I have a friend who's my age (roughly 35) who's on her third marriage. It's her husband's third as well.
I know some less extreme examples, but even my Dad took three wives to figure it out.
I have two friends who used to be married to each other. One is, as far as I know, happily married to his second wife with two kiddos. Honestly, if he'd put as much effort into his first marriage, he might not have gotten divorced, and he'd tell you the same.
My other friend, his ex, has a marriage that as far as I can tell is on the rocks. Though at first blush their marriage, like her ex's seemed to be one that had the efforts its predecessor lacked.
What makes it even harder to cipher, for me, is that when these two friends were on their first marriage (to each other) I saw only one or two signs of weakness in their relationship. A guy I'd asked to stand with me as best man at my own wedding shocked me by telling me he had moved back to his Mom's while sorting things out.
On the one hand, I can see the virtue of the 'go marriage' cheerleading squad. It's serious business, and I meant the 'until death' part of my vows. Still do. But I'm not a scold, and for all the people I see getting married and divorced on slim (both in and out) reason, I also see that sometimes breaking off a relationship is constructive.
A woman who stays with a man through REM behavior disturbance, where he thrashes in his sleep and she wakes up with bruises from a dream he doesn't remember, there's a saintly quality to that. Or a spouse who sticks it out after an affair. Or a heart attack, change of religion, etc.
Abuse is a whole other area. Verbal? Physical? Some things are obvious. I used to know a woman who met her husband in jail. She wasn't in jail, her future 'husband' was. She was just along with a girl visiting a boyfriend in jail, met the man of her dreams. The man of her so-called dreams was serving time for molesting his kids.
So she took him in after his unpardonable parole, and exposed her own kids to him.
They had no marriage license, no matter what they called each other, but she helped him maintain the appearance of an indepednet residence since he couldn't legally live with her (because of her kids). She used this asshole as a baby-sitter, and when the parole officer gave her 'husband' a polygraph she decided it was an 'anxiety disorder' that caused him to fail, not the misdeeds he'd been up to while she was off not earning her hourly wage.
People who see marriage and divorce as a black and white thing, and I have tendencies in that direction, probably don't put enough thought into marriages that end up like my friend's. Not the woman who shacked up with a paroled sex offender and basically fed her kids to him, that is NOT a friend of mine, and by calling her duplicitous, illegal and destructive relationship 'marriage' is abuse of he language.
Now, my friend of nearly half my life, she's in the middle of a situation I couldn't even begin to help. A long ways from the Lansing Love that I detailed, but in a painful place. And trying to decide which way to bet on a two-headed nickel flip.
No comments:
Post a Comment