Checking Out Of A Marriage

I will admit that the Huffington Post is part of my morning reading. Perhaps it is too much to say that I “read” it; more like I peruse it. I read the headlines, and click through to very few of the articles. I do not generally click on articles pertaining to marriage or divorce. I learned long ago that most such articles are next to worthless for any number of reasons.

Some of the articles seemed to have been written by angry women with axes to grind; most were probably just click-bait for aggrieved female readers. It was low-percentage subject matter for me. So I was surprised one morning when I clicked on an article called, “6 Signs Your Husband Has Checked Out of Your Marriage (sic),” by Brittany Wong. Almost all of these articles are written by and about women, complaining about men. But I clicked, and I read it.

It’s possible that I wanted to make sure that I had not been the one to check out of my own marriage. I needn’t have worried. I was innocent in every one of the six cases mentioned, but my wife, the dear girl, was four-corners with the entire list.

Substituting the feminine pronoun for the masculine, here are the six:

1.   She’s hypercritical of everything you do;

2.   Stonewalling becomes the norm;

3.   She’s noticeably irked when you don’t follow through on something;

4.   You (plural?) aren’t as playful as you used to be;

5.   She’s impatient and short with you; and

6.   She confides in other people.

That’s a strong six-for-six right there. According to Ms. Wong, my wife was the one who had checked out of our marriage at some point. About fifteen years before our divorce, in fact.

I still cannot recommend that anyone read these articles about marriage or divorce, nor can I recommend reading the Huffington Post in general. I was, however, glad that I read this article. I lost a lot in our divorce; in fact I lost everything except for a few dollars. I lost my wife, my children, my father’s goodwill, many friends and neighbors, a lifetime’s worth of possessions, my wardrobe, my car, the house that I helped build and the home that was mine for decades. I often worry that I could have done something differently to save the situation, that it might have been possible for me to have done something to avoid the difficulties. Something “possible” would be the main sticking point here. Impossible things are, by their nature, impossible. This article had the effect of soothing my conscience somewhat. That was a blessing, and I am grateful. 

Today In WTF: Divorce Edition

Today I woke up in a world where I am a terrible human being. Not only because of things that I may have done, things that would have originated in my active mind to be carried out by me in the real world, in opposition to morality and common decency, but also because of what I am, which is depressed, and somehow incapable of simply snapping my fingers and magically becoming cheerful and well adjusted, and also being a man that is so out of control that he cannot even sleep without snoring.

People are telling stories about me. Stories that are neither flattering, nor true. I am not now aware of the details of these stories, but I know that they are in the air, and I think that I know in which direction they travel. I have a hunch that they would, if they were true, make me a much more interesting man that I actually am. So I’m on a fence about confronting them. No, I’ll settle for the real me, the dull me. If the rumors are in any way exciting, they’re probably not true.

The rumors serve a purpose, and that purpose is my demonization. Oh, my friends, I have counseled you all recently not to get involved with beautiful women, and I would add to that to never, ever get involved with women who have anger issues, women who awake every morning to an entire world of people and things that infuriate them, women who hate their own parents and at least half of their siblings, who hate most of their friends, and who virulently hate almost all of the rest of the world on general principals. Don’t do it! No matter how beautiful they are.

Why would anyone hook up with such a woman? Marry her and try to make a life with her? Stick by her for forty-plus years, raising two nice sons? Well, for one thing, there’s the beautiful bit, and she was plenty sexy besides. For another, she was very smart and well organized. Those skills would come in handy building a family. I also knew that she was adrift herself in a world not of her making, and that she was unhappy in the extreme. We shared those conditions. I stupidly thought that maybe by forgiving her peccadillos and loving her unreservedly I could make her happy. And maybe she would forgive me mine. More fool me.

