Married, married again, married one more time
Often when it comes up that I’ve been married theee times, I get a look. I’ve been in the company of people who know about my marital history and they just happen to decide a conversation about my generation’s inability to commit, soon after my arrival. Three marriages seems a bit more than strictly necessary, admittedly even I sometimes find it excessive but then I think about why I’ve been married three times.
In my first marriage I was ok, not skipping off walls happy but not desperately unhappy. I think I was like people are on average. We had our issues and there were a few attempts at reconciliation instigated by him. By the time I said I’m done I was over it. That was the hardest because we had kids and I hadn’t had a job, not to mention we both had examples of long if not happy marriages in our immediate families. It was as if we were thumbing our noses at their commitment. What makes us so special that a little unhappiness warrants such drastic actions. Around that time I had someone ask me why I wasn’t willing to fight for my marriage.
I was thinking about it today (nearly twenty years later) and I realized that I was willing to fight for my marriage, to my husband. What I was unwilling to fight for was a marriage to my husband and his family. I didn’t want to be rid of them or never interact with them, I wanted a relationship that did not involve having every decision, argument, and misdeed (mine) brought to his family, especially before he and I had taken time to work things out. I never felt married to one person. At the time I had no idea how to articulate it better than telling him I didn’t want his family in our business which he took as a declaration of dislike for his family and an attempt to alienate him from them, which was never my intention.
We have talked a lot over the years and in the last few he’s come to understand my plight better. Especially after a marriage in which his partner did alienate him from his family. I’m not one of the “what happens in this house stays in this house at all cost” types but as two grown people my expectation was that if we had problems we would first try to work them out between us, and if that didn’t work we would seek the help of an impartial professional ie someone we weren’t having dinner, and otherwise interacting with on a frequent basis. The inability to see the difference made it such that by the time we saw the professionals I was done.
There are those who would say family involvement is a good thing, and for them it may be. I’m a private person prone to anxiety, knowing the people you see all the time have heard about your worst moments does not make for comfortable interactions. Even if any judgement was all in my head the fact that I felt that way and it was not respected was enough to eventually make me feel that I would never be respected by my spouse and if I wanted any chance at relationship that I felt truly cared for it was going to be with someone else.
Funny how much easier it is to work all that out in your head well after the fact. It’s also interesting how much easier it is to look at someone married multiple times without the death of a spouse and deem them somehow deficient. I think condemning others helps keep us from looking too closely at our own situations.
In my first marriage I was ok, not skipping off walls happy but not desperately unhappy. I think I was like people are on average. We had our issues and there were a few attempts at reconciliation instigated by him. By the time I said I’m done I was over it. That was the hardest because we had kids and I hadn’t had a job, not to mention we both had examples of long if not happy marriages in our immediate families. It was as if we were thumbing our noses at their commitment. What makes us so special that a little unhappiness warrants such drastic actions. Around that time I had someone ask me why I wasn’t willing to fight for my marriage.
I was thinking about it today (nearly twenty years later) and I realized that I was willing to fight for my marriage, to my husband. What I was unwilling to fight for was a marriage to my husband and his family. I didn’t want to be rid of them or never interact with them, I wanted a relationship that did not involve having every decision, argument, and misdeed (mine) brought to his family, especially before he and I had taken time to work things out. I never felt married to one person. At the time I had no idea how to articulate it better than telling him I didn’t want his family in our business which he took as a declaration of dislike for his family and an attempt to alienate him from them, which was never my intention.
We have talked a lot over the years and in the last few he’s come to understand my plight better. Especially after a marriage in which his partner did alienate him from his family. I’m not one of the “what happens in this house stays in this house at all cost” types but as two grown people my expectation was that if we had problems we would first try to work them out between us, and if that didn’t work we would seek the help of an impartial professional ie someone we weren’t having dinner, and otherwise interacting with on a frequent basis. The inability to see the difference made it such that by the time we saw the professionals I was done.
There are those who would say family involvement is a good thing, and for them it may be. I’m a private person prone to anxiety, knowing the people you see all the time have heard about your worst moments does not make for comfortable interactions. Even if any judgement was all in my head the fact that I felt that way and it was not respected was enough to eventually make me feel that I would never be respected by my spouse and if I wanted any chance at relationship that I felt truly cared for it was going to be with someone else.
Funny how much easier it is to work all that out in your head well after the fact. It’s also interesting how much easier it is to look at someone married multiple times without the death of a spouse and deem them somehow deficient. I think condemning others helps keep us from looking too closely at our own situations.
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