Bad Marriage

2005-07-18T22:34:00.000-04:00

Well it has been a long time and maybe I will pick it up again. Stopped because blogging about the day to day grind became a grind in itself; the hoped for relief from writing just disappeared and in itself turned into yet another required task at a time when there was too many tasks and not enough smiles. But life has taken a very pleasant turn. Settled into an apartment I bought in

2004-11-22T14:40:00.000-05:00

A portion of a telephone conversation with Wife earlier today: Wife: “I don’t want this to happen.” (this being divorce) Me: “Let’s look at it realistically. Our marriage is broken.” W: “I don’t agree. It has lots of problems but others have worse and they stick it out”. M: “C’mon. We haven’t slept in the same bedroom for a year and a half. I tell that to people and to my

2004-11-21T17:50:00.000-05:00

A remarkable thing happened about a week ago. Like a veil lifting from my eyes, the depression that had been laying on me for the past four years lifted. Just like that, the gray wet blanket that had been lying on my head was gone. What is left? Feelings of deep sadness and fatigue mostly, but also an ability to feel much more keenly than had been allowed to me over the past several years.

2004-11-11T22:21:00.000-05:00

We finally did it. Broke the news to Child. Sunday morning, sat Child down on the coach next to the favorite stuffed animal, and broke the news. The second worst day of my life, only bested (?) by the day my father died from an aggressive cancer at the ripe old age of 54, and a day that I am sure that will live in Childs memory in fine detail for decades to come. Wife and I had

2004-10-31T21:18:00.000-05:00

S sent an email asking “What would have been the one thing that could have convinced you to stay?” <>To summarize the answer – If Wife had remained more or less the woman I married and not turned into a stranger after Child was born the marriage would still be alive and well. I loved that woman, wanted to spend my life with her. Everything she represented herself to be turned out to be

2004-10-24T21:17:00.000-04:00

Busy week and progress is being made. Two major events this week and lots of musing. Visited with the Divorce Lawyer in the middle of the week. Had a serious conversation with Wife, that she instigated, about the future where we both approached the discussion like rational adults. And for the first time in months I feel like at some point in my life I may be able to really smile again. To

2004-10-17T21:14:00.000-04:00

<>Rhoda left some interesting comments to my post of October 3. They are good probing questions. To respond… The “buddy” question… How to be your child’s parent when you are allotted limited time with them is the million-dollar question. While it is more important to me than ever to have a warm loving relationship with Child, I fully intend to be a parent while enjoying

2004-10-11T21:12:00.000-04:00

I had drinks earlier this evening with a friend whose husband passed away in late August. Actually, to be more precise, he committed suicide. She found him hanging in the basement of their summerhouse and tried to revive him. My friend finds herself a widow at the age of 45. I can’t imagine the pain and swirl of emotions she is dealing with. Fortunately, they had (have) no children so on

2004-10-10T22:02:00.000-04:00

Here I am, about three solid weeks into the trial separation. Finally settling into the groove after a couple of weeks of craziness. I still sleep over the house once or twice a week, just did last night (Saturday night) to continue the fiction of marriage for Child and to live up to agreement with Wife that this is a trial separation. Random thoughts and reflections on the trial separation

2004-10-03T22:37:00.000-04:00

Just a quick update before bed. Wife’s Lump has subsided to grain of rice size and She is relaxing about the whole thing. Wife has follow up doc’s appointments this week but the panic is gone. I went home from the airport and spent the evening, sat on the couch with her. She seemed to appreciate it. We also spent a lot of time together this weekend as a

2004-09-28T22:51:00.000-04:00

May the great bird of the universe shit on your head. The cosmic wheel – what goes around comes around. Every action has an equal but opposite reaction. Truer words were never spoken. So I finally get it all together, find a sublet, engineer the move out, start getting settled in. Do it without alarming Child who thinks I am on extended business trips. Spend four, yes four,

2004-09-16T21:16:00.000-04:00

I am back. And what a summer it has been. Cutting to the chase, Wife and I are starting a trial separation next week. I have signed a two month lease for a furnished sublet about twenty minutes away from our home which starts on the 20th. I am moving out next week. We have agreed to not tell our 5 year old Child, using the explanation of ‘business trips’ that are longer than the norm. I

