Day 8 -- Anger Part 1

The past few weeks, I haven't been angry. I've been reflective. I've been hurt, and I think I've been at least reasonably clear-headed. I think there have been moments of revelation and learning. All good.

Best of all, not being in contact with my husband has released me from a lot of the hugely corrosive anger I have been living with for the past year. But this morning, I am that angry. Again. And my anger brings me closer to contacting him than anything else.

Why am I angry?

I went out with some friends last night. I haven't seen them in a long while. That's partly me-- after my divorce, I went into my cave. I let this couple know by mail what had happened, and that I was needing a lot of alone time. I attended their wedding party, and we've been in touch through mail and letters this year. They were in my home city for the weekend, and I agreed to meet them for dinner.

I met one of the women in this couple more or less the year my husband and I moved in together. We'd been dating for a long time by that point, but had finally just made the jump to cohabitation. She also knows something very few do--

I made a stupid mistake as a very very young woman, and "married" a casual boyfriend on paper for immigration purposes. The whole thing went badly wrong since he took the paper marriage seriously (thought we were in the movie Green Card) and it left me with some financial and legal obligations which I had to care for in the years after I had the thing annulled. Which happened very very quickly. So she's one of the few who really remembers my "ex husband", since at the moment I met her I found out that I had some legal responsibility for a property which this man had bought while we were "married".

She also knew what it was and what it wasn't-- I don't think of it as a marriage. She knows that.

Anyhow, dinner last night was strained. I had no intention of banging on about my divorce, but it's very difficult for me to talk about the last year without talking about divorce. They've also been friends with Jan and I for a while, and are women with whom I have shared many things openly. But the conversation was extremely strained, very difficult. If I mentioned anything about the divorce, the partner who has been closest to me would change the conversation-- very obviously, very loudly.

Towards the end of the evening, things felt like they relaxed a bit. And I made some kind of joke about how I was working through my anger at my ex-husband. My friend looked at me nastily and said "which ex husband?" I looked to see if it was a joke, but I could see in her eyes it was meant to be nasty. I think I looked shocked. We speedily wrapped up the dinner, and I made my way home.

And I don't know, really, what it means. Whether she has some kind of comment on my marriage.Whether I have whitewashed my own past in a way which annoys her. Whether she feels somehow in sympathy with Jan (hard to imagine-- he always disliked her).

So I've also been thinking about how honest I was about that relationship at the time it happened. (Remember, this is more than 15 years ago now.). I had been dating the man, and I felt really awful that he thought about our paperwork as a "real" activity. My mother had just died, and  I let myself go along with it at a certain moment, since I was fond of him and had a hard time seeing what I really felt-- in too much pain to think. He told our friends and family we were "married". Though it started as a joke, it ended up serious for him. I coped badly.

A few sessions in therapy, however, convinced me to cut it off at once since I didn't feel married to him, would never have considered him husband material, and didn't want to even date him anymore. I had to have my therapist explain to him there was no point in "relationship therapy" since the relationship had existed mostly in his head.

Boy, there are many things I can honestly say in my life were not my fault, but I have huge amounts of guilt and shame about that little adventure. The man was sad, but that whole mess was my responsibility. And it taught me the hard way that charmingly rebellious was often a recipe for long-term regret.

The good thing I got was a clear roadmap how to do it when I got married for "real". Even though Jan and I felt married from the moment we moved in together, I told him I was not drifting into marriage ever again. It needed to be a deliberate step, taken together in front of God and witnesses and celebrated as a rite of passage. There needed to be no mistake about what we were doing. In the end, we were actually married when I was pregnant for the first time. We knew the pregnancy was in serious trouble, so we kept it small and private. We decided to celebrate publicly only after my health had recovered. Since I was repeatedly pregnant after that, we didn't celebrate until 4 years ago. We combined it with moving into the dream house we had designed together. (Dutch people often make their commitment to be together when they start to try to have children, but do not marry until after the children are born. So what we did was not at all unusual here.)

Anyhow, Anna's comparison of Jan and I to my mistake made me angry. It also made me furious at Jan. My friends could look at our marriage as being in the same category? I recognize it's probably unfair to see that as his fault...