****
“I just want to feel the way I used to feel about you.”
The night he left me, he told me many things.
With the cold shock of it all withering through me, I was still able to feel a flare of anger over how unfair, cruel and completely fucking juvenile a thing that was for him to say to me.
We were twelve years into our lives together. Twelve years and two kids. It was impossible to once again be new and exciting to someone who had been at my side for all of it. And that’s not the point of marriage. It’s not to be who you used to be, it’s to appreciate who you’ve become- the life and family you’ve made together. Forward, not back.
I was sitting there wearing pajamas, no makeup, my hair messed from laying with our sick six- year- old to get her to sleep. I had just finished the dishes and had been excited to show him something I had finished writing earlier, and there he was, essentially telling me that who I am now does not interest him anymore.
He told me many things that night, many hurtful things that came out of nowhere and didn’t make sense- but I felt that one drag it’s way down to my fucking core. I knew that sort of yearning was the thing that got into someone’s head after it had been turned by someone else; it was the sort of thing they would say if they had weighed the spark of new attraction to someone else against the settled, safe love of their spouse and then made a cruel, selfish choice.
But there was no one else, he swore.
Had I known the truth of it, I might have had the good sense to at least hit him with a chair on his way out.
It seemed that he did indeed want to go back to who we used to be. You see, Mark used to have a horrible reputation when it came to women, though he didn’t even seem to be fully aware of it. He lied and cheated his way out of every relationship he ever had. Every. Single. One. He was a nice enough guy as long as you didn’t date him and I had no intention of doing so. We were loose friends for years, but I was never remotely interested in letting my heart anywhere near him.
Yet when I was going through one of the darkest times in my life, he was there for me. He became one of my closest friends, and then more. I didn’t expect anything to come from it, especially considering he had been seeing someone else at the time. Even when he told me he was going to marry me right from the start, I thought he was just trying to be charming.
I didn’t think myself better than all of those girls he had wronged. I didn’t think I was some special magical fairy princess with the power to change his ways. I didn’t have a plan and I had no delusions about what was happening.
Little did I know that I was really a snake charmer.
It turned out, he’d had a crush on me for years and years, but I was the (clever) one he couldn’t get. Now that we were finally together, he seemed to genuinely want to be a better man. He cried a lot at the beginning, about his past, about his family. Whiskey aside, it seemed so intimate and real and not like the stoic man I had known him to be. I thought then that maybe there was something special between us after all. I had All of The Feelings, but was still hesitant to love him with the heart-bursting fullness of it. He was so open, but I managed to be restrained while still getting tangled up in him.
Which was good, because he cheated on me right away.
Well actually, it was a couple of months in, and with the girl that he had been dating when he and I started seeing each other. Touché, karma, touché. I suppose I wasn’t surprised, but what a let down. I felt all of the breaking things you feel in that situation. My heart fell away -but I caught it. I don’t know what made me give him another chance. Maybe I had known that he would make this mistake, that he would stumble. I didn’t let him fall though. There was something in him that I knew.
Falling in love with him was like having been lost in a dark and foreign place and suddenly finding someone from the strange land I was from and Oh THERE you are -thank god ! It was something akin to relief, joy and disbelief all at once.
I never put him on a pedestal, he was always in step with me. I didn’t have to be someone else for him, he didn’t love me for my potential, but for who I was right then. We were really there for each other and when we would talk I felt listened to, like I mattered- like what I said mattered. We didn’t need to hide from each other, we could feel safe sharing whatever weird things we were passionate about and even through hard times we could always end up making each other laugh. There was so much laughter in our time together.
This all seemed like a good foundation for a strong and lasting relationship, but when I was first pregnant, I knew this was another crossroads for us. I remember the uncomfortable blend of hope and dread knowing the likelihood that he was going to leave; I was familiar with his past after all. But he didn’t. He stayed by my side with a smile and his level-headed reassurance. He didn’t leave me and he didn’t let me down. He even married me, gleefully and on purpose.
And I watched him soar.
He really became the good man I knew he had in him. He was a good friend, a good husband, a good father. He was proud of us; of he and I and of our girls. He put his family first. He was an honest man, a respectable man, a man who would look down on someone who would cheat on their spouse and walk out on their family.
In the beginning, I used to always ask if he loved me as though I expected him to find himself unsure. He said he was worried that I really thought he didn’t, but I’d just been hurt so badly in the past that I still couldn’t believe that I’d found something true. In my unfortunate experience, the other boot sometimes takes a long time to drop.
Sometimes, I guess it takes twelve years.