2004-04-30T23:04:00.000-04:00

I have decided to stop posting for a while. My blog is by design and intent a single issue forum, a one sided particular perspective on an issue near and dear to my heart. As I think about future topics for posts, I can’t help but feel that the whole blog is become a bit ‘whiney’, and there is nothing more annoying than a whiner. I have to consider whether to stop blogging on this topic all

2004-04-16T21:07:00.000-04:00

Wife has been making a major play lately to save the marriage. Unfortunately for both of us, she has blown through about four and a half years of good will from me and I feel dead to her efforts. Twice in the past month we have had ‘the conversation’ where I have told her that I am totally fed up with her actions and our marriage and that I think we should separate. She used every argument

2004-03-31T21:03:00.000-05:00

I met with a divorce attorney last week for about an hour and a half and several hundreds of dollars. What an odd experience. In my professional life, I spend a lot of time with lawyers, personally spending in the low six figures every year on corporate legal counsel. The lawyers work for me in the context of business deals I do, and only rarely do the issues devolve to bare fisted fighting,

2004-03-27T21:10:00.000-05:00

Cinnamongirl left a long response to my last post in the comments window. She talks about the mental illness that she suffers with and takes exception with many of the things that I said. Her post is very passionate and in part attacks me and in part attacks my friend. I am fortunate to not suffer from mental illness, though I suppose if you looked through the DSM III long enough, we would

2004-03-23T21:21:00.000-05:00

I have a friend, a business colleague but not a co-worker, that I get together with every couple of weeks to play a racquet sport that we are both fairly good at and then have a couple of beers. We have been doing this for years and have become good friends. My friend is very successful in his profession, enjoys the respect of his peers, and is financially well off. He married quite young to a

2004-03-22T00:03:00.000-05:00

Random and varied musings to start spring. I have an appointment with a divorce lawyer this week for a consultation. Wife and I are still together, things improving somewhat, but I had set up the appointment a few weeks ago and am going to spend an hour and a few hundred bucks to hear from a pro what I should think about if things go badly. Better to be prepared. Cousin told me that we had to

2004-03-14T21:18:00.000-05:00

Things go from bad to weird. I dropped the bomb that we should separate for a while, and she has responded with a full frontal effort to save the relationship. Touching. Unfortunately I may have passed a tipping point in getting the state where leaving Child, Home (which I really like), Stability, Money, and Wife behind seemed favorable to another fight in our dirty little war. For now I am

2004-03-09T21:48:00.000-05:00

I almost pulled the trigger tonight. For the past bunch of days, Wife has been asking what’s wrong – she senses that something is up. When I have been home, which has not been often lately due to business travel and another ski weekend which she declined to attend, I have been withdrawn and not communicative. Generally, I have avoided the question with short non-answers, but on the way home

2004-03-08T22:07:00.000-05:00

Thank you to each of you who have taken the time to email or leave a thoughtful comment. I started this blog as a way of talking out loud about my experience of living within a troubled marriage; in a sense, engaging in my own talking therapy without sitting in somebody’s office for 45 minutes each week. I didn’t really expect responses, but the notion of writing to a diary that only gets read

2004-03-05T16:44:00.000-05:00

As things deteriorate in any situation, a person naturally starts evaluating alternatives. This is true whether it is a business deal (consider hiring a lawyer or Tony Soprano), sitting in the stands during the middle of a 10-0 rout of the home team (consider leaving or buying a lot more beer), or living in a bad relationship (consider leaving, start an affair, or start checking out the ladies

2004-02-18T11:26:00.000-05:00

A few years back, I lived and worked for a time in a rural and mountainous part of the country. As part of my work, I got to know some ranchers, farmers, and building contractors – typical Sam Shepard types in their demeanor and outlook. One day I got to talking with a subcontractor who owned a heavy equipment and road building company and for some reason or another the conversation turned to a

2004-02-14T15:39:00.000-05:00

About ten months ago, when Wife and I were at a really low point, I concluded that desperate times require desperate measures. I started cruising the Salon/Nerve personals site, looking for somebody who could possibly be interested in a very discrete liaison. Understand that in my years of marriage to Wife as well as the (mercifully) briefer time married to Practice Wife (obviously practice

2004-02-03T20:59:00.000-05:00

I have several good friends and business associates who are from India. They have all moved to the US at various times in the past five to ten years and each of whom is in an arranged marriage. Some of the couples seem to have developed real love and affection for each other while others barely like each other. Based on conversations and observation, if you were to create a graph whose x axis

