August 12, 2008
It had been a long time coming. She knew from the beginning that he was the wrong guy for her. She even tried to break up with him about 3 months into the relationship. She told him that he should find somebody else because she only wanted to change him and that wasn’t how a relationship should be. You should be happy with the person however they are. He didn’t understand and he cried. Then he phoned her and he was drunk and said that he couldn’t live without her. They were married 3 months later.
Sure – it was great for a while. They were young and in love. They had their future ahead of them and they didn’t worry about anything except keeping their love. They made careless choices – both quit their jobs to go to school. They lived on macaroni and cheese and water. They both quit school when they saw that it was too much sacrifice. They both got good jobs – good in the sense that the bills got paid but that was about it.
Finally, they started looking at their future. She wanted more and more and he wanted to give her more but he wasn’t capable of providing it. She pushed and badgered him until she decided that she could do better. She left him. 3 months later, they reconciled. She was lonely and he said he would change. She said she would change too. She agreed to let him be whatever he wanted to be. She took safe jobs that were stable and had a decent paycheque. She wanted to let him have a chance to flourish – an opportunity that he had never been given before.
They lived like this for a while and they were happy. In their third year of marriage, she got sick. Instead of being there for her, he partied with his friends. She was in the hospital for a week. When it was time to go home, she had to take the subway home because he didn’t want to drive to pick her up. When she got home, all she wanted to do was lie in his arms and feel protected from a world that had randomly given her a disease. She wanted to hear his soothing voice say that everything was alright. He didn’t understand her vulnerability. In the end, as she had always done, she put aside her wants and needs for his. Sometimes she thinks that that was the beginning of the end.
They continued to go through the motions of their marriage. He went from career to career; always claiming that he had found what he wanted to do. When he didn’t like any of his careers, she put him through school. She went from job to job in search of money and stability to support his various careers. That was their life. She was the wallet and he was the dreamer. She couldn’t fault him for wanting to dream. What kind of wife wouldn’t support their husband’s dreams? She had been hoping that he would find success so that one day she wouldn’t have to be the wallet. But, she began to fault him for not succeeding at any of them.
Years passed. They fell into a comfortable routine. She was the provider and he explored a variety of career options. He stayed in each job long enough to let her think that he had found “the job”. Then he would start to find fault with each job and it would be time to move on. She recognized the pattern and always made sure that there was enough to pay the bills. She was constantly looking for higher paying jobs. The only way for her to make more money was to take on more responsibility. She did that. His friends referred to her as a “career gal” and “more focused on work than on family”.
He went back to school. She paid all of the bills and did everything so that he could focus on his school. After all, it was their future. He got a job after graduating and she finally thought they were on their way. But, the company had cashflow problems and his cheques bounced. He didn’t want to leave because he kept hoping that the company would turn itself around. All she knew was that she couldn’t count on his paycheques.
She found career success and they even had some savings. He decided it was time to buy their first house. This house would be the first step in their future. Every day, he would meet her for lunch. He would bring real estate listings, a budget, and a calculator. He would show her homes that they could afford on her income. He was still self-employed and the paycheques were still unsteady. He would say that if they could live within her income, most of his income could go in the bank or be used to build equity into the house. He would crunch the numbers and show her how it could work. He said that if it got too tough then he would get a real job with a steady income.
She believed him and off they went in search of their first home. They looked far and wide. He had specific ideas of what he wanted. The house had to be in a settled neighbourhood that was quiet. He wanted to be near his sister and it had to be cheap. Her only requirement was that it be near public transportation in case she didn’t want to drive to work. The hunt for the house was painful. They drove around neighbourhoods looking at homes. He would pull up in front of the house and say that it wasn’t right. She would barely have time to comment and he would drive away. She would ask him what he was looking for and he couldn’t say. He said he would know it when he saw it. They finally stumbled onto a home and he declared that it was the one. They contacted a real estate agent and, in a few months, they were in their first home.
