Staying Married

Creative Commons, Neil Lathwood

I have been reading Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed. Towards the end of the book, Cheryl aka Sugar shares three letters from women who are thinking about leaving their husbands. She puts these letters together, because she believes that together they tell a complete picture. In her answer, Sugar describes her own first marriage, and how she made the decision to leave it for no definable reason except that she felt she must.

“Go!” she encourages the letter writers. “Go!”

Here, I must disagree with Sugar. I got married when I was 20, to a lovely, normal man. He was many things that I was not, including mature and emotionally stable. Before the wedding, and immediately after, my mind shouted at me to RUN RUN RUN! I sweated through the nights and cried through the days because every twitching fiber of my being wanted me to go, but there was one small corner of  logical thought that kept talking me down.

There are lots of real reasons to decide to leave something or someone, but there are lots of other reasons too that are less valid and less real and less about a relationship than our own minds: Fear (of screwing up, of being left, of not being good enough), restlessness,  resistance to growing up, PMS, not knowing how to live without drama, fearing that you’re getting happy, and happiness is boring.

The thing that scared me the most was the knowledge that if I stayed, something was going to change, and that something was probably me. I didn’t know what changed me would look like, or if I would like her more or less than I already did. Would I still recognize myself? Would I still be myself?

None of these were good reasons for going, because if the reason is my own crazymaking self, then, as the saying goes, “Wherever I go, there I am.” I will find myself and my crazymaking ways thinking exactly the same things a month or six months or a year later and have the same choice to make again. Stay or Go?

I could be going forever, which at some point looks a lot like running away.

He had reasons to go too. Getting married to a beautiful depressed person who, while not exactly in love with someone else is not entirely over them either, seemed like a big mistake. He told me later that being married was so horribly different than he expected he wondered if he had ruined his life.

And yet, here we are. Neither of us chose to go, despite our heart’s whispers, and somewhere along the way we learned to love each other well. The past eleven years have brought us happiness and suffering, but these have not defined us. We have chosen to fall together and not apart.

I am thankful for the years, and for the examples we have in a long marriage. Not only my parents and his, but also our grandparents and aunts and uncles . This is a beautiful rarity in the world today. I am fortunate to be surrounded by living pictures of what it looks like to stay. 

Society tells us leaving is the stuff, exciting and daring and fresh. Sometimes it is. But it is staying that goes deep and carves Grand Canyons out of the plains of our lives. The waters run and run and run, and they are always the same and somehow always different. We lose parts of ourselves to the staying, get rounder and smoother, and in spite of all that we have lost, bigger too. Each season turns and flows past, every experience leading to the same place: to the end, and then out into the deep wide sea.

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