2004-01-31T23:38:00.000-05:00

“I'm getting married in a month, I've got to say that hope your site is a sham. It's pathetic a (sic) dumb to stay with someone you can't stand. Get a divorce.” This is the complete text of an email I received earlier this evening from a lady. Thanks for the thoughtful and eloquent advice. If you read more than one or two lines of my blog, I hope that you would realize that the situation is

2004-01-31T23:22:00.000-05:00

Thanks everybody for the supportive emails, and also a hearty muchas gracias to the people who told me the comment function was not working on the site. I have fixed it so give a try and leave a note.

2004-01-30T23:27:00.000-05:00

The third rail issue of our marriage is a second child. Simply put, she is inconsolable in her need to have one; I am adamant in my opposition to the very concept. Every time she brings up the issue, it is guaranteed to zap any equilibrium we may have attained and kill an unspoken truce that may be in effect. Neither of us can walk across this minefield without setting off an emotional

2004-01-24T11:12:00.000-05:00

What is it about a women who has been married for a few years that allows her to develop an utter and complete lack of interest in trying in basic ways to be attractive to her spouse? For every example of a married hottie in a cute or sexy outfit out with her hubby, I could point to a hundred who are in not much better than sweats or a diner suit (you know what I mean), carrying 10 or 20 extra

2003-12-01T15:11:00.000-05:00

The White Stripes played a great show a couple of nights ago. They were playing some make-up shows for the postponed ones after Jack broke his finger over the summer. I had four tickets to the originally scheduled dates, which were used by me, a good friend, my brother and his girlfriend. Great show by the way, primal, Meg doing the dinosour stomp on the tom toms while Jack channeled some

2003-11-03T22:09:00.000-05:00

We have decided to try marriage counseling. Again. This will be the third bite at the apple. The first time was about a year after our child was born and lasted for about three months. It was a disaster. The second try was a few months ago and ended almost as soon as it began. For the nine months before our child was born and a good two years after my wife was a raging lunatic. Of course,

2003-10-31T21:51:00.000-05:00

I have been too depressed lately to write. Though my life is by all outward appearances excellent, even in many ways envious, the funk of being tethered to her casts a pall over everything. We are fortunate in one sense – we are both 40 and have enough sense to not act out on our worst thoughts in a destructive manner. No clichéd throwing dishes, screaming matches in front of the stunned

2003-10-05T21:00:00.000-04:00

I have a headache.

2003-10-05T20:51:00.000-04:00

I need to start taking anti-depressants. I had been taking St. Johns Wort on and off for the past year and it generally helped take the edge off, but then I started developing side effects. They were actually kind of bizarre – I would get a mild rash and get wildly itchy, particularly on my scalp and my ear lobes. The itch was weird – felt more like bugs crawling all over than the

2003-10-03T23:03:00.000-04:00

There is an old and odd compliment that people used to give about a woman’s housekeeping ability – “You can eat off her floor” implying that she (and it always meant her and not him) keeps her house so clean that you would be happy to have your meal served right on the floor without plate. Well, in our house the statement is literally true. You could make a full four course meal from the

2003-10-01T22:30:00.000-04:00

Ambien. 5mg, sometimes 10. The rare nights that we now sleep in the same bed, I need Ambien to help me fall asleep. Fortunately we have taken to sleeping in separate rooms, or more accurately, I effectively moved out and upstairs to the guest bedroom. This of course has many advantages, as I can now self-gratify in peace without having to sneak around, can sleep without the infernal a/c

2003-09-19T23:09:00.000-04:00

I recently received the following email from a friend living overseas: “Now that all my friends are shacked up, the opportunities for meeting women, and developing relationships organically, have diminished dramatically. When opportunities do present I jump -- but nothing past the second date. Having become a serial first dater has left me a bit deflated. But at least I have a ready source of

2003-09-19T11:59:00.000-04:00

The first post is the hardest post. The first admission to yourself that you may have failed, achieved less than you hoped, is the hardest admission. That first time you stand up and say “Hello, my name is G and I am in a failing Marriage” (where is the inclusive, we are with you “Hi G!” response?) is the worst moment. It is make comments to your friends, only half jokingly, like “my wife is