Of course, she ultimately kicked me out. After five years of exile I filed for divorce. Of course, being depressed, I blame myself. Of course, in the eyes of my ex-wife, my sons, most of my family, my neighbors, the friends that were “our” friends (and even some that were “my” friends), and the world at large, all of this is massively my fault, exclusively. It’s always the man’s fault! I make matters worse by living in Thailand. When people hear that, they’re absolutely positive that I went Cuckoo For Coco Puffs and am just here for the girls. Which, just to be clear, is not the case. I came to Thailand to make a living and to be able to afford a decent lifestyle. I know what you’re thinking, most of you are on the Pussy Crazy side of the argument. Ah, well, it does tend to make me much more interesting than the quiet, unassuming man that sits at the keyboard before you.

I might as well get on board; this train is ready to roll. Think what you want, world. I’ve got shit to do. 

Mr. Fred's Dream

The video is a cover of “Bob Dylan’s Dream,” from the Freewheeling album.  Of all things, the original doesn’t seem to be up on YouTube.  (Just an alternate take that should have been taped over long ago.)  This cover seems to be by Dario Piccarreta.  I have no information about him, but he has a great name and does a very good, respectful job on the song.

But this is my dream!  My friends!  Our old lives!  I wax nostalgic myself sometimes.

Through my late teens and twenties I was lucky enough to be part of a group of close friends.  I made a list, fifteen of us.  A couple of them on the list were outliers in general, but close friends of mine, and I decided to include them. Everybody knew them; they knew everybody. 

There is no distaff side to the list; most of us had girlfriends, but many of them came and went and all of them were left out of the real shenanigans, more or less.  We were all born between 1947 and 1950.  I’ve been wondering: how did my friends and I fit into the traumas and the temptations of our era? 

Military Service

We were all prime-time for the Vietnam era draft.  Only five of us served time in the military, myself and four others.  Of the five, only two completed their tours without incident.  One in the Air Force, and one in the Navy.  Four years each. 

In my case, boot camp went fine, and I was posted to “the fleet.”  Before too long, the Navy decided that I lacked military bearing, or had failed to adjust to military life, or was possibly hostile to authority, some combination of those things.  I was given an Honorable Discharge and a plane ticket home.  They were decent about it; I’d never been in trouble.

Another friend had been drafted into the Army.  Although he had no formal education to speak of, the Army discovered at boot camp that his intelligence was off the charts.  They sent him to Army intelligence school.  He went through the school and was posted somewhere, but then his officers discovered that he, too, lacked military bearing, and had certainly failed to adjust to military life, and was probably hostile to authority as well.  I don’t think he made any trouble while he was in, but I’m pretty sure that he was given a General Discharge.  The Navy has more of a sense of humor than the Army.

A third friend was also drafted into the Army.  He got the more usual schedule:  boot camp; advanced infantry training; jungle school; Vietnam.  He was there for about six months before he got shot in the head.  He survived, but with life-long disabilities, including partial paralysis and epilepsy.  He’s made the best of it. In those days, they didn’t “discharge” seriously wounded soldiers, they “retired” them.  So they got retirement pay, and, in my friend’s case, 100% disability as well, with full meds.  I don’t think that they’re so generous anymore.

Of the other ten guys, seven were 4F.  A couple of those were legitimate, one with physical and one with psychological problems that had been clinically observed.  One guy was legitimately gay, and they noticed quickly and rushed him out, thanking him for his interest.  One might have just had his file marked, “oh, hell no.”  He was odd.  At least three went in loaded, exaggerated their drug use, and might have said that they were gay as well.  Anyone who ever tried that approach got the result that they were seeking, and I never heard of it ever coming back to haunt someone after that.

There were a few simple “no’s” on my list.  I don’t know how they did it, but they never went in.  It’s not like we really discussed these things. 

Marriage

My gay friend has made as much of a success of “marriage” as any of us.  He’s still in a long-term relationship that began in 1973. 

Only three of the fifteen never married.  One, because death took him at age 22; another, because a terrible cloud came over him at about that age (he died relatively young, too); and the third because he just could never get the whole woman thing figured out. 

Six of us, including myself, have at least one divorce under our belts. The times of the first marriages were: six months; six months; two years; several years; ten years; and forty-four years.  (That last one is mine.)  Two were caused by general craziness; two by adultery (one by the husband; one by the wife); one by cocaine abuse; and my own by compassion fatigue on the part of my wife.

