Part 2 Of Your Love Life | This is what happened to me (3)
Yes, my former husband may recall things completely differently. But this is genuinely how it seemed — and still seems — to me
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Should I have been suspicious when my husband asked if I would mind if he left his wedding ring at home whenever he went sailing, in case he lost it overboard?
I trusted him completely. Right from day one in our engagement and marriage, he had told me when women (and the occasional man) had come on to him. Sometimes they left him notes in his pigeonhole at work which he showed me. I saw no reason to doubt his honesty now.
His work-patterns plus sailing meant getting to church regularly, or any sort of contact with people who shared what had been our moral compass, gradually dropped out of his life. His faith seemed to become more nominal than actual, though sometimes I sensed a struggle going on to re-connect. Whenever we were with church friends it was as though he put up a barrier to prevent anything other than superficial chitchat.
‘For the first time I feel lonely in my marriage,’ I confessed to my diary.
When you are No.1 in someone’s life, and then suddenly you aren’t,
believe me, you know
The issue wasn’t that his work involved him regularly being away from home. I was used to his work pattern. I knew and supported his love of sailing. This was something subtly different: ‘I can accept him being away so much if he is loving and attentive when he’s home,’ I wrote, ‘but at the moment he isn’t. He is distant and cold.’
When you are No.1 in someone’s life, and then suddenly you aren’t, believe me, you know. Yet I had complete trust in his basic faithfulness to me and our marriage, throughout the ups and downs of whatever life might throw at us.
When I asked him what was the matter he told me all his energy was being consumed by his new promotion at work. I thought he was going through a rough patch, and that the most loving thing I could do for my husband was to give him time and space to find peace with himself again.
I tried to be patient and understanding but the strain took its toll on me and I wrote in my diary of a bad atmosphere when a wider family bereavement happened and he said I wasn’t being ‘upset enough’. I realise his family probably found me too shy to be a good mixer — although they were unfailingly kind — and being English among mostly Irish people, perhaps I came across as standoffish. I feel a sense of regret I was unable to better overcome my shyness and my tendency to defensiveness. And of course I have a thousand human flaws.
I took comfort in the words of Madeleine L’Engle, who wrote during her forty-year marriage to actor Hugh Franklin: ‘[Our marriage] is much more quiet and I think that is the way it will have to go on growing.’
Perhaps this was how marriages matured, I speculated, growing into less intensity but still nourished by underground roots?
There seemed no shortage of other couples we knew with separate interests but it didn’t undermine their love for each other. I didn’t believe my husband would cheat on me for an instant, but I felt him turning away from me.
Live — laugh — love — leave?
There was inexplicable behaviour I couldn’t account for. When I said I’d love to visit his shared yacht on the south coast of England, he put me off and changed the subject. When I drove him into town one night to meet up with some sailing pals who were passing through, and I asked to come in and say hello to them too, he seemed to panic and said no, though he couldn’t come up with a viable reason.
It was only later I found out what was going on. An affair, of course. With a married woman in the same profession he had met at his sailing club. I guess the night he said no to me meeting his pals he had thought it would be beyond awkward if his sailing friends who knew about his relationship had to meet the eyes of and talk to his wife. Perhaps his lover was there too. I shall never know.
When the truth did come out — when he confessed after I finally lost patience and demanded he tell me what was really going on — he sobbed as he told me. I could see his actions were causing him to go through torture. He said briefly he had been unhappy 'for a while and this culminated in an affair’. I think he even used the word ‘adulterous’ at one point.
After he had confessed to me, I actually managed a tiny, tearful, fragile smile. ‘How can you smile at a time like this?’ he cried, incredulous. ‘Because now you’ve been honest, we can put this behind us and move on,’ I said.
Wrong. At the root of my words was the belief that both of us were committed to the promises we had made each other and though we might slip up, neither of us wanted to throw it away. I genuinely thought we both still believed we had been brought together, that marriage was 'till death us do part', and that we would work together to overcome problems and protect it.
Gradually over the next few weeks the devastating truth dawned on me: the commitment I thought we shared had gone for ever. He no longer valued me, us, or our marriage, and was prepared to end it to be with someone else.
'Sailing has unleashed a side of me that was dormant'
He maintained an impenetrable wall of silence between us for the remaining few months that we lived in the same house. I would go into his study and say, 'Please, let's talk,' and would still be sitting there twenty minutes later waiting for a single word from him. He refused any sort of relationship or other counselling. In a funny sort of way I wonder if he were actually trying to protect my feelings by not having to say the words, ‘I find you boring and irritating and I don’t fancy you anymore.’
The closest he came to opening up was when he said, ‘Off-shore racing has unleashed a side of me which has been dormant since school – the sporty and competitive side.’
From this I understood that as I lacked these qualities I no longer suited him and he wanted someone different.
If he wouldn’t talk to me I encouraged him to talk to a couple of his closest male friends, both men who combined their faith with sense and empathy.
Once the word crept out about our situation other church colleagues found this invasion from a very different world virtually incomprehensible.
‘What were these two people thinking about their marriage vows when they did all this?’ my older friend said, shaking her head in utter incredulity. Any divorce lawyer would have told her it happens every day.
In a spirit of compromise and to keep myself active during this heart-breaking time I joined a gym, and took swimming lessons, finally learning to swim (a bit) at the age of 39. When it became clear my husband was continuing his affair and had no intention of giving it up, I asked him to move out of our marital home, and one day, he did.
Was it all a mistake?
I was left in the empty house with the confusion and pain which anyone in that situation would feel. But for the believer in a ‘Christian’ marriage, there was an extra layer of misery. We had absorbed the message that God guided you in all your major life decisions, and had someone in mind for you as your partner even before you had met them. How could this be, when my partner had walked away from it and me?
‘So confused about everything [I wrote in my diary]. I thought God brought us together, we both felt committed to our marriage, so were we wrong? Was it all a mistake? Does God make a mistake? Did God bring us together, is everything random, does God exist at all?’
Many months later my husband paid a visit to the 'marital home' where I now lived alone and made it clear he was never coming back. I had no desire to cling on to someone who no longer loved or respected me and our marriage, and we agreed I would start divorce proceedings.
Divorce. A violent word. An amputation. The word you think you will never apply to you.
Where now?
