0: The Marriage In Brief

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When I met S in 2002, I was a different person. I mean that I was a freshly different person, in that I was newfound in my openness for connection and partnership. It was my very great fortune to meet someone like S, who not only was everything that I wanted but also represented everything that I discovered I needed. Her vigorous reality was something that I could trust, in a way that I could never recognize consciously but always knew viscerally. It was something usually missing that would make me end every relationship before that one.

So my own trajectory was set inside myself. But at the same time S had her own doubts. Originally, we faced those doubts together, and I parsed them as being about her trusting my love for her. That was something I was completely confident about, and reassured her about it.

Her doubts never totally went away. My experience of our 17 years together were mostly happy, with occasional bouts of doubt troubling her for small portions of the time. It got easier to push those doubts to the side when the kids came, because we are such wildly successful parenting partners and both utterly in love with being parents.

But the doubts ate S alive in the last 5 years. Counselling on and off cast them in dim light, but never gave us the insight needed to cast them off. As we talked and cried, we established a profound understanding about how much we do love each other, how much we are family, and much we would like to be friends.

If there is any single thing I want known about our marriage, it is that I gave my whole heart to it.