Amy Watkin
I think I got divorced backwards. Maybe if I walk you through the highlights (lowlights?), it will make sense.
September.
We celebrated 25 years of marriage. It’s hard to separate now how I actually felt then versus how I see it now, but in my memory, this anniversary was a genuine celebration. We were happy…
Weren’t we? Today, I find it hard to imagine that I didn’t know then that something was off. Maybe I just wasn’t ready to admit it. Even now, I can’t pinpoint exactly what would have felt “off” then.
25 years of marriage, and two fabulous, grown children. Good jobs, loving relationships with in-laws, a nice home, plus a cabin on a lake. Two college kids who fell in love in the 1990s had built something together. We were finally entering a phase where we could relax a bit more and just enjoy life.
I spent weeks preparing for that big anniversary, buying a special notebook and writing the many, many reasons I loved him in it. He loved that gift.
Did he give me anything? I can’t remember.
How do you harvest a memory from a brain that refuses to cooperate? Maybe I’m blocking this detail from myself for some reason.
Regardless, we had a great anniversary weekend at our cabin. Though again, the details are a bit fuzzy to me and I don’t know why. I remember giving him the notebook, I remember having sex, I think I remember going out to eat.
That was September.
In December, he assaulted me.
It’s assault even if the person never touches you. This is one of those tragic things that experience teaches.
We’d been planning to go out to dinner that night in December. You know, the date nights that married people pretend are enough to keep love alive. I didn’t know that it had been pajama day at the middle school where he works, and I thought since he was wearing pajamas, he had decided not to go out. I asked about it, and suddenly we’re screaming at each other.
He’s inches from my face, screaming “Fuck you!” over and over and over again as my hands go up to block the spit flying into my eyes and mouth. Maybe to try to block the awful words, too.
This level of anger and vitriol had never happened before.
I’d been standing in the hallway when he got in my face, and I had nowhere to go but into the small bedroom that was my sewing room. Full of furniture with only a little spot, about 4’ x 5’, of open space.
There was a desk in the room with one of our wooden dining chairs next to it. I stood with my back against the sewing table, wondering how I would get around him to get out of the room before he hit me. He’d never done it before, but I was sure he was going to hit me that night.
I can’t remember if he kept screaming at me while he turned and grabbed the chair, or if we were both silent when he picked it up. But he stood right next to me (there was nowhere else to go in that room) and beat that chair against the carpeted floor until it shattered into dozens of pieces.
I kept that night a secret for months. I knew I had to, because anyone I told about it would beg me to leave him. They’d see him as a villain, and I didn’t want that.
Always protecting him.
That night we talked seriously about getting divorced and he said, “I will lose everything if we get divorced. I will lose your family, and my family, and both of the kids. I will lose it all.”
Most of me was numb by that point, but I still felt sorry for him. Nothing that extreme would happen, I was sure, but I wanted to protect him from the possibility of that sad fate.
We moved through the holidays like wooden figures with smiles carved out, making sure we seemed good on the surface, at least until we figured out what to do. We are from the midwest, where people are stoic and strong. Masters of suppression.
January.
We started marriage counseling. I’d begged him for years to go, and apparently, the assault had scared him enough to finally do it.
We sat on our therapist’s couch together, talking through our issues and trying to figure out how to move forward. Every other week I changed my mind about whether I wanted to stay together or not. He said he was all in and wanted to stay married.
I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, but I was convinced that it was all my problem to fix.
In February, I hand-wrote him a letter saying how much I loved him, what I was trying to change about myself to be a better partner for him, and what I wanted our future together to look like.
But I couldn’t give it to him. I still don’t know why. It stayed inside the notebook.
When did I become such a mystery to myself?
It was a Tuesday in April when I told our counselor about the December assault. It was such a relief, such a release, to finally speak about the worst trauma of our marriage, that I decided that day to be all in again. I didn’t want to be in a marriage with one foot out of the door.
Wednesday was our son’s 21st birthday. We celebrated with him and I felt like things were starting to go back to normal. Maybe we were getting to a healthier place.
On Thursday morning of that week, I was working from home. Which usually meant working in between loads of laundry, cleaning off kitchen counters, and wiping down the bathroom.
When I went into our main bathroom, I saw my husband’s phone on the counter. He often forgot it at home, no big deal. But I was drawn to it in a new way this time.
I picked it up and keyed in his security code. I took a deep breath, knowing that what I was about to do had the potential to change our lives completely. But I also felt very strongly that I was being silly, that I was a bad person for even doing this, for even having any type of suspicion at all.
But there it was.
Texts between him and another person (his written the night before while he had been next to me on the couch). They wrote about how much they missed each other and what lies he was going to tell me so that they could spend the weekend together. There were only a few texts, all of them from the past 24 hours.
He’d deleted all of their previous exchanges.
I fell to my knees, thinking “I don’t know how to be this person.” What are your mind and body supposed to do with betrayal?
I wanted to call my sister, my best friend, all of my friends.
I wanted to keep it all a secret.
I wanted to confront him.
I wanted to never ever talk about it.
I wanted to rage and sob and scream and whimper and set off a bomb and make it all go away.
Instead, I stood up.
Maybe I rotated the laundry, I don’t remember. The body does what it knows to do, even when your mind and heart are squeezing themselves into brand new shapes. I do remember regularly falling to the floor that day. My legs just wouldn’t support me.
But I haven’t even told you the juiciest parts of this story.
He was having an affair.
According to him, they’d been sleeping together for ten months by that point. The “woman” he was sleeping with was 21 years old. The same age as our youngest child.
