Man taking on too much when trying to cope with divorce
Six years ago, I separated from my wife of nearly 35 years and my adult children. I was divorced in 2008, and my marriage was recently annulled, as I am a practicing Catholic. I want to go forward with my life, but seem unable to do so, for reasons I don't understand.
In leaving my house, I do mean that I separated from my wife, and also from my children, who were all still home at the time. Estrangement from my children followed. I have not felt close to them since that time. Despite giving the marriage my absolute best efforts for 29 years, I realized I could not maintain the relationship alone.
It was a marriage devoid of intimacy. I sought counseling for 15 years but couldn't effect a change. After 10 years of marriage, I learned in a counseling session my wife had been raped before our marriage, and I'm sure that secret had much bearing on her feelings and subsequent actions/inactions.
My health continues to deteriorate, but I desperately want to re-establish the closeness I felt to my children. I also feel a need to "set the record straight" with my ex, but she is adamant that the marriage failed because of my actions alone. I think it's fair to say that her influence on our children has them believing she is right in solely blaming me for the demise of the marriage. -- T.T., Las Vegas
You want to go forward, but are unable. And you don't understand why.
I call it "stuckness," and stuckness quickly falls into two varieties. One kind of stuckness has to do with unfinished business -- business that is rightly our responsibility. The other kind of stuckness has to do with our fierce grip on someone else's business. As I read your letter, I found myself wondering if you were stuck in both of these ways.
I would say that your business is the grief you feel over a failed marriage, the anger you feel over being sexually abandoned in that marriage and the helplessness you must feel/have felt because no amount of counseling or effort seemed able to change things.
The deliberate withholding of sex in marriage is no little thing. It's huge. It's consequential. I could even make an argument that it is hostile. Cruel. To render marriage sexless is to fundamentally change the marriage contract.
Of course, I would affirm that no one should ever have sex they don't want to have; but, when you find you don't want to have sex with your spouse, then I would say you have a responsibility to explore that reluctance, to fix it, to bring every effort to the goal of healing whatever needs to be healed so that thriving sexual courtship might resume as soon as possible.
Ten years into a marriage, it's OK to quit your mate's bowling team and reveal that you've never really liked bowling and to tell your mate he/she will henceforth have to enjoy bowling individually. But try to deliver that same speech about sex, and you'll find it's a little different.
You link your ex-wife's withholding sex with her experience of rape, but I don't know-that-I-know that. There are in fact a wide variety of reactions that people have to childhood sexual abuse or adult sexual assault.
I would say that reconciling with your children is your business. In fact, I'm curious that, in your own words, you separated from "my wife and my children." It's as if you thought one estrangement presupposed the other. I wonder if, in the crisis and pain of divorce, you blurred some boundaries in the various relationships. I would set aside the question of responsibility for the "demise of the marriage," and would stand strong in your unilateral responsibility for choosing divorce! Yes, kids -- it was I and only I who wanted and chose the divorce.
But ... you also are stuck to business that is alone the responsibility of your ex-wife. I'm saying this need you have to "set the record straight" with her is misbegotten. Each individual divorced person narrates the story of failed marriage in his/her own way, often narrating pure fiction so as to dodge the work of moral accountability. Your ex's story goes something like, "Once upon a time I was minding my own business as a stellar wife in a perfectly good marriage and my husband dumped me."
And this story, good man, is none of your business. You don't need to "set the record straight" with her to help you move on. Divorce means surrendering her to live out her own story for as long as she can stand it.
You, however, are free to tell your own story. If you'd like, a more responsible, accurate and liberating story. A story that will help you move forward with your life.
Steven Kalas is a behavioral health consultant and counselor at Las Vegas Psychiatry and the author of "Human Matters: Wise and Witty Counsel on Relationships, Parenting, Grief and Doing the Right Thing" (Stephens Press). His columns appear on Sundays. Contact him at 227-4165 or skalas@reviewjournal.com.
