Why did my marriage fail?

There seems no more fundamental question for me to ask right now.  OK, so I know that asking that is the most normal thing in the world.  I also know that I also know that asking that is, ultimately, futile and irrelevant.  But I'm an engineer.  Without a post-modem on it, how do you form lessons learned?  And without lessons learned, how do you not repeat the same mistakes next time?  Asking it from the very pathological standpoint of, "what did I do wrong?" or "what is so wrong with me that makes me so unlovable?" is obviously unhelpful.  Actually stepping outside and looking at what did and did not work might be helpful.  As long as it doesn't fuel my depersonalization thing. 

But, anyway, I can't help it.  That's what you do when you divorce.  You ask why.

To me, the answer to that question goes way, way back.  As I think I've mentioned, more than one counselor who has seen Madam X and I since the divorce started has come to the conclusion that the two of us simply should have never been allowed to be married.  That it was simply doomed from the start.  That means a lot to me.  Since my, oh, I'll guess I'll call it, "conversion", I have very deeply internalized the ideas and theology behind the idea of marriage annulment.  That not everything we as human beings call "marriage" truly is, just as not everything we label "divorce" is that.  God has His own standards.

And by any standard I know of, it would be hard to call what Madam X and I had a valid marriage.  The combination you find universally in both scripture and tradition that determines what is and is not marriage is sex and consent.  We certainly consummated our marriage.  But did I -- or she -- ever truly give consent? 

I know that I did not.  I told my mom six weeks before our marriage, and three weeks before I found out she was pregnant that when I graduated and left school for my job I would not take Madam X, because she was NOT the one.  I had decided NOT to marry her.  Not to continue our relationship.  To leave her and find someone else.  She certainly knew this was my decision.  She is and has always been very perceptive.  So, she got herself pregnant.  On purpose. 

OK, so this does reveal other choices of mine, that were freely made (if not well thought out), but consenting to sex with a ready and willing girl doesn't equate to consent to life-long marriage.  But she knew I am the guy that always does the right thing, no matter the consequences.  So, she got pregnant because she knew I would marry her.  That is what we were both taught was the "right thing." 

For the first 5 or 6 years of our marriage the thing I most strongly felt was trapped.  I didn't want it but I had no choice.  The first blog I had helped that.  I realized that a lot of the dysfunction in our relationship was that I had never chosen her.  So, I decided to really for real make it work.  And it did.  For awhile. 

But then there is the other half of this: she never really wanted me, either.  Yeah, she got herself pregnant so I would marry her.  But, by her own admission, this was not because she loved me.  She wanted away from her mom.  She wanted out of her home town.  She wanted a different life.  And I was her ticket out.  Me and my career.  So, she made sure I took her with me. 

But that's not really a solid foundation for a marriage, either.  It was OK until she met my "friend" Bluto.  Then she decided there was all these things she wanted that I was not and that he was.  She decided she had settled for far too little.  She decided she "deserved" more.  And so, she left. 

What went wrong?  Well, first of all, I didn't really have a lot of standards when I was first sleeping with her.  I've always had a big problem with self-confidence, and, while I was still trying to date other girls, was still sleeping with her because she was available and because I didn't think I could do any better.  I never really wanted her.  But she was there.  And, at that point, no one else was. 

I read a really good article a little while back.  It was written to single women about why they aren't married yet, and so is a pretty insightful look at what guys look for.  Or should look for.  The author says at one point, that smart guys wisely pick their wives "for their character, not their cup size."  That's about having standards.  That's about making sure the girl is the RIGHT girl.  And I just didn't.

 And that was because I didn't feel I deserved any better.  I've always struggled with self-confidence, but especially then.  There were a lot of other girls I would have rather have been with, but I thought they were way out of my league. 

OK, so what to do now?  What do I learn from all this?  Well, as my previous post showed, she still has something for me, and it is because, even if she really wants Bluto, she knows that in a lot of ways I'm the better guy.  She knows I'm the guy she can REALLY count on.  She HATES me, and even she still feels that.

So, why NOT be confident?  I'm an intelligent, educated, and successful guy.  I make in the six-figures for a rather important institution.  I'm not grossly obese or anything - and even she, in a moment of pure honesty, said I'm more sexually attractive than her other guy.  And, I do the right thing.  I have character.  I have gravitas.  Why not be confident?  Why not KNOW in my heart of hearts that ANY girl would be lucky to have me?

I don't know.  But believing that is still awful hard.

Other things new and different

More of these keep occurring to me.

Before, I would spend quite a bit of time watching TV.  I wasn't quite a couch potato, but I'd watch the History Channel, and the few good things on SciFi (I refuse to use the new name), and I would watch a lot of sports.  Now, while I have a TV, for the first time in my life (really!) I don't have cable.  I have the TV hooked up to the computer and do netflix and hulu and the new Amazon streaming thing.  Which means, on mornings like today I can't grab the remote and just surf around until I find something interesting on.  I have to know what I want to watch and then go find it.

