"Why Your Marriage Sucks":
http://www.salon.com/2009/06/24/vindication_love/
No matter what I read, it makes no sense to me. Marriage to begin with, logically speaking. Nor how ours broke, which defied every reason for marital demise listed in that article - by those measures, I'd done everything right, including the downsizing and re prioritizing etc. And/but listening to him (trying trying), why it broke is that I'd done it right and NOT put the institutionalization of marriage higher on my list of things to do every day. Thus/but it had not been enough about acquiring mutual debt, it hadn't been contractual enough, there wasn't enough to "show for it" to him. But everything I read about the reasons marriages fail amount to the contractual/transactional being the killer of love. So it would have failed anyway.
I don't understand much of anything is just about the only thing about which I feel certain.
So I will go to counseling. Will do the homework. Will submit. And see if it gets me any closer to what I wanted out of this relationship in the first place, which wasn't ease or status or stuff, it was GOODNESS. I wanted to be GOOD to someone, for no other motive than to do that as far as I could in the everyday, having faith in the transformative possibilities of that up close and personal. I'm surrounded by people who are very good people in the abstract. Their outrages are rightly placed, their political sensibilities are moral, their writings and actions bespeak their decency of mind, they clean up rivers and go to rallies against fracking and model thoughtful citizenship (or at least feel endlessly guilty) .. we are all "good people" more or less. Theoretically. But we usually just suck, utterly, at giving a real shit about the people right in front of us. Up close, even good people are routinely awful. And it's not just a matter of blood - we are no better inside our families and intimate spaces than we are to our friends than we are to our acquaintances. In fact, I'd say we are shittiest in that order of succession, kindest at greatest distances. (Like I was yesterday, by accident: I took that old man's hand and said sincerely 'you've been so blessed in such a long marriage', my voice cracking a little with admiration for him really, and he held my hand a long time and cried. Afterwards, Witch and her family were looking at me like I was some kind of materialized aberration. What? He NEVER has held a hand, not even to cross a kid across a street, cold always, "he's emotionally retarded - what the hell did you say??") I wanted to reverse that just once with all my spiritual might, an experiment in radical intimacy. Wherein the constraint of monogamy would drive me into invention in order to achieve a more concerted mindful beauty, like writing a sonnet.
And now I feel cored like an apple a lot of the time, nursing a crying headache usually, wondering if I am still mid that experiment (keeping the faith) or if it just failed miserably (in denial). Or some other non binary option that I'm too blind and hurt to see at all.
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