Lately I seem to be having a lot of conversations with divorced people. Maybe I shouldn’t, because just the other day, someone asked me one of the most difficult questions I have had asked of me in quite a while.
“What went wrong with your marriage?”
The question kind of took me back, because I can’t remember anyone ever asking me that point blank. It struck me as having come from someone that had already examined those things for their own answers, and it struck me even more that I probably had not. In fact, I know I had not. I had never taken the time to fully understand one of the biggest events of my life, the death of my marriage, and I was intrigued by why I had not.
I think, for many of us, the business of moving on becomes reason enough for skipping over that step. We have all those phases to go through: anger, denial, yada , yada, yada…it’s easy to want to move forward to the path of least resistance. And with the pain that is so often experienced in trying to process a divorce, who would blame anyone for a little escapism, be it whistling our way past the emotional graveyard or partying our brains out every night until the break of dawn. There is little in life you will experience—aside from the death of a loved one—that will compare to the death of a marriage or deep relationship.
So, when I first responded to that question, I could feel myself reaching for answers, and whenever I feel myself reaching I begin to hear that little voice in the back of my head telling me that I am saying something about which I know absolutely nothing, or too little. I stopped myself, stopped reaching, and I admitted that I didn’t really know. And then, the customary self-examination began; I needed to know why it was I never tried to understand it.
When you ask that same question of many of those divorced, I think the natural tendency is to first find blame, or find some ambiguous reason that, at the very least, deflects any sort of blame. How many times have you heard the other party was completely at fault, or that a marriage just died, or that some outside force just created too much pressure for the marriage to bear? I thought so. It’s easy for us. It’s a natural self-defense mechanism.
In my case, the process of tearing apart the marriage involved so much blame thrown at each other that I myself developed a pretty thick suit of armor. Later on, it easily became a muddled mess of confusion and hurt that was too murky to see through, and so I gave up trying. The girls became both sanctuary and shield for me, and I closed off protectively. A wall went up, brick by brick, and I eventually forgot about what answers I might have left on the other side.
The even bigger frustration: even if I try to find the most humble route to understanding what ended my marriage, I may only be able to find half the answers. To paraphrase the way one philosopher put it, I may be able to dissect and physiologically know how a bat sees and feels the sensory, but I will never understand or know the way a bat interprets or experiences it. I will never know what it is like to be a bat. I will also never know what it is like to be Michelle, because I will never know or feel what it was she brought into the marriage that filtered her interpretation of the experience. It’s not possible without being her. And even asking her, which is impossible for the same reasons why we were not a good couple—a lack of trust and communication—would prove fruitless. So my answers are limited to understanding myself and my own culpability, and I have to be satisfied with that.
But when I try to find my answers, the things I need to learn from or take from all of this, I still find it easy to slip off into finding the symptomatic, the things that were really signs of a failing marriage rather than the root causes. I still can’t get to the core, or feel like I have gotten there, anyway. Maybe self-defense, at least for me, is so strong that it becomes impossible to reach what may be a balanced state of humility, of complete understanding of self. I find myself peeking through the door for answers but still a little worried that it will blow wide open from my hands and the cold wind of doubt rush in. I’m uncomfortable with that; even the thought of that imagery makes me shiver. It reminds me of when asking myself these things wasn’t so healthy. When everything was still fresh, it was difficult, and seemed amplified by the particulars of my situation.
In a post-relationship event you want to know why and what, and at some point you begin to wonder what you own of the why and what. Its not far from that to wondering what issues you yourself brought into it, what baggage you may carry from it, or are you or will you be seen as damaged goods. Divorced and in your forties, it’s also not hard to wonder if lightning will ever strike for you again. Time eventually wears all the hard edges off of all those thoughts, but it’s not much fun to experience.
Maybe the reasons why we don’t ask ourselves the hardest questions, or even think of them, is because the answers are not what we want to hear, or are too painful to hear, or our fear of the uncertainty that lies in looking into them too threatening. And maybe this does or does not apply in my case, my marriage, or others’ failed marriages. At some point I end up asking myself why it matters, what it may really mean to me going forward. At the moment I still find myself more fascinated with why I haven’t asked the questions more than I am the questions or the answers themselves.
Then I am reminded of something I have tried to tell myself often, that learning through pain is sometimes the most valuable learning I will ever do, and that to ignore what may need to be learned is to make the same mistake again later. Maybe that is the most I will get out of this particular thought process, for now anyway.
Still, at this point in my life, it feels more like a healthy curiosity. I feel like a kid with a mechanical toy he wants to understand, tries to take apart to find its inner workings and demystify the magic underneath. The answers I don’t have are not so pressing to me anymore, because what I don’t know about myself or that situation, seems less significant than what I do know about myself, and that is, quite frankly, that I’m an okay guy. Maybe I’m an even more okay guy because I take the time to try. I like that. I’m going with it. I try. And tomorrow, I’ll try again.
Originally published 1/20/10.
© 2010 Cody Kilgore. All Rights Reserved worldwide under the Berne Convention. May not be copied or distributed without prior written permission
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