One man’s voice

A marriage that perhaps should not have taken place

Posted on July 12th, 2008 in On Marriage, Rants

Editor’s note: I know sometimes I write about some pretty stupid stuff here. And sometimes, like yesterday, I write about stuff that is a little personal. I hope I don’t give the impression that I am trying to air my dirty laundry in public. It is a pretty well know fact that all of about three people read this blog of mine and I am fairly confident that those three people either have had some experience with what I talk about when it comes to things like marriage or they simply don’t care what I write about. Either way, I am good with it. I find blogging to be wonderfully therapeutic and I know it is helping me get through a really tough time in my life.

Robert

Last night I had a good talk with my wife about our relationship and our feelings toward one another, toward our children and toward our God. While I have to say that most of the conversation was my wife telling me, in the form of “just some guy that is asking” how her marriage is holding up, I can say that I was able to get a lot of my chest. One thing, however, stuck out to me and I feel compelled to write about it.

One of the things that came up in our discussion was the topic of why my wife said yes to me when I proposed. The answer astonished me to a degree, though I am quite at peace with what was said. Essentially my wife told me that the reason she said yes to my proposal is because she didn’t know how to tell me no.

Regret is a terrible thing to live with, wouldn’t you say?

I know being married to me is no bed of roses. How could it be? After all, I am me and that in itself is enough to make anyone cringe. And I can say that I totally get her response to that. For the most part she has been miserable in our marriage since we got married. Scratch that, she has been miserable since we got back together in 1993 after breaking up for a few months.

But I can’t help but wonder how a person can stay married to someone they didn’t really want to marry and cannot find joy in being married to. My thought is divorce would be a much easier one-time miserable situation to live with than a lifetime of staring at your worst nightmare in the face. Wouldn’t it?

How crappy would it be to wake up every morning knowing that you are married to someone that you would much rather not be married to? Worse, what if every time you looked at that person you were reminded that for the last 13 years your life has been the worst it has ever been and it is all the fault of the person that you are sharing your life with?

So I asked these questions to my wife and her response was pretty simple. She is not a quitter. She would much rather be miserable in marriage than say that she gave up on it. Somehow trying to work through 13 years of a marriage in hell is redeeming when you can say that you stuck it out. I am not so sure.

Personally I am of the mindset that your marriage is what you make of it. You can make it crap or you can make it work. Regardless of what you want out of your marriage you are always at the helm of what your marriage experiences. You choose to say things, to do things, to feel things that have an impact on your relationship. I choose to make my marriage good or bad. So in effect, I have chosen to do things that have made my wife miserable in our marriage.

Sadly I am not at all aware in most cases of what I am doing or not doing that makes my wife miserable. In other cases I know that something I do has a negative impact on my wife but the thing that I do is a part of who I am as a person. No matter how hard I try to kill that part of me for her sake it always creeps back in and always has the same effect.

All of this leads me to the conclusion that looking back on 16 years of hell would almost certainly make a person want to stop the bleeding. How much misery can a person take? How long will a person choose to sustain their position in a relationship that reminds them of a 13 year (and counting) mistake they made? Wouldn’t it make more sense to count your losses and start afresh with half a chance at finding what you want in a person other than the bastard you are married to?

I hope I don’t come off as angry with this post. That is not the case at all. I am more than aware of how miserable my wife is in our marriage. I am in that same marriage with her. I see it and hear it every day. And as weird as it sounds, I really do want what’s best for my wife and children. I don’t want my wife to be miserable. I want her to have everything she expects to have in the man of her dreams. Hell, I want that sort of happiness too. So I am not mad to find out that I am not what my wife wants in a life partner. I just wish I could give her what she wants so she does not have to be miserable all the time.