Dear D and L, or rather, Both,
The only way to “see this mess” is by getting close and mucky; the mire has to be walked through, hard though the going may be. You are right that it’s unique for a husband and wife to write, having seen each other’s letters. If there is cause for hope — a small beam of light in the sad story — it begins with that fact. But I want to emphasise, here at the beginning, that sometimes marriages run their course, and then the task is to enable the couple to part knowing that the marriage they had was the one they created, not denying the love that was once there. Still, I must proceed from the assumption that all is not lost.
Can I take you back to those discs of colour I mentioned, letting the small beam of light shine through them, blue as the perfection of sky, yellow as a jolt of sunlight? Each represents one of the individuals within this union. But place them side by side, then slowly slide one half way across the other . . . and what do you have? Green. A blue crescent and a yellow one, facing inwards towards the green centre. It’s important that you see this new colour as your marriage — two people contained within one relationship. For when professional therapists work with a couple, they know that they are not working with one husband and one wife, but with a couple. That’s why they call the marriage the “container”.
It is an entity with more potency than the homes we create around it; the problem is, so often we allow the accoutrements of life to create a brick enclosure — within which the entity, the whole, the container (call it what you will) can wither. Marriages have to change and develop, just as the two individuals within it do — but too often we muffle its cries with our cushions, curtains and chairs. What’s more, each will have his or her version of the marriage — one of them looking at that green as verging on the acid-yellow, while the other sees a reassuring aqua.
What we see in our marriages isn’t necessarily true, but what we want to be true. So I am thinking of D’s perfect home, with meals on time, flowers arranged and her taking the responsibility for it all, so that she felt exhausted most of the time.
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Looking back over the letter, she is actually ambivalent — moving from the description of herself as the perfect partner, creating the perfect family environment, to the one who was actually quite scratchy and discontented because she didn’t trust herself to demand that L do his bit. Or maybe she didn’t allow him to do his bit. We do that in marriage — place each other in roles that become as rigid as a straitjacket.
Since you’ve given so much, let me reciprocate. For 35 years I was married to a man who displayed no domestic skills, making me do the whole kitchen goddess bit, self-satisfied and exhausted. Looking back, I confess it was my house. In turn, I never saw an electricity bill, or participated in the buying of a car. All that was his job. Talk about stereotypes! And when we part, what happens? He becomes a dab hand in the kitchen and I find I can pay a bill or buy a car as good as the next girl. How many people will recognise something of this syndrome in their own marriages? The point is, we think that it’s OK (and indeed it can rub along “until death us do part”) but it often isn’t. Roles are all very well but not if they become a stick with which one can beat the other: “He never cooks!”; “She’s so hopeless with money!” Beware, readers, of disabling each other and getting stuck. Because when things go wrong, there is a reason. Always. And it could start with just such a hampering “mire”.
Now D says that she has resolved to separate after her son finishes A levels. She feels that the whole situation is hopeless: that she will never again be able to look at L in the way she did before. So now I want to bring in a letter from another reader, called James, who contacted me in July.
He wrote: “Just over a year ago, you wrote an excellent article about a woman caught up in an affair. You ended by asking the question, ‘Is it better to stay and fight for a better marriage or run away?’ Well, it was along those lines. I just wanted to say that it was that article that prompted me to break off my brief affair and go back to my wife and family. We are now a year down the road. It has been tough. But I have found that all I wanted was under my nose. I had just lost sight of it — I fell for a lie. I wish that I could turn the clock back and prevent the pain I caused my wife, but I can’t. It would be of some comfort if my comments could stop someone else making the same mistake. It is possible to forgive, but both my wife and I have been hurt by this matter. In fact, I don’t think that either of us has worked as hard in our lives. But I do want to thank you and to maybe encourage others that it is possible to rebuild a marriage so that it is stronger than it was before.”
Encouraging words, although James has realised that there is a cost and does not underplay the price paid. He adds: “One of the biggest problems we have had is trying to find someone to talk to who has been where we have been.”
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That’s why it should not surprise regular readers of this column that we have given so much space to this crisis. It is in no way to diminish your terrible pain (D), or remorse (L), that I say there will be many people out there who have experienced what you are going through, for so many aspects of your tale are universal. An affair is a symptom — often a bid for freedom or cry for help on the part of the partner who has begun to feel that life will never change — and the marriage itself is the patient.
This is a very important concept, for when things go wrong we naturally invoke the old idea that somebody is in the right, somebody in the wrong.
Of course, D will protest that she has done nothing wrong, certainly not to deserve such treatment. I entirely agree. But honesty also compels me to take the crudest example, and point out that many men would rather have sex on the sitting-room floor than a nicely served meal. Especially when they reach the dreaded fifties and turn themselves into clichés as well as human beings terrified of death — the ultimate “change,” the one you didn’t go restlessly seeking. If D wants me to tell her that she’s in the right and therefore somebody must pay, I cannot. Because I am afraid that if she leaves, she will be taking with her unresolved, unhealthy feelings of “pollution” — which put the emphasis in the wrong place. Marriage is not a temple, a holy place, a sacred writ that counts blasphemy a sin. There can be no fundamentalism about it, for that is both reductive and destructive. Marriage is a baggy, ongoing story, written (often badly) by two people, changing all the time. It is no place for coy asterisks — or bland psychobabble, for that matter.
The key issue is raised by D when she says that “our marriage was over when he embarked on his affair.” James shows that isn’t necessarily true, for people do forgive each other. The miracle of love’s survival happens every day. Since L sincerely maintains a desire to rebuild, I say: if you are truly penitent, you will have to be more patient, truly empathising with, rather than just knowing, the extent to which you have damaged your wife and son. Your glib summing up at the end of your letter is about as substantial as candy floss: words, not feelings.
Reading your letters yet again, it occurs to me that here are two people who use the word “flawed”, yet are obsessed with perfection. D’s is in the home; L wants “better” all the time, and can’t stand the process of ageing in his wife. Yet mud on the floor and middle-age spread are realities, and the big step for both of you will be to actually value (not just tolerate) imperfection. I think you both have to ask yourselves why each fell in love with the other — what did you see? If D was in search of her perfect father, that was going to put a burden on L. And what were you looking for, L? If you found it in that 27-year-old that you married, then ask yourself how much you were responsible for her loss — way back, not just when you embarked on the affair. When did you stop touching each other, and why?
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Couples have to forgive each other for not turning out to be all that the other hoped for — and it is always a two-way street, no matter how much one may appear to be in the wrong. When a crisis like this occurs they have to ask themselves if they mourn the loss of the person they loved — or their idea of that person, the bit of themselves that they saw in him or her. You can see an affair as an end — or (and I really mean this) a beginning, but only if you can imagine uniting as one (the “container”) to love and protect the two changed people you are in the process of becoming.
You could still try, D. Maybe life will still be better with him than without. If you leave you might be intolerably lonely — or forge a new, successful life. Who’s to know? But on this glorious, golden September day, I can’t help hoping that you don’t throw away the key to the garden just yet. The trampled, muddy bit could yet green over. And of course, green is the colour of nature and fertility (messy processes), meaning renewal and growth.
Best wishes and good luck,
Bel