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...

Day 7-- Reflections on my first comment

I had my first comment! And it was critical! And I deserved it! (Seriously, I appreciate it very much.) 

One of the things the commenter said was that it was naturally much easier to cut off contact with my husband since I knew he betrayed me. The point she was making, and there's a way in which I think she's absolutely right, is I need to see Patte as betraying me in the same way to really cut off contact with him in a good way.

But I wondered whether it was really easy to cut off contact with Jan or not? In one way, it's been shockingly easy. It's also only been 7 days. But still. 

I called one of my good (female!) friends to ask her view. Part of my preparation work for cutting off contact with Patte has been about coming clean regarding the affair to some of my closest friends. 

She shared that for the last year she's been watching me nearly kill myself trying to communicate with my husband.  She said:

"While I respect why you are cutting off the affair with Patte, and I think it says a lot of good things about your ethics and common decency, I don't care so much about that. I am *desperate* for you to stop talking to Jan. For a year, you've been acting as though he was the same man you married and we've all been desperate to get you stop. Somehow." 

And that's true. It's only easy to cut off contact with Jan now because for so long it was impossible. 

I recently read a book about how we think; how we make decisions. What it basically said was that conscious decision making takes place in one part of our brain-- the seat of reason. However, habits don't live there anymore. Once you've built a habit-- and a habit consists of trigger, routine and reward-- it moves from your higher reason into your ganglia. Even if you suffer brain trauma. Even if you literally lose your short term memory, you're going to remember your habits. They're written in your bones, in a very real way. It's probably a survival adaptation, right? For good routines, you don't want to have to think too hard to engage them if one day you happen to find yourself running from a bear.

Jan is written in this part of my brain. We had what I thought was a great marriage. If I heard something funny, I called him. Whenever I travelled for work, I would buy him some small gift-- just to show I was thinking of him. We talked *constantly*, laughed all the time.

I only stopped buying him travel gifts a month ago, by the way. For the last 10 months, I've been buying him gifts as I always have done, and then throwing them away. How sad is that? I couldn't even sacrifice the routine. 

Within 6 months of my final decision to stop trying to get pregnant, he'd begun to cut himself off from me and had begun his affair. Within a year, he was gone. 

The affair was the LEAST of the pain he dealt me. I have no parents, no children. He was my only family. He never ONCE tried to fix what was broken once he had decided I could not provide him with the life he wanted.  He told me it was all my fault-- he never (not until quite recently) came right out and said it was because I couldn't have children, but he danced on the edge of that every single day. He told me I was unattractive as a woman. He told me I wasn't caring, wasn't nurturing. He told me I was career obsessed. He told me I was cold. You can add up all those comments into bad mother pretty easily, and you can be sure I did.

To put this in perspective-- most of our 15 years has been completely different. The bad period with each other lasted for one year. 

I don't blame Wendy the Wine Girl. I don't think much of her, but I don't blame her. I blame my husband, right between the eyes. The affair didn't cause the way he behaved. He had an affair because he didn't even consider it was worth breaking up with me in a clean way before he started a new relationship.  Even his mother said to me after DDay that "you should have known he can't be alone". And I do know that. I do. Wendy the Wine Girl isn't the fucking problem. She's nothing more than a particularly ugly symptom.

And in one sense, yes, not talking to him is easy. In another sense, it's been the hardest fought battle in my life. In the past year I've dragged myself to painful therapy sessions, talked all night with him, listen to him *scream* at me that I should respect Wendy the Wine Girl as a "real girlfriend". (Part of his fiction is that it wasn't an affair because we were really already broken up, and I knew it.) I did all that because it was the first thing we had ever encountered which we couldn't talk our way through. I thought-- i really believed!-- that if I just listened and engaged, we would somehow find our way through. It was so stupid, and so destructive. 

To stop talking to him, I had to let him hurt me enough times that the aversion to the pain he caused me overrode the writing in my bones. 

Is that really easy?

Day 2-- About my marriage

All the focus here has been about my ill-advised affair. But I guess I'll be over not contacting Patte in a few weeks. It's a loss, but it's not the big one. And then I'll be staring down the cliff of my failed marriage, failed childbearing, how it was I chose a partner who loved me so little right from the start.

Oh this is going to be such fun the next few months.

Day 1-- My Husband

I found out about my husband's affair one day after a long business trip.

After 13 years together, he was leaving for a woman he met in a bar and with whom he had been having an affair for nearly six months. Once I knew what I was looking for, I could easily find pictures of them together on Facebook.

He blames me for not being able to have a normal Dutch life. I am barren. Unable to carry to term. Childless. Infertile. A broken copy machine.

He says he might have been able to live with that, if I had compensated by showing more interest in having the kind of home life he wanted to have. He's never been able to define what that home life is-- he's only been able to say it wasn't any of the things I did.

The woman he met in a bar stopped sleeping with him ten weeks after he left me, so he came back and wanted to try therapy together. During our therapy try, he went to a dating site where he met and wooed Wendy the Wine Girl. I ended the therapy after I found out about her. I still have no idea why he bothered with the therapy.

Our marriage had been largely sexless for a year before he left-- his choice. He told me the stillbirth had ripped me up too much for him to take sexual pleasure from me anymore. He reminded me repeatedly I was never his type.

When I ended the therapy, the therapist sent me an apology letter for being part of the deception unknowingly. Jan complained bitterly I was setting unreasonable demands, and if I could show I could be the woman he wanted, then there would be no Wendy the Wine Girl.

He believes deeply that I deserve everything he's done. He has no pity or remorse.