Ugh. Such an ugly word. Partially because when you get married you have “happily ever after” ringing in your ears and you’re certain that you couldn’t possibly end up on the wrong side of the 50% bracket. Divorce is for other people. Silly people. People who just don’t have it together like you do, right?
Wrong.
Now I get it. There is just absolutely, 100%, no way to tell what it’s like to be married before you are married. And, like it or not, people DO change. In fact, change is the name of the game, isn’t it? If not, we’d all still be living in our parents’ house, eating bags of Doritoes while watching MTV, and stuck in some horrendous math class.
Instead, we’ve all graduated, have jobs, careers, wives, husbands, kids, dogs, cats, cars, houses, aging parents – in other words – RESPONSIBILITIES. Another ugly word at least a full half of us wasn’t prepared for. It’s quite a shock to wake up one day and realize that you are in your 30s and supposedly a “nearing middle aged” ADULT. Yikes. Doesn’t sound too pretty, does it? Not to me, anyway.
How does it all go haywire anyway? And I don’t necessarily just mean the marriages. When did life stop being an fun adventure on the roller coaster and start being more like a ride through a haunted house? When did I round that imperceptible corner into the “downhill” phase of my life? I still feel really young and like I have everything ahead of me. So why is it that the prospect of being a divorcee at 34 makes me shake in my birkenstocks? Why do I suddenly feel as though my future is dwindling?
Does everyone go through this? Is it forced on us by the media? How do we get the images of what we were supposed to be like at this age out of our heads?
Here in Asia, divorce is just starting to take hold. People would still rather eke it out with someone they don’t particularly like just to have some “security.” Which means money, if you’re a woman, and a nurse for your old age, if you’re a man. It’s strange how all the illusions of romantic love really haven’t gotten their hooks into the culture here yet. When you talk to people about relationships, they stare at you with that “have you gone mental?” look on their faces. It just isn’t an issue here – at least not in the same Jerry Springer type of way it is in the US. People might hate the way their spouse breathes and secretly hope they fall down a flight of steps, but you’d never hear about it. Oh, they constantly joke about bickering with their wives/husbands, but that is the RULE, not the exception. You’re not supposed to love your mate in a Hollywood way. That’s our own particular brand of nonsense and they’re not buying into it.
As much as I have tried to make this marriage a success, it just isn’t. That’s the bald-face truth of it. Yesterday we got into it because I corrected his usage of “jaded” – which he took to mean tired and I explained was more like “wisened with bad experiences.” Par example, I am now JADED when it comes to marriage and love. Instead of saying that he was annoyed by me making fun of him a little, he pushed my buttons. Instead of just taking that in stride, I let him and started a bigger argument. End result? He was yelling in the middle of the street and left me with two 20-pound bags of cat litter to carry home. In the end, maybe because I was crying, he caught up with me and helped me home. Then I had to admit what I’ve known all along – this just isn’t WORKING.
So, that’s it, I guess. Somehow we’re going to try to live with each other for another year so that I can finish my Chinese studies. Maybe we can at least salvage something to be friends. To be honest, we’re not really that great of friends anyway. So maybe we can just learn to become friends.
It’s funny how things change. Slowly, over time, love just drains out of a thing like water out of a leaky bathtub. No matter how full, warm and inviting the bath was in the beginning, if you don’t keep adding hot water or learn to fix the leak, you will be left cold and shivering in an inch of water. And that’s what we did. We enjoyed that awesome bath to the fullest – but paid so little attention to the water leaking. In the beginning, at least we kept adding hot water to keep our love lukewarm. Now, we can’t even do that. We’re sitting in an empty tub arguing about how it got that way. And it makes me so sad that I can’t even believe it. How empty I feel.
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