It’s been a confusing time.
Back in May when when I was visiting Seattle with my older brother to do the famous “Beat the Bridge” 8k race, I took this photo of a flower in the neighborhood where we were staying.
#1 - I am so very fortunate to have many relationships that do that for me.
#2 - I don’t think that my marriage is one of them.
For months I’d been bemoaning my state of indecision in regards to this, one of the longest and most significant relationships of my life. I had even joked about how I wished I had an algorithm available to me - in this age of AI it doesn’t seem too far a stretch of the imagination - so I could just input key data and magically out would pop my instructions, on what to do.
Then I found a book which seemed like the closest thing to it.
I read it for the first time back in January, carefully answering all 36 “diagnostic questions” and when the answer was “Too Good to Leave” on one of our weekend visits I pushed my chips to the center of the table (metaphorically), and told my husband: I was all in.
I waited to see what he did next.
His job didn’t actually require him to be in Miami, it was fully remote from the beginning and he only had to be in the office maybe once a quarter. He could move back to St.Pete, get a short term lease on a place not far from me, we could go back to couples counseling, start “dating” again, reconnecting and figuring out if we were even still compatible.
But he did none of those things.
He apparently was preparing to do those things - and a few more, like quitting smoking and resuming his yoga practice, to start taking better care of his health - but he neglected to tell me. Instead we continued in ambivalence and occasionally on the phone “arguing in such a way that there was no endpoint and we were bringing out the worst in each other” while I felt more and more hopeless. I read the book a 2nd time and this time the answer was the opposite.
So, when he came to St.Pete the 2nd weekend in June, ostensibly to celebrate my birthday a bit early but also to visit his storage unit, I met up with him at the nice downtown hotel and took the in-person opportunity to say - “I need to tell you that this relationship is over for me” as well as “I don’t want to talk about whether or not this is the right decision” - which shut down any conversation in which he might have tried to convince me to reconsider.
I was shocked that he was shocked! Leading up to it, I’d thought of several ways it could go down and I honestly never thought it would blindside him. Which showed me that he was just.not.hearing.me and that we were not at all experiencing the same reality of our relationship the past few dismal months.
It lasted only a couple hours, start to finish, but every minute was awful, after I told him, sitting with him in his shock and sad silence (since I had shut down all conversation about the decision), with the white hot glare of a summer day in Florida outside the hotel window, walking back down to the lobby, getting the car from the valet and finally driving away. I did not waver in my decision. And it was by far one of the hardest things I have ever done.
I really thought it was over. But then? I got new information. My husband started sharing with me more about what had been going on for him, the breakthroughs he’d been having, that he was moving back to St.Pete pretty much immediately, he was done with Miami, he thought we still had a shot, that being married to me was all he ever wanted.
That in fact he felt that God had charged him to love me, as we included in this quote from our Quaker wedding program.
And while I’m not sure that’s exactly true for me, I do know I still love him. So here we are several weeks later. Still Married. Still trying. We’ll see what happens next!
