This journal entry was written on 11 July 2007.
Marriage is commitment. That’s the defining difference between it and other types of relationships. When you marry, you commit to travel through the rest of your lives together. You commit to doing everything in your power to work through the turbulent times and the times where you really don’t like each other.
That’s why I’ve been hurting. We committed to spend the rest of our lives together. We brought both our biological and our chosen families to witness and participate in a ceremony that strengthened our bond and announced before the world just how serious we were about staying together.
So certain were we that we gave those families a modicum of control over that relationship. We gave them each their knot, representing our union. If our union were to end, every knot-holder would have to be convinced to untie it. Every memory of those so important to us would have to be confronted, and would have to know the full truth of whatever situation it was that would be immense enough to drive us apart.
We involved our community.
At the end of those six months, you were ready to divorce me, to hell with the knots. You had acted to me as if nothing were wrong. You had gone through the motions of love with someone that you were no longer sure that you loved. Maybe I didn’t see it because I didn’t want to see it. Maybe I felt secure in our relationship, so secure that I took it for granted. It seems a possibility; I was operating under the idea that we had committed to spending our lives together.
Now, you have told me that to be true to yourself, you must express your love for another. You have, by your own choosing, suppressed this since you had an inkling of it, before we were married. This is where my brain has been forced to consider the abstract. I knew that some quality of marriage made this situation unreasonable, but I could not grasp it. I considered the pros and the cons, both emotionally and intellectually. I could see both sides, as I’ve told you before, and it didn’t help. Nothing in the abstract helped me to decide whether or not I could handle this.
If you and I have committed to spend the rest of our lives together, this situation makes no sense. You and I should be together by default, no matter what, and the question should be whether you get involved with her or not. The default should not be that you and she will be together, and the question should not be whether you and I will remain married.
There is something broken in our relationship. I have problems trusting you, because you have deceived me. I have problems with your driving and your attitude about car insurance because they continually add stress and problems that never needed to be there. I have had problems (up until very recently) with your habit of not doing what you say that you are going to do – living room, bathroom, front yard, bills, dishes.
These things can be worked out.
You had a laundry list at the end of those six months. I, and we, have worked much of that out. I’m sure that there are still things that do not make it easy to be my wife.
These things can be worked out.
You are being more honest with yourself than you have ever been, and that makes me ecstatic. I have been more honest with myself than I have ever been, and that makes me proud. I have thought about how much easier it would be for me to live alone. I have been tempted by it. I’ve realized – in a flash that felt like getting hit by a bus – that I really, truly, and completely want to be your husband. That clarified things for me and gave me orientation.
I am still committed to spending the rest of my life with you.
I have asked myself, if this were in the situation that seemed correct, if our marriage were going to be there no matter what, and you wanted to express your love for another freely, physically, how would I react? Immediately, I knew that I would be totally against it. This is not something that I would be able to deal with under “normal” circumstances. That leads me to the belief that the only reason that I am considering this is because of your threat to leave.
But we haven’t been that committed to each other since those six months. How can I see our commitment as stable, or as reliable, when you were going to ignore the knots completely? What do the knots mean now? Why do we even keep them?
I want for us to be at a place where they mean something. I want our commitment to each other to be strong again. I want our marriage to be the “of course” when we think about ourselves in the world.
I don’t want you to go, but I don’t think that I am ready to share you. I don’t know that I ever will be. If this is immense enough to break us apart, I ask you to have the knots untied. If it is important enough to you, then it is worth confronting our families about, both biological and chosen.
She texted me the other day, pestering me about meeting to sign papers. How ironic. They’re signed, and I file tomorrow, assuming that my forms are all in order.