The first day was awful. The toilet leaked, the carpet had to be pulled up and they needed a new roof. The dream began to tarnish quickly as reality set in. Owning a home was an expense. He didn’t want to give up being self-employed and resisted for almost a year. She would drop hints that maybe it was time to find a job. Finally, when he accepted the fact that they had no money, he got a job. He was unhappy from the start and didn’t keep that fact hidden. He did not like what he did but he worked 10 minutes from home. She liked what she did but spent a lot of time commuting to and from her job. He said he felt guilty but that it would only be until they had enough equity in the home to sell it and then they would move closer to her job. She stayed in her job and hardly saw him and, when she did see him, he complained about how unhappy he was in his job.
They were in the house 2 years when they refinanced their mortgage to pay off debt. Whatever equity they had was gone and they started over from scratch. He said it would be different this time. They would knuckle down and save and they would pay off the house quickly. They would be able to do great things. The only great thing they did was spend their money.
He was unhappy all of the time and she felt guilty because she couldn’t give him what he needed to be happy. And all the time he felt like a failure because she was unhappy too and he couldn’t give her what she needed to be happy.
There came a time when she decided that she had progressed as far as she could in her career and she wanted to go to school. When she told him, he said that he had been thinking the same thing for himself. He had had enough and had researched different careers. He knew where the money was. It would take him two years to finish school full-time. But after he had finished, they would be set for life. She gave in, put her wishes aside and stayed in her dead-end job. He decided that he didn’t want to spend two years of his life in school at his age. He stayed in his dead-end job.
Somewhere along the way, they both stopped talking to each other about things of significance. They grew apart. They would spend more time talking to other people about their hopes and dreams.
One day he came home and announced that he had found another job. It was very different but it would pay more and it would give him a lot of freedom. The hours were long and it was shift work. But every three weeks he would have a week off. He said he would use that week to make improvements around the house. There were weeks when she didn’t see him at all. The weeks that she did see him were spent planning the changes that they were going to make to the house. But there was always an excuse for not executing the plan.
They were comfortable not seeing each other. It was like they were living on their own. This new arrangement gave him time to spend with his family or party with friends. It gave her time to think about who she was and who she wanted to be. She realized that she wanted more out of life than what she had. She was unhappy. She knew he was unhappy. She saw a therapist who told her to talk to her husband and tell him what she was feeling. The therapist said that maybe he was feeling the same way too.
She was afraid to say anything to him. She didn’t want to start to say how unhappy she was because she couldn’t describe her life without crying. So she decided to write a letter. She picked a night when he was working the night shift. She had the house to herself and she sat and wrote out how she had been feeling. All of her sadness and loneliness was put down on paper for him to see. She hoped that if he read the words that he would really be able to comprehend the depth of her sadness. She decided to hide the letter for 24 hours. She wanted to see if just writing down her feelings would be cathartic enough. She went to bed and finally slept soundly. The weight of her sadness had been lifted from her heart. She went through the day trying to decide whether or not she should leave the letter for him to read. She went home and reread the letter. There were times when the tears stopped her from reading her own words. She went to bed and cried herself to sleep; knowing what she had to do. The next morning, he came home from work and, after he went to bed, she left the letter on the table so that he would see it when he got up.
She spent the day on edge. At the end of the letter she asked him not to contact her at work but they would talk about it when she got home. But that didn’t stop her from wondering if he would call. He didn’t. As she drove home, the enormity of what she had done weighed on her. When she got home, she started to cry. He put his arms around her and said that he was sorry and the he loved her. She said she was sorry too. She said that she had been feeling this way for a long time and that she wasn’t happy. He admitted his own unhappiness. He had felt like he was drifting and just going through the motions of their marriage.
She uttered the words that she had been afraid to say. She told him that she wanted to separate. He looked at her and said that it was probably for the best. He asked her if she thought their life would have been different if they had had children. They both agreed that children would have just prolonged the inevitable. They sat together, in silence, each lost in their own thoughts – reflecting on their life up to that point and how what started out as love was ending. She looked at him and told him she was sorry and that she never meant to hurt him.
She stood up and went into the bedroom, changed into her pyjamas and crawled into bed. She lay there silently, listening to her heart beating slowly as the tears flowed down her cheeks. She knew it was the right thing to do. As she fell asleep, she realized that for the first time she had finally put herself first and that she had made the right choice for her.
Diary of a DOW 