Speaking of TV and sports, I've always been a big college basketball fan, and so March Madness has been a favorite time of year for me.  Every year since my oldest was born, me and the now-ex, and whichever kids were old enough to speak filled out brackets.  Then, the first two days of games the ex would take off work to watch them on TV, while I would most of the time move my laptop into the breakroom at work and work in there for two days, watching them on the TV in there.  This year: no one to do brackets, no breakroom to watch the games in, and no cable to watch them on at home.  And, for some reason, I really don't care.  I haven't even tried to watch any of it this year -- and that counts for the entire season.  Too much other stuff going on.

Last year at this time -- as in past years -- I'd be spending March planting seeds in pots in my kitchen window and getting all the lawn equipment and sprinkler system in working order.  Then, around the end of March, beginning of April I'd have to start weekly yard work, as well as starting up my garden for the year.  This year, I live in an apartment, and I don't even have any South-facing windows to do a window garden in.  And, as far as I know, the ex knows nothing of yard maintenance and probably hasn't done anything, which means she hasn't started watering yet, which means my yard (and my trees, and my grape vine) will all die.  Oops.  Not mine anymore.  That's changed, too.

Oh, yeah, other changes

I thought about editing the other post and adding this but decided to surprise everyone and give a short one.

Another big change from a year ago to now: last spring I was working furiously to finish my master's degree.  I had been going back to school a class at a time while still working full-time for a full 5 years at that point.  Then, in May of last year, I graduated.  So, after 10 straight semesters of school, I'm now on my second without it.  That's new.

Another: because a year ago I was a) not paying for two places to live and thus had more money, and b) was in full-on theological searcher mode, I was buying books like crazy from Amazon and doing some rather serious research.  I was reading and writing up new classes to teach and all that.  And now I'm not.  I taught a class on Wednesday nights at church for 7 straight years.  Now I'm teaching nothing.  I have nothing to prepare for.  No classes to teach, no research to do.  There are certainly still personal questions of a theological nature, but I've already made my big decisions -- even if I haven't quite followed through on all of them yet -- and so what's the point?

Another: in past years, because my family was so important, I would often get asked by people at work or whereever to come over and do guy stuff and I would often turn it down because I had to do stuff with the kids.  Now, I'm sitting here in this little apartment by myself most of the time (well, not most of the time, I'm not that isolated, but it feels that way sometimes) because when I call now to see if anyone wants to hang out they all have to do family stuff.  Because all my friends are married and have kids.  That's new.

Expansion on a previous one: work and what I do.  Before, I was the techy guy who sat in the back in front of a computer all day and wrote code and analyzed data and, while I'd interact with the rest of team pretty well, and would put together presentations for briefings and stuff, I was the techy guy.  Now, my job is to go to meetings and talk like I know what I'm talking about, and to give other people direction, and to write systems engineering plans and powerpoint briefings, and to draw little cartoons for the powerpoint briefings.  That's awful new. 

So, new life, new blog

Some of the people who will find there way to this little journal will be people who knew me from my past blogging world.  Some of you will, hopefully, be new.  But for either group, I think I need to give a little background/update.

So, one year ago my life was completely and totally different.  I was approaching 11 years of marriage.  I was also approaching 11 years with the engineering firm I was working for.  I was a deacon at one of the local congregations of the Church of Christ, and was teaching 3 classes a week.

I had a very broad circle of friends from both work and church - and while I've always felt a bit of an outsider in any group, I also know I was respected.  One of the classes I was teaching for church was at the small group hosted at the house of a much older and wiser and respected man from church, and he put me in the role of teacher for his group.  I was the youngest person there, and was teaching them.  At work, I was doing the job I had done for 11 years, and I did it very well - writing simulations of systems, and then doing data analysis of the hardware systems, and letting the two halves interact.

As for friends, the best I had were a group that was just then getting put together, but would eventually be a small group Bible study before flying apart.  There were three families, including mine, and one single guy and the only thing they had in common -- the only thing that brought them together -- was me.  In the group, I had one very, very close friend, who happened to be female (as most of my close friends throughout my life have been), but I was also developing a very close friendship with the single guy in the group.  The first real, close male friendship I've had in a very long time. 

That was a year ago.

Since then, my entire life has rebooted.  Hence the blog name.

In May of last year me, and two of the guys from our small group had a great big doctrinal fight with the elders of our church, and in June we all left that church - and, though we all left at the same time and for similar reasons, my doctrinal issues with it all went a lot deeper and were a lot more fundamental.

In August of last year I took a new job at a new firm.  Work and money and such were getting very scarce in my old firm, and they were laying off a ton of people, and I got tired of looking over my shoulder.  So, I went looking around and found an awesome opportunity.  But, in a new place, with new people, doing something COMPLETELY different.