Four of my friends have gone on to very successful, long-term second marriages. 

Five of the fifteen have only been married one time, and are still married.  This all puts us, I believe, right at the heart of all of the statistics. 

Drugs and Alcohol

Let’s just say that my friends and I were not immune to the temptations of the times, and none of us were loath to participate. 

Three of my friends developed alcohol problems that they thought were problematic enough to join AA.  Two are still going to meetings, and one is sober on his own. A couple of my friends stopped drinking on their own, successfully.

A couple of others should probably have joined AA.  Let’s not put too fine a point on that one.  One friend has actually drunk himself to death. 

Our involvement with the so-called drug scene seems almost quaint by this time.  Only one of us went through a period when his drug use interfered with working.  He got over it, and was fine.  Only one of us became a regular user of cocaine.  He had a good income, and he worked in the music business.  That can be a dangerous combination.  He got over it, too, but only after his marriage had blown up.  He’s been fine ever since. 

Education and Career

I am the only one on the list that completed university.  (I later went on to get a JD and become a lawyer.) 

Two others on the list completed three years of college, which is worse than no years of college at all, because it proves to the world that you cannot sustain an effort. 

Everybody on the list did finish high school, at least. 

Only three of us went on to impressive careers.  One as a session drummer and drum teacher; one as a recording engineer; and one in the field of publishing. 

Another was an insurance adjuster, that’s a good, responsible job.  He worked at it for twenty-nine and a half years, and he was “laid off” a couple of months before his pension was to have vested.   Picked the wrong company to work for, unfortunately. 

I am not on the “impressive career” list.  Interesting, certainly, but hardly impressive. 

The rest of us have knocked around all of this time at one job or another.  For years, we had resumes that would mostly frighten prospective employers. I, and many others, settled down and began to perform well at some point.  By now, many of us are retired, one way or the other.  A few of us are on the “work until you die” program.  America these days is not a friendly place to get old.  I’m sure that I’m not the only one who wishes that I’d been born in Europe.

Mental Health

At least eleven of us were depressed, more or less.  There was one, and maybe two problems that may have been schizophrenia, one was clinically observed from an early age.  All of us learned to play the cards that we were dealt. 

In the absence of psychological issues, I’m sure that the group, as a whole, would have performed much better educationally and career wise.  My friends and I were a pretty smart group, but you’d never know it to add up the statistics. 

Are we happy now?  The survivors?  Maybe fifty-fifty.

But “survivors” has a nice ring to it. 

Happy Birthday! And A Word About Divorce

Happy Birthday!  To me, that is.  Sixty-seven and counting.  Counting with great interest, as will happen when one reaches one’s late sixties. 

The early sixties are the hump.  Insurance actuaries tell us that if we make it past the early sixties our life expectancy jumps by about ten years.  For example (not actual figures), if your life expectancy at age 59 is 77, by age 67 it jumps to 86.  Because you made it over the hump. 

My birthday is more famous for deaths than births.  Elvis died on my birthday in 1977.  Robert Johnson, considered by many to be our greatest bluesman, also died on my birthday (1929?).  Bela Lugosi, my birthday.  The great Babe Ruth not only died on my birthday, he died on the very same day, in the same city, just a half-hour before I was born. 

I’m still alive, but I’ll admit that at this point I only feel about 75% alive.  I’m down to twenty-three teeth, but you wouldn’t know it.  All of the gone teeth were in the back, so my smile, such as it is, is intact.  I had a major checkup last week and all of the results were fine.  Some minor complaints, but all typical of people my age.  Blood pressure issues, cholesterol a bit high, “moderately” enlarged prostate.  Typical for guys who smoke, drink and use bad language anyway.  (All in moderation, and usually not in mixed company.)  Oh, and I have a gallstone.  A one centimeter gallstone if the report is to be believed.  Good to know.  If I get the pain, I won’t have to worry what it is.  Just go to the hospital.  If they’re right about the one centimeter thing, it’ll be an operation for sure, that thing ain’t going through no duct.  If I had duct-work like that, my blood pressure would be lower. But I feel good; I get around okay; all of the objective signs are good.

