Marriage Made an Actor Out of Me

My divorce, though comparatively gentle and humane, still left me shattered, bone-tired and distrustful. Throughout our 12-year marriage, I felt like I had been playing the role of a high-society Hollywood wife and mother, and I no longer knew who I really was.

The combination of a domineering stepfather (who was overly concerned with propriety) and my experience as the only Black girl in every school I attended had smothered my true self; all I ever wanted to do was fit in and conceal any quality that rubbed people the wrong way. In my marriage, I presented my husband with what I imagined to be the most acceptable version of me, one that I hoped he wouldn’t find annoying or disappointing.

This pretense was costly though. By the time I filed for divorce, not only had I lost touch with myself, but I had also developed a nasty addiction to sleeping pills, from taking one Ambien a night to popping them constantly, often washed down with booze. I was a 43-year-old P.T.A. president and mother of two. Former publicist, former would-be author and now former wife. Once I had made the painful decision to go to treatment, I invited my best friend over to talk everything through.

“The only bright spot,” I told her after crying on her shoulder, “is that I can finally stop pretending to be something that I’m not.”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean that I’m terrible at relationships,” I said. “And I’ve been pretending that I’m good at them. Being divorced might be a relief.”

The moment I arrived at the Arizona rehab center, the walls started closing in on me. During orientation, in a small room with six other new patients, I started to hyperventilate. Mortified, I jumped up and left.

Outside, another patient, Scott, chased after me with the sweatshirt I had left behind. I knew he was breaking the rules; we weren’t allowed to interact in any way outside of our group work. I slowed down and murmured, “Thank you,” but he continued to stride along with me.

My memory of our short walk together is muddy, but my first impression of him is crystal clear: He was white, smiling, with blond hair, blue eyes and a Hawaiian shirt. He talked about his two daughters, his beverages of choice (tequila and beer — he was in for alcoholism), and how hot it was in Arizona compared to Utah, where he was from.

I wasn’t interested in bantering about his children or the weather. I just wanted him to leave me alone.

After that, wherever I went, Scott would find me with his eyes and smile. At first, I turned away from these encounters; his steady stare was too personal and intimate. But as the days passed, I found myself looking for him too, hoping to catch his eye, sitting next to him whenever it was permitted.

There were countless reasons he and I could never be together, mostly the fact that he was white. Before I met my husband, I had never dated outside of my race. And it weighed on me, a feeling that I was betraying my race by falling in love with him. If I were to fall for Scott, I risked doubling down on that betrayal and cementing my reputation as a Black girl who liked white guys.

Besides that, I was a lover of the great indoors, luxury travel and all things hip-hop. Scott was a real outdoorsman, skier, mountain biker and rock climber who lived for camping and the Dave Matthews Band. He had been in Utah for 20 years; I lived in Los Angeles. He is an only child; I have five brothers. And up until meeting in rehab, we had no experience with or desire to live in the other’s world.

During our second week (we were there for a month), I was missing my children at breakfast and tearfully pushing my runny eggs around my plate when Scott sat nearby and caught my eye.

“Good eggs?” he said.

I burst out laughing.

Our connection during those days felt so clean and innocent. Because it couldn’t lead anywhere, I felt no obligation to entertain or impress him. During our final week, I became unmoored by how much I liked being near him. But the acid wash of my painful divorce still singed my skin whenever I considered what it might be like to be coupled up again.

I expected those first few months at home to be a period of adjustment to being newly divorced and newly sober. What I hadn’t counted on was the tender longing I felt whenever I thought about Scott. Every night we talked on the phone about our time in Arizona and our day-to-day lives at home. I was surprised at how much I looked forward to those calls, and how comforting it was to hear his voice. In the light of day, I would scold myself for being so weak-minded.

We had spent 30 days together in an artificial, isolated environment. In the real world, our differences would spell disaster. We made no sense as a couple. Except, of course, for the fact that we couldn’t stand to be away from each other.

My therapist, Marguerita, said, “What if the reason you thought you were terrible at relationships is because you were not being your true self while you were in them?” She plopped a fresh box of tissues on the table, and I quietly blew my nose. Normally, if I cry at all, I never do so in front of other people. But after leaving treatment, I was crying all the time.

“That’s the thing,” I said. “I feel like I deserve an Oscar for my performances over the years as ‘best supporting’ whatever — wife, mother, school volunteer. But I’ve been playing these roles for so long that I don’t know who I am anymore. I went to the store yesterday to get stuff for dinner and burst into tears because I picked up a carton of milk. I hate milk. My children don’t drink milk. I was buying it out of habit because I think a good mother is supposed to have milk in her fridge. But if someone asked me at that moment what I wanted instead, I wouldn’t have been able to answer them. I’ve forgotten how to be myself.”

“But this man you met in Arizona — you said that you felt like yourself when you were with him.”

Marguerita looked at her notes. “You said that you didn’t have to pretend with him.”

“Yes, but that was because I was never going to see him again.”

“But you were yourself.”

I looked up to find Marguerita staring at me over her glasses. “Perhaps,” she said, “this is a good place to start our quest for the real Laura.”

Scott arrived at Hollywood Burbank Airport on a Tuesday.

It hadn’t been hard to convince him to come for a visit. Our nightly conversations, though once deliberately platonic, now had an unmistakable romantic tone. I had taken an improv class once when I was 14 where the instructor gave us half an hour to be “what you are afraid to be when others are watching.”

I’ll never forget how unconfined I felt during those next 30 minutes. Talking to Scott was like that. I never had to think before I spoke or check myself before saying something silly.

“I miss you,” I’d say to him every night.

“Me too, I miss you so much,” he would say. “I can’t wait to see you.”

The first thing I noticed when he got into the car was how embarrassingly animated I was, my words tumbling out, barely giving him a moment to respond. The second was the gravitational pull compelling me toward the passenger seat the second he closed the car door.

In recovery, I heard that one shouldn’t get involved with anyone during the first year of sobriety. I had been thinking that Scott and I could just be friends.

That notion was wrong.

As time went on, Scott and I found that we had even more differences. He falls asleep as soon as his head hits the pillow, while I need hours to wind down at night. I walk with purpose when we take the dog out. He meanders, stopping to admire every rose bush and jacaranda tree. But I came to discover that it didn’t matter if we walked at the same pace or had the same bedtime. What mattered was I never felt the need to pretend with him.

Marguerita was on to something. I was never terrible at relationships. I was just terrible at pretending to be someone I wasn’t.

Laura Cathcart Robbins lives in Los Angeles. She is the author of the memoir “Stash: My Life in Hiding,” and hosts the podcast “The Only One in the Room.”

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