In September of last year, my wife decided my close friendship with my female friend bothered her, and demanded I end it.  There was nothing inappropriate about it at all.  There was nothing wrong.  Certainly nothing romantic and adulterous.  But, when my wife said stop, I did.

In November of last year, my theological issues with the Christian movement we were a part of started coming to a head.  My family ended up leaving another church, but in two different directions because my wife wanted something that was more deeply Church of Christ, and it was the deep, traditional Church of Christ theology that I could no longer do.  So, she and the kids went to the ultra-conservative Church of Christ in town, and I went to an Anglo-Catholic church across the street.

Then, in January, I come home from work to find a policeman in my yard serving me with divorce papers.  In order to justify her actions to her very conservative friends and fellow church-goers, my wife accused me of having an affair, and spread that lie to anyone who would listen.  And quite a few did.

The real reason, of course, was that she and my single guy friend, who I thought was the first real, close, male friend I ever had, are now quite the item. 

So, new job, new Church, and now completely new life situation.  Living not in the nice, middle-class house we bought 8 years ago right before my daughter was born, but alone, across town, in a rather lower middle-class apartment.  Of my friends, those who weren't so much friends, but just aquaintences from our old church mostly bought the lie and don't want anything to do with me.  My single guy friend - let's label him Bluto - thinks every word that comes out of my now ex-wife's mouth is gospel truth, and thus thinks I'm some sort of pathological liar, and hates me.  Even while he tries to replace me in the lives of both my wife and my children.  The other couple in the small group is still friends with me, but I know just having me around makes them nervous.  Not that they'd ever admit to that or stop having me (and the kids, when I have them) over to visit, but I can tell they don't quite know what to do.

Of course, now that my wife has left me, I can at least be friends with my female friend -- and her husband -- again.  Interestingly enough, since September her husband has become one of the most faithful and stalwart friends I have.  We always got along and considered each other friends before, but not quite like this.  So, that's all new.

So, brand new life.  Outside of my kids -- which I get to see far, far too little -- and a few of my personal items there's not much in my life that was there a year ago.  And I really don't know how to handle it all.

I mean, how do you handle that much change?  That much change at once?  My very core identity is at stake here.  I used to always identify myself, primarily, as a husband and father.  My old blogger log-in even had "husband" in the name.  Fatherhood was the most cherished aspect of my existence I had.  Now, who, on the most basic level, am I?

My therapist says I'm handling everything very well.  Much better than anyone he's ever counseled in similar situations.  Yet, that alone scares me.  It's not normal to handle this sort of thing well.  It's normal to freak out and go a little crazy.  Yet, I'm calm.  I'm rational.  I'm reasonable when I have to deal with the ex.

I'd like to attribute some of that to faith.  Certainly I feel closer to God than I did before.  Before, I was in full-time searcher mode.  Which is a fun and interesting intellectual exercise, but that's not devotion and relationship and all that other existential stuff I'm now engaged in.  But I know faith isn't all of it.  Or probably even most of it.

Some of it is that a lot of the change was necessary, even if it was painful.  The marriage we had was in trouble for a long time.  Several of the ministers and counselors we have seen together or individually over the last few months have, in the end, come to the conclusion that the two of us simply should have never been allowed get married because we really, really didn't work together and the marriage was more-or-less doomed from the start.  And the new job is a good career move and has given me a very good situation (even if I'm really not all that comfortable with my new role yet).

But I know some of the reason why I'm appearing to handle things so well is less healthy.  I know I've been checking out a bit, in a very deep way.  I've had rather strong and persistent experiences of depersonalization and dissassociation lately.  Which isn't good.  I mean, I know that's all psychological defense mechanisms to help one deal with trauma -- and this certainly counts -- but when you factor in all the newness -- the me of today is really and truly not the same as the me of even 6 months ago and that makes it really, really hard to even know who "me" is -- things get scary.  I depersonalize it, as if it happened to someone else that I'm just watching from the outside, as if I'm just watching a rather tragic play, and so that means I don't have to emotionally deal with it.  Because, is it really me it's happening to?

So, I know I NEED to personalize it, and the only way I know to do that is to do it like I have always dealt with stuff - write about it.  Think about it, process it, feel it, and then talk about it.  To the ether.  To the universe.   I blogged marriage problems 5 years ago.  Then, I thought it was all good and stopped.  Then I tried to start again in September after that mess but then my wife and her new boyfriend started reading it, and that was just not-good on an epic scale.

But, now, she's gone and he's gone and this is a new blog for my new life.  I need to write in this and I need to do it every day.  To get my thoughts and feelings and experiences out.  To talk it through.

So, that's the story.  And, if you're new to my blogs, I'd like to tell you the length of this post is atypical of me, but the others that DO know me would immediately call me a liar.  So, I'll not even try and make that claim.