Subjectively though, I feel like an old photograph that is fading in the sunlight.  It’s a lucky thing that I have a new life that I enjoy, because in my old life I am fading from memory as though I were already dead.

“My old life,” he said.  If you live long enough, events will overtake you.  An event that overtakes many of us is divorce.  This is increasingly happening after thirty, forty and fifty year marriages.  (Forty plus in my case.)  Examples are everywhere, even poor Al isn’t married to Tipper anymore.  Has anyone noticed that most of the negativity surrounding divorce is usually attributed to the husbands?  This usually happens on a hunch.  I reserve judgment on other people’s divorces.  As I have said herein:  the one thing that is certainly true of any married couple is that only the two of them have a hope in hell of understanding what is happening to them.  That’s if even they know.  Most of us are strangers to ourselves.  But I wouldn’t be so quick to blame the husbands.  I can guarantee you that many divorces are driven by the distaff side.

Here’s some free advice (worth every penny):

If you see a divorce on your horizon, begin damage control right away.  Formulate a flattering narrative and begin furious lobbying immediately.  Or sooner.  This narrative can be a mix of the totally true, the vigorously spun, and the plausibly deniable.  Elements that are actually untrue will be counterproductive and should be left out.  If you can afford it, hire a professional PR firm to represent you.  Only good PR, done by you or by an agent, can prevent you from being demonized by your soon-to-be ex-spouse and cut off by your family.  It’s bad enough that you will lose your spouse in the divorce.  Don’t lose your entire family in the process if you can possibly avoid it.

You want to be nice about it?  Good for you!  It’s nice to be nice (to the nice).  Be as nice as you want, but watch your ass too.  I’m not suggesting that anyone should be mean or underhanded in any way, not at all.  Be nice, be fair, but make damn good and sure that your family, your relatives, your neighbors and your friends are not being sold a bill of goods by the soon-to-be ex.  It’s probably true in all circumstances:  a competing narrative is imperative. 

Follow this advice and you will thank me.  Fail to follow this advice and you may end up like me.  That would be 1) demonized; 2) slandered; and 3) ostracized.  If the worst happens to you, I hope that you have a Plan B available to you that is as felicitous as mine.   

The Divorce

Something is happening, but what is it?  In science and mathematics, something that has happened can be checked and proven.  What has happened can be known.  Mechanical devices can be reverse engineered and what they do and how they work may be discovered and understood.  Two plus two is four; devices work or they don’t.  It is all very straightforward and objective.  When something happens to a human being, however, it is, by definition, subjective.  What? Why? How?  Nothing is ever clear; nothing can be proven.

Something is happening to me.  I can feel it all weaving its new reality around me, but what it is, and why, and how, are questions that I cannot answer with any certainty. 

I am in the process of getting a divorce from my wife of forty-four years.  For most of that time I thought that it was a fine marriage.  We seemed to get along okay, it usually appeared that we were meeting each other’s emotional needs.  I can say, with all honesty, that even close to the end I would wake up and watch her sleeping, and think with wonder what great luck had brought me to her side. We raised two very fine children, very successful organisms, healthy, relatively well adjusted, now grown men not without success in the affairs of society, both well-loved, morally upright, and very respectable.  Why should we get divorced at all, much less this close to retirement? 

That inquiry would start out, Roshamon style, with two distinct points of view.  And like in that great Japanese movie, the resulting stories would be very different depending on the speaker.  Different people tend to spin stories in different directions, to meet their own requirements of emotion, ego, pride or shame.  Me, I don’t even like to think about it.  Starting down that road it all starts very quickly to look like placing blame, and I don’t see any profit in it.  Nothing will ever change the fact that my family is my family.  Anything that I can do to keep us getting along with each other as well as possible would only tend to help me.  Not just me, wouldn’t that be better for everybody? 