He was 52 years old.
She’s the daughter of one of his best friends.
A friend he’s known since college, who was in our wedding.
They’d been friends for over thirty years, and we had held this child when she was a baby. We’d shared parenting tips and advice because our kids were the same age. We’d taken her with us on a family trip because she was a good friend of our son.
He assured me that this affair was just sex, nothing more. That he never meant to hurt me. That I shouldn’t be hurt by it because it was really just sex.
How is it possible to betray a person and then believe that you never meant to hurt them? How was it possible for him to sleep with this child, this friend of his son’s, this young person he’d known her entire life?
How was it possible for her to sleep with her friend’s father, one of her own dad’s closest friends, a man whose family she not only knew about but knew quite well, and had even seen recently?
How did they sleep together under a quilt that I spent years making, in a room that I painted, in a cabin that I decorated, eating food that I bought, and enjoying renovations that he and I had recently worked on together?
How do you do all of that and still claim that you never meant to hurt that person? That it wasn’t about me? How do you disconnect so completely from the one person you vowed to always love and care for?
I’ve never asked “what the actual fuck” more sincerely in my life.
But I quickly stopped looking for answers.
I still have those questions, but they exist now mostly just as a wedge between my brain and his. I do not understand what it would take to do the things he did, or the mental gymnastics and self-deception it would take to make it okay in his mind.
Getting divorced backwards…Yes, there were issues before I learned about his cheating. But I thought they were recent. Maybe surface-level. Fixable. And definitely my fault.
What I’ve learned since the divorce (5 weeks after I discovered his cheating) as I continue therapy, is that we were in a cycle of abuse for years and years. That both of us were finding ways to make things seem okay, and to make it feel okay in our own minds, by deciding to put up with things, and telling ourselves that the good outweighed the bad.
And it did.
In a lot of ways and for a really long time.
The good did outweigh the bad. We had a lot of good times, a lot of good years together.
I need to say that once in a while so that I don’t forget and then beat myself up for being too ignorant to know that my marriage was shitty the whole time.
It wasn’t.
But he was consistently defensive, to a degree that I taught myself to work around. And he could erupt in extreme anger over what seemed like the smallest things. Then he would leave, the house or just the room, but he would disappear for minutes or hours after an argument, and then when he did come back, he would not speak to me.
Sometimes for several days.
We very rarely came back to the subject and talked through what happened in that argument and how to keep it from happening again.
But these were just his personality, right? The rest was good so I could learn to live with these relatively small things, right?
After all, he wasn’t hitting me, so clearly he was a good husband.
Take that in, because that is the message that so many women are getting.
If he doesn’t hit you, you’re fine. There’s nothing bad enough to be worried about, or working on, or certainly not leaving him over.
Be grateful.
Every woman needs a man and you’ve got one.
You were chosen.
Be grateful.
Be grateful.
Be grateful.
Despite all of that messaging, all of society’s programming that I absorbed for my entire life, I’m so glad I divorced him.
Highly recommend, ten out of ten.
Because if I hadn’t done that, I might never have learned that the defensiveness, the avoidance, the gaslighting, and the refusal to resolve an argument and create action steps, were all part of a cycle of abuse.
How many women are stuck in a cycle of abuse and have no idea?
I wish I knew. I feel like I should know, because I’m a strident feminist. I even teach college classes in gender studies.
And I wasn’t a subservient wife, by any means. I even thought we had a fairly equitable, feminist marriage. But the ways we are socialized and the messages that society sends throughout our lives are very powerful and loud. We take them in without even realizing we’re doing it.
And what I’d always heard was that men need women. That they are incompetent in any number of ways. How often have you heard about men not being able to find anything in the fridge? Or not knowing who their kids’ doctor is? Or not remembering birthdays for their own siblings and parents? It’s just understood that women will pick up that slack, I guess because we’re supposed to believe we’re better at it? That it comes somehow naturally to us and men are too…important? powerful? stupid? busy? to manage all of that.
Instead, women like me overfunction. We pick up the slack in the same way that we can hold our car keys, coffee mug, credit card, two letters that need to be mailed, a snack for later, and an extra tampon all in one hand because we need the other one to unlock the door and keep the toddler from running off.
And what we don’t see, or what we choose to ignore, what society chooses to ignore, is our own suffering.
Overfunctioning is exhausting. Maybe that’s it. Maybe so many women become stuck in cycles of abuse because we’re too damn tired to do anything about it.
And what would happen if more women did realize that their relationship is abusive, or at least unhealthy? How many would still be stuck, for financial or other reasons? How many would choose to stay because having a man, any man, is still seen as better than being alone?
And how many will burn it all to the ground because the rage that women aren’t supposed to express is fucking real and needs an outlet?
I’ll bring the matches.
Until then, I’ll continue to ask myself questions. Can you be completely over something and still working through it?
Yes.
At least, I think so.
I guess I’m still in the middle of things so ask me some day down the road. But right now I feel over it.
Over him.
I’m having such an amazing moment as a newly single person that I’m thinking about going on tour to recommend divorce to all women.
Want to clear your skin up? Divorce!
Finally change those eating habits? Divorce!
Look forward to being alone like you never have before? Divorce!
C’mon, ladies. Let’s go.
Amy Watkin is a fifty-something college English professor with two fantastic young adult children. She’s written for McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and Sharon McMahon’s Here’s Where It Gets Interesting podcast. Nowadays she mostly writes the historical fiction novel she’s been working on for ten years and the memoir she’s just getting started on. On a daily basis, she’s out here happily breathing the fresh air of being single.
