The Beginning of the End 

So... here goes nothing...

I am 44 years old, married in June 1984, coming up on 24 years of marriage.  In so many ways, the world looked at L. (my spouse) and I as the perfect couple.  We grew up as high school sweethearts.  She helped me through college and law school.  I eventually landed in a wonderful career in estate and financial planning.  We had two wonderful, healthy kids.  We were active in various wonderful churches where I served as a music minister part-time. Although we did not have many close friends, we had a wonderful extended family and wonderful acquaintances who would do almost anything for us.

It was all just... well... wonderful.  Or was it? 

As with an iceberg, beauty floats above, danger lurks beneath.

L. had several strikes against her from the outset.  First, she was an only girl in a family of three other boys.  From my observations, L. became used to the unique attention of her father as his "princess" and she chafed by what she had seen as the strict controls of her mother -- meticulous, often opinionated.  Ironically, after marriage, L. began to see her mom's controls as part of her love for her -- to protect her from the harms to which Mom's teenage sons had been already exposed.  They have remained best friends in every healthy (and not-so-healthy) sense of the word.  And she began to adopt the same controlling habits with those around her.

Another key event occurred when L. was sexually molested by a teacher in high school.  Her family and I had kept it secret for years.  The blinding hurt and anguish that it must have caused her, I believe, never got fully explored.  In time I believe it affected our love life to where sex became only a necessary evil, a tool to conceive, not an integral part of a healthy relationship.

As for me, I was the quintessential nerd growing up -- extremely bright and talented but painfully shy and introverted.  Most of the world around me was my "interior world," and I did not wish to associate with the "real" any more than was necessary.  Girls giggled at my awkwardness -- I never really dated any one.  Until L. came...  She was the only one who didn't giggle, who made me feel like I was the best man on earth.  I reveled in that, even though the first signs of that powerful, controlling nature of hers reared their heads.  After dating the first year or so, I knew she would be my wife.  After all, who else would want me?

The first year of the marriage was hellacious.  The control extended to so many seemingly meaningless and trivial things and yet I was required to comply.  L. repeatedly used the threat of divorcing me as a weapon.  Coming from a very conservative, religious family, where divorce was unthinkable, I would often fall sobbing to the floor, begging her to come back and agreeing to comply with whatever she wanted.  Instead of real communication, I learned to cope by "settling" and pushed my real feelings down into the surface, as was my instinct.

I thought of a million different justifications for this behavior -- every marriage involves compromise, maybe I am being unreasonable, I am a more mature person, I can handle it, surely this issue is not as important as I think it is, my needs are not important, that's what my mom and dad always said, think of others before yourself.  All good and true thoughts, I suppose -- they allowed me to survive in this jungle of marriage.  But like any argument, when pushed beyond the limits of reason, they can become the most destructive of tools to tear our psyches apart.

L. loves things -- in many ways, things take the place of people for her --  much more dependable and unable to hurt or talk back or confront.  Nice furniture, frequent trips and dining out.  And I, again longing to make her happy, obliged constantly.  And all along, the bills racked up... and up....  As a person who is skilled in finance, I juggled income and expenses adeptly.  At times, I felt almost like I could make magic from it all.  I just worked a third job teaching temporarily or got another loan to consolidate and lower payments or took money from the kids' college savings and we kept going...

L. also deals with many health-related issues.  She was diagnosed with relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis about 10 years ago.  The relapses cause her to be virtually unable to walk.  There were countless trips to the hospital, steroid treatments, MRIs, medications, doctors and specialists and super-specialists.  The steroids ballooned her to weigh over 300 pounds.  And as hard as it is for me to admit it, it began to affect my physical attraction to her.

I was there through all of it, or so I always thought.  Again, I, the strong, mature, healthy, energetic husband would attend to his fallen wife -- save the princess from the dragon until she would become well again.  But it was gradually becoming less and less a relationship of a prince and princess, or even a husband and wife.  It was becoming one of a dependent child and a parent.  At times, the child would throw the usual temper tantrum for this trinket or a cruise away from it all or a demand to cater to some need she had.  Sometimes that need would be translate into a need for me -- for touch, for comfort, for constant presence.  More and more, that positive feeling of being needed and wanted started to morph into a repulsion, like a man smothering to death from underneath his lover's pillow. 

