on the couch -- not to mention the other women he never could admit to -- I called it off. We filed the papers together, spending the afternoon poring over books at the law library. I threw my dog in the car and cried all the way to my new life in New Mexico. He hopped back into bed with his 19-year-old of the moment.
After my one disaster I truly believed that I would become that eccentric 80-year-old who lives down the street, pecking away at a typewriter with the eternal cigarette hanging out of my mouth, a thermos of coffee and whiskey at my side and 17 dogs lying at my feet. My best friend signed on to become my 80-year-old roommate. Then I met him. He showed up at my door with a picnic blanket in his backpack and it wasn't even a date. He let my dog come along. He kissed me softly in the back of a noisy bar. I sneaked into his bed that night and hugged his long, warm body close.
He was patient with my pain. He held me when the tears shook me. Slowly, I began to understand what it means to be loved. We were driving through Northern California -- the redwoods were swaying, there wasn't a cloud in the sky -- when I brought up the idea of marriage. I'd been trying to think of a way to approach the subject for months. He'd been asking his parents for advice on how to propose. Moments later, we were holding hands tightly between the gearshift. We shopped for a ring in San Francisco. This time I was going to do it right and I truly believed I knew what it meant to be ready.
