Twice burned

My first husband died in my arms; my second one changed his mind about wanting children. I'm 40 and devastated. Plus: Why do married men kiss me?

By Cary Tennis

Oct 1, 2002 |

Dear Cary,

Ten years ago, I was an English teacher engaged to marry a doctor I'd loved since college. We had an adventurous, romantic relationship, fueled by a mix of the idealism of one's 20s and our own hard work, which suggested to us that we were going to have a very fine life. We reveled in each other; we relished our dingy apartment and ramen noodles because we knew we were lucky and wouldn't be without for long. Rob and I spent several of his residency rotations in developing countries, where he worked in free clinics and I helped local women learn to read. We enjoyed this so much that we planned to shape our married life around it, following in the footsteps of others we admired who'd raised worldly and self-possessed children overseas.

Four months before our wedding, he was killed when our bus went over a cliff in Guatemala. He died in my arms about an hour after the crash and was conscious for some of that time. Our conversation is crystalline in my memory -- he wanted me to promise him I would have a happy life and take care of his dog. Back at home, I lay on my mother's couch, went to grief counseling, returned the early wedding gifts, hollered at the universe, fretted that somehow my karma had caused this, bonded with the dog, stopped viewing myself as the wife who almost was, and finally got on with things.

Eventually I stopped comparing every man I met to Rob (who had, of course, become deified in my mind -- those who die young and in love at least get to spend eternity as beautiful memories). I also picked up a Ph.D., started a university job, volunteered in literacy initiatives overseas, earned a private pilot's license, joined a hiking club, took up photography, and valued my girlfriends.

When I was 34, I met Arthur. He's an avid mountain climber -- the kind who takes four months a year to climb peaks only airplanes are meant to see. We enjoyed traveling together, he sent flowers to my mother on her birthday, and he got along with the (by now very old) dog. He taught me to climb, and I took him flying. Two years into our relationship, he proposed. Arthur was as eager as I was to travel and continue our hobbies and, like me, hoped we'd have a child who enjoyed these things, too.

Then, on our first anniversary, he said he'd reconsidered his decision to have a child. That reconsideration deepened into an insistence on not having children and, in the last six months, a decision that perhaps he shouldn't have married in the first place. I should have seen it coming. He has a Ph.D. in physics, a field that profits from immense concentration and solitude; he was a bachelor until he was 42; he could ride in the car with me for six hours at a time without saying a word. He is kind to my family when they visit, but he refuses to waste his leisure time visiting them. He flies into a rage when I drop a pan or burn the soup. He prefers to eat his meals alone with a book. He backs out of every real estate deal we've entered, so we're still renting.

I believe him when he says it isn't me, but that he got married only to discover that he preferred Katharine Hepburn's advice to "live down the road and visit." I can't blame him -- how could he have known how he'd feel about being married until he was? I honestly believe he wasn't being disingenuous when he claimed to share my hearth-and-crib visions, but perhaps it was more something he thought he should do rather than something he wanted to do. Now, Arthur has said he's "willing" to remain married, but it's a chilly and untenable existence. He went to marriage counseling with me four times before denouncing it as "pseudoscience" and refusing to go back, even when I said it would help me tremendously.

I am devastated. I am not functioning; it's a good thing my job doesn't involve punching a clock. Last month, I spent 10 days locked in the apartment with the blinds drawn. I think it was some sort of sick experiment to see if someone would come looking. I damn near slept with a man in my flying club, and I still might. I feel indescribably lonely and horrid. I hate that I feel worse than I did when my fiancé died, for chrissakes. I cry so often I tell people I have pinkeye, but at the same time I know that compared with all of the devastation in the world, I have no good reason to feel sorry for myself. I've sought counseling and listened to the variations on the "Sure, you got a bum rap, but you're still young" theme.

But I am not young. I will be 40 soon, and the hearth-and-crib dream, simple as it seemed, is fast approaching impossible. Yet I don't understand the depths of my despair. Is it just a midlife crisis? The only real difference is that this time around I can't hope to meet a man and have a natural child. I had to re-envision and reinvent my whole life when Rob died, and I think I did so capably; why can't I this time? I can adopt or be a foster parent. I can date. I can sleep with the guy in my flying club. I can travel overseas and help teach women to read. I can become an eccentric professor who takes Elderhostel tours and talks to her cats. I am fully aware that I have no right to feel that life is not worth living but, you know, that is how I feel.

Hitting a Wall at 40

Dear Hitting a Wall,

Perhaps, for a while, you would benefit from doing nothing but grieving and tending to what may be serious depression. I think you need to give up trying to make your life work like a good Swiss watch and face the mess. Ignore your husband. He's going to be no help at all. Find a tough and intellectually rigorous psychiatrist who can help you through this. See if you can take a leave of absence. Accept that you need help and that sleeping with the guy in the flying club would just be a chilly charade.

Grieving and fighting depression is a lot of work, and with all your flying around and teaching people to read, you probably have never spent enough time on it to do it well. When I say grieve I don't mean grieving for that poor guy who went over the cliff with you in the bus. I mean grieving for the glittering dream of a perfect life you were foolish enough or idealistic enough to believe could come true. When the bus went over the cliff, you grieved for your fiancé, but staggered on, starry-eyed and invincible, toward the light, and you were betrayed again. But this time it is a more piercing betrayal because it is personal and more subtle; it has no exploding gas tanks and weeping Guatemalan Indian widows in colorful shawls; it is simply that a man you love turned out to be cold, aloof and imperious, and you're shocked by the barrenness of your life.

You may think now that since your husband has mistreated you, you're supposed to get up, dust yourself off, and found a school for the blind in Jakarta. That may be what Katharine Hepburn would do. But she was just an actress. In real life, when things fall apart, we sometimes get weepy and shut ourselves in, and the super calls a locksmith or, in some neighborhoods, a Jungian psychiatrist.

Here's another thing to consider: Just because some people strive to teach children to read and others strive to win big at the track doesn't mean that one form of compulsive striving is less painful than another. All human striving brings suffering. And, in fact, the hardest striving to give up is the kind that's cloaked in virtue. If you were a cat torturer, you could find plenty of people to help you quit. But if you're addicted to virtuous acts, who's going to take pity on you and help you recover? After all, your suffering looks like happiness and it's socially useful. Who's to say you're anything but an innocent victim with the best of intentions? Only your dark, truth-telling shadow can say.

I'm willing to bet that there is some messy, twisted madwoman in the attic who doesn't give two shits about teaching kids to read, who finds the professor a royal bore and would rather be playing cards with the maid, but she isn't allowed to speak. It's time for her to say how she's hated all these years being the good girl while anybody could see that beneath that world-saving missionary is a real woman racked with irrational passions.

You're at a crossroads. You need to ditch the physicist and get a psychiatrist who can help you face the tragic nature of your own striving and help you grieve for your own innocence.

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