For years I continued to endure it all, riding the all-too-familiar roller coaster of emotions that those who suffer emotional abuse must experience.  When L. was happy, I was happy.  When L. suffered, I suffered.  "Again, isn't that the process of any relationship?" I asked myself.  Perhaps.  And yet, after our last move into a house I really didn't want, facing the oncoming train down the tunnel called "mid-life," I took a look down at my gut (no, not my starting-to-bulge stomach, but my real emotional gut).  All of a sudden, I saw the garbage of over 15 years of resentment and pain from L.  "Where did all this come from?" I wondered like an idiot.

All of a sudden I began to realize that after swimming for years in this ocean, I was getting tired and land was nowhere to be seen.  And so, this mild but growing interior panic started to set in.  Surely, land would come in sight.  Surely, God would help me find a way out of the life circumstances I have found myself in.  Surely... surely... there is a plan, there is a way out.

And then... it really began to unravel.

It started when my mom died of cancer at 67, after battling it for over 22 years.  We all knew it was coming after the cancer had metastasized into her bone and when treatments began, one by one, to fail.  My mom, the most courageous person I had ever known, the touchstone of my life, was leaving.  I was only one in my family that did not cry once at her funeral. 

A certain group in the church where I served as a music minister didn't like my style or my growing lack of enthusiasm for the task.  I saved them the trouble and left.  After three years now, I have probably attended ANY church in numbers you could count on a single hand.  My belief in a benevolent God who answers prayers and cares about those who love Him and has a plan to rescue the faithful from calamity was shaken to its very core.  The rubble of my faith looks to me now like an archeological dig in the Holy Land -- remnants of ancient bones and utensils lying amongst dirt and rocks in a barren desert.

As a result of leaving the second job, money became more scarce.  We certainly weren't living like paupers; neither were we living like the Rockefellers.  L. had become used to having what she wanted and continued to demand it, despite having the extra income to have it.  By the same token, she was unable to keep employment.  Frankly, I don't know if she wanted a job (but couldn't keep it) or was just unable to  -- due to the MS, her lack of education, her lack of desire... any number of things that could be either reasons or excuses, depending on your point of view.

Next, my oldest son began attending college and eventually fell in love with a young Mormon gal.  As a result, he converted to the LDS church -- an act of heresy within our conservative Baptist family.  Even I became riddled with the questions of why he would do this, whether my own crisis of faith had somehow caused him to abandon his.  And now, in an ironic twist of fate, my son prepares to be married in September at the same age I was when I started that journey.

And then, a huge shocker.  My daughter declared she was a lesbian.  Despite her conservative upbringing and her absolute devotion to God and her Baptist faith, she was utterly convinced of her attraction.  Despite trying to have boyfriends and to conform with what the leaders of her congregation said, she could not deny her inner truth.  L., in her controlling and morally indignant way, wrote her off.  Ever since, we have become comrades in arms, both victimized by L.'s widening web of emotional control.

In desperation, I turned to chatting with other females about my plight online, looking for understanding and perhaps even some reassurance that I was not as bad a guy as I continually thought I was.  It was totally wrong-headed and eventually it self-destructed.  L. found out, and I was virtually ready to call it quits.  And yet, I have lingered (I guess we both have lingered) trying any way possible to regroup and rebuild a more healthy relationship.  I began treatment for depression.  We both went to counseling.  We went to a marriage retreat.  We read books.  I tried communicating more and repressing less, despite the increased tension and strife it seemed to bring.  Nothing... literally nothing has changed.

And so here I am, typing these last few lines of my first journal post on a website dedicated to those who are ending what is meant to be a lifelong journey -- for some, an eternal journey.  Why can't I fix it?  Why can't I endure it?  What am I going to do?  My mind is jumbled with scenarios, legal and financial -- with details that must be attended to if I am to throw in the towel.  It all feels like being in that ocean, too tired to even tread water, knowing that if I just stop, I will sink and drown noiselessly into the depths.

So it is a death -- the death of what is really the only life I have ever known.  But perhaps it means a ... new life?  A resurrection into a new existence and a new person I have never known?  The real me?  The "core me" that exists outside all the expectations of my father, my siblings, my co-workers, my few friends?  Dare I even entertain the thought of such a thing?