****
Enter the midlife crisis
A midlife crisis is a transition of identity and self-confidence that can occur in middle-aged individuals, typically 45 to 55 years old. The phenomenon is described as a psychological crisis brought about by events that highlight a person’s growing age, inevitable mortality, and possibly lack of accomplishments in life. This may produce feelings of intense depression, remorse, and high levels of anxiety, or the desire to achieve youthfulness or make drastic changes to their current lifestyle or feel the wish to change past decisions and events.
I wish I had known that the midlife crisis was a real thing. I had thought of it as more of a plot device until my husband became a paint-by-numbers example of one.
There are plenty of articles and blogs filled with warning signs because the most common casualty of the midlife crisis is marriage. It differs for men and women, but for those wives that miss the signs, the way the husband leaves is eerily familiar; it’s out of the blue and the reasons given seem made up. He tries to scapegoat his wife for things he is unhappy about in his life. There is almost always an affair.
Changing your appearance is one of the red flags, so if thinking chronologically, I suppose it started with the suits.
A few years ago, there was a promotion to management, something he sat down and talked over with me before taking because of how much his schedule would change. That was the type of person he always had been with me- someone who talked about big decisions and any problems that might come up. He was a problem solver and I admired that about him. He wasn’t one to let problems slide.
Gradually he started dressing for the manager role. Then over -dressing for it. But this last year he started becoming a bit obsessive. He needed to have the right colored pocket square to match this particular tie and his tie needed to match his socks and the tie clip had to be the right texture and his shoes needed to match his belt and so on.
This change made him happy. Ever supportive, I bought him a manly jewelry box (which are not called manly jewelry boxes) to keep his growing accessories in for his last birthday. I made sure to tell him he looked good when he showed off a new outfit. I was proud of him.
Then of course came the stereotypical new car. Spending money recklessly on yourself is another flag.
It wasn’t a sports car, but a Jeep like he’d always wanted and he didn’t do it without my agreeing to it. He was so excited about getting it last year after he got a raise- and it was his birthday. He does not have credit, in fact he couldn’t even open a bank account and didn’t even have a license until a couple of years ago, so he needed me to co-sign. I had no way of knowing he was going to screw us over financially and in every other conceivable way months later.
I would joke that next would come the younger girlfriend and he’d smile and say something like, “I know right?”
But the next flag was the death. Losing a parent or someone close can trigger a midlife crisis and cause you to make drastic changes in your life because you question your own long held beliefs and choices. You start asking if you don’t deserve something better.
Several people he knew, but wasn’t particularly close to, had passed away in the last year. His boss’s passing in December really affected him. He was sort of a mentor to him and he was a part of his daily life. It wasn’t long after this that he really committed to being the epitome of selfishness, but he’d had his eye on his hostess for a while before that.
He talked to me about her. His co- wrecker. He talked to me about her. He was always complaining about work. One night, I remember him being frustrated that the hostess might find another job because she wasn’t being paid enough and was only part time. I believe the gist was that he wanted to find a way to get her more money so she would stay because she was the best hostess he’d had. He talked to me, his wife, about the woman he wanted to or was already sleeping with.
But I digress.
One of the components of the midlife crisis is trying to recapture your youth and ignite old passions. Not a good idea when in your youth you were a real dick who seemed incapable of respecting the women who loved you.
When he left me, he decided to take up running and get back into photography. Oh, finally free of the ol’ ball and chain, he was gonna live his best life! The photography he had given up years ago when he couldn’t find any more girls to model for him. It almost had started to seem like he was more interested in just getting women to dress up in fetish wear for him than he was in taking pictures for artistic merit. I would try to get him to take some high quality pictures of, I don’t know, his kids. But that didn’t appeal to him.
The running, I’m guessing, came from his lowlife girlfriend’s influence. Perhaps to pick up steam when he was running, he pictured the girls and I chasing him, asking when he was coming home. Actually, the reason I went looking in his location history and ended up exposing his affair was in a way because of the running.
I had taken a walk with our oldest while he hung out with the youngest. You know, that’s why he came over, to hang out with his daughters. Yet when I came back he was sitting alone in another room on the computer. On a hunch, I checked his search history when he left.
He was looking up sports bras.
****
The midlife crisis doesn’t excuse anything.
It’s not a medical diagnosis. It’s not a mental illness. It’s a re-evaluation. One of those articles noted that it can be a time of growth, or it can be a time of destruction.
Mark chose utter destruction.