My wife and I have always had very different points of view about our marriage, so it’s no surprise to me that we should find differences of opinion about what is happening now.  Over the years we engaged in marriage counseling two different times, the first after a few years of marriage and the other after about ten or eleven years.  On both of these occasions we were asked what we thought was wrong.  On both occasions I didn’t feel like much was wrong at all, while my wife could go on and on about what was wrong and acted like I was either delusional or in denial.  At this point I don’t even want to know what she thinks, or what she tells her friends and family, or what she tells herself.  What good could come of knowing?  And no discussion is possible. 

I don’t like to think about it, but I do think about it.  The results, so far, have not been encouraging.  There is a problem that is similar, but separate from the Roshamon problem.  Most of us do not remember things as they happened, for one thing.  And most of us tend to spin reality to suit our own needs, emotionally etc.  Selective memory is a real problem.  Then there are the lies that we tell ourselves, a form of self-preservation.  And forget about explaining any emotional event to someone else, that feat is beyond the power of any human being.  It is true that my name is in the Petitioner spot on the divorce papers, so one could be forgiven to think that it was my idea, but I don’t believe that I am the engine of destruction here.  I believe that I filed because I was driven to it.  Whether this was the result of real events or suppositions that occurred in my mind or the mind of someone else, I'll never be too sure.

Checking down the list of verifiable facts it is very clear to me that divorce is my best, if not my only option.  It all seems very clear to me that it was my wife who decided that we can’t possibly live together any more.  There are quotes in e-mails, in very direct, unambiguous language, some quite cruel.  I was excluded from the house, abandoned to my fate as it were.  "Make your own plans, I can't take the doom and gloom anymore." That was six years pre-filing, and at no point was I ever invited back, never was an apology offered to me, she never showed any sign of having changed her mind.  My wife began to refer to our house as her house, and so on down the line.  Any time I attempted to address any substantive issue between us in e-mail or in person the result was an angry reply or a long silence followed by an e-mail about the weather, or a "how about them Dodgers?"  Cars were bought and sold, the property was improved at great expense of bank money, all with no input from me, I was simply never informed of any of it.  It’s true that there had never been anything like joint management and control of community assets in our marriage, so this was nothing in the way of a surprise, it was nothing new.  It had always been her way or the highway.  Only the kick-out order was new.

My wife maintains that she doesn't want us to get divorced.  Since she does this with no accompanying indication that she wishes us to resume our lives together I must assume that she really wishes to be rid of me while continuing her management and control of our community property.  It is, in any case, a matter that is now in the category of "already happened."  It's a little late to start rearranging the deck chairs.  

The above is my basic understanding of what is happening, but it’s not the last word.  For me, there never is any last word.  My own thoughts, like digitally produced music and films, are subject to constant revision.  Even worse, I have a tendency to blame myself whenever something goes wrong.  This is a very old tendency, extending well into childhood.  In my childhood family, we experienced abandonment issues (my father was rarely at home, preferring his work environment which included extensive travel) and mental health issues (my mother, God rest her soul, don’t cry for her, death was all she ever wanted).  Our house was never a happy place.  I somehow became convinced that they were a nice family, the three of them, my father, my mother and my sister, and that I just ruined the picture.  Why would anyone think that?  It’s strange, isn’t it?  Was I right, or wrong, or merely confused?  Was it some fault of mine, or theirs?  (Not my sister’s, of course.)  Should I have done anything differently?  Should someone have intervened?  Who would that have been?  Oh, these questions spin out of control very quickly, do they not? 

I have a tendency to be very hard on myself in general.  So if I consider the reasons that my wife would want to be rid of me (without really being rid of me) I usually come to the conclusion that she’s right to feel that way.  I even wonder how the divorce could be my fault without my even knowing it.  My new situation is not entirely unpleasant.  Did I manufacture the entire thing for personal advantage?  How is my selective memory affecting my actions? 

I don’t believe that we construct our own reality, because the involvement of fate is too great for that.  But maybe we construct our own understanding of it.  Telling ourselves convenient lies wouldn’t be the half of it, if the truth were known. 

So I know what’s happening, I’m getting divorced.  But I’ll be land-damned if I am really sure why or how this is happening to me.