This man who was always such a problem solver decided to not solve any problem, but instead to create them. He overwrote our marriage in his head to try and justify to himself what he was doing, plucking out things that had never seemed to bother him at all and assigning them as suddenly being marriage destroying issues so great- why, he just couldn’t even bear to lift a finger to try and fix them. In fact, he couldn’t even talk to me about them, much less live with me and our children anymore, because…??
He’s tried to sell me on the idea that as soon as I found out there was a ‘third party’ ( Her name, in case you didn’t know, is still Amanda) that I discounted all of the reasons he gave for leaving before I knew he had been cheating on me. Well…yeah. Maybe because the reasons he gave felt like straws he was grasping at and the first time I was hearing about them was when he dropped them as he rushed out of the fucking door. Oh, and he left with a spring in his step, knowing she was there waiting for him. I can only imagine the pep talk she must’ve given him that day on the phone.
I’m guessing it came with pictures.
His attitude, expressed to me and other people, about what he’s done has basically been flippant and dismissive. Like, “Yeah, fine I cheated, but… but I was UNHAPPY OKAY?? OMG you guys! Stop focusing on the fact that I cheated on my wife for months before abruptly walking out on her to be with another woman and lookit how very secretly unhappy I have decided I was to make it okay!! PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE AFFAIR BEHIND THE CURTAIN!!”
About this affair, he actually told me at one point, “I could have cheated on you at any time(before this)! I had plenty of opportunities!” Holy shit, get this guy a fucking medal for just being a decent human being up until then! I mean if someone points out all the people they didn’t kill while on trial for murder, they should really be cut some slack.
****
So if you never want to find yourself a middle-aged cliché, or a piece of shit at any age, here is a good life lesson to keep in mind:
It is no one’s job to make you happy.
Not your friends. Not your parents. Not your spouse. When you get married it is a commitment to be there, comfort and support each other through the good and bad life throws at you. When you have a family together, the importance of that commitment deepens. But no matter your relationship status, ultimately, you need to tend to your own happiness.
In marriage, you are meant to act with a degree of love in all things towards each other, you should enjoy your children and the life you made together, but you owe it to yourself to pursue outside interests (something I’ll point out here that should not include sticking your dick in other people). This thing you’re reading? This was my outside interest. I write. It helps.
Tending to your happiness matters more when you have a family. Your life is no longer just about you because what you do has the power to profoundly affect your children, so you owe it to them to be emotionally cognizant enough to recognize if you feel your contentment slipping. Talk to your spouse if you feel something is growing wrong there because you owe it to your family to not, for example, go screw up your kids because you’re dissatisfied with your sex life.
I watched his job devour his life for three years. He was always on the phone, getting called in on his days off and being frustrated at just about everything from his irresponsible employees to his set- in -their- ways bosses. I tried to keep his homelife as stress free as possible, I kept him tethered to us when he couldn’t be there by sending him funny texts, pictures, and phone calls. I made it so all he had to do was show up and enjoy his time with us.
And when he would put his phone away and just be present, he did enjoy his time at home. But stress from work always loomed. Then when those things only spoken about with whiskied breath about his past, about his family, seemed to be bubbling up more this year demanding to be addressed, he didn’t seem to know how to do that.
When he wanted to start therapy, I thought it had something to do with any or all of those things. I didn’t know it was because he had started seeing someone else and was looking for someone to tell him it was okay to leave. Something had to give, and I guess it wasn’t going to be the paycheck, it wasn’t going to be the job that gave him a sense of power, especially when his current fuckbuddy worked there.
The thing he broke instead was his marriage.
It was his daughters’ stable home life and trust in him.
It was me.
One thing that had made me eventually feel safe in loving him all those years ago when I was fresh out of an abusive relationship and had a hard time trusting in anything, was that this man knew what I had gone through, he understood and was so reassuring that I knew he would never do anything to hurt me. He knew, he knew what his cheating on me would do to me emotionally and psychologically. And he did it anyway.
He did it and then has tried to dismiss it as irrelevant. I doubt anyone who knows him is ignorant enough to buy into that- except of course for Amanda, but then she doesn’t know him. Not really. Not yet. My eyes on the street tell me they are very much still together and, I can only hope, are very proud of their ill-gotten relationship built on the ruins of his marriage and family.
My husband is a very, very good liar.
His impassive, reptilian stare gets wet, almost like tears, when he looks into your eyes and sincerely tells you what he wants you to believe. He lies just as well to himself. He is never going to let himself look at the real heart of his life- shattering decisions to start a new relationship and then leave his wife and family. He will never admit to himself or anyone else the commonplace fact that he was just another middle-aged man who got fucking bored with his life.
Yet actions speak louder than lies and all of his sing that our marriage didn’t go rotten, he did.
