But You Seemed So Happy: A Marriage, in Pieces and Bits

by Kimberly Harrington

This book is for the ambivalent, for the second-guessers and overthinkers, for anyone who has ever felt alone in their marriage and been told, “It’s not so bad, what are you complaining about?” And it’s for anyone who feels like what was even the fucking point of that relationship, that marriage, or my entire life while we’re at it?

I am free from a yearslong conversation about how happy is happy enough? I have continuously asked myself how I could possibly be so selfish as to prioritize my own happiness. Isn’t it incredible what marriage and motherhood will do to your most basic sense of what you deserve?

You cannot spend your life with someone without curiosity. It is as devastating as infidelity, yet somehow working in a slower, gentler, more insidious way. It is being unfaithful to your own life.

Because the message I’ve internalized since the beginning of our relationship is that I am a bitch and he is a gem. I am lucky. I am the only one who is lucky here. I will clearly never get this lucky again. I already have more than I deserve.

It was the fault of two people who believed in marriage but had little idea what they were in for. Which, come to think of it, is true of most everyone. I didn’t know myself. He didn’t know himself. We didn’t know each other. Unbelievably, startingly, this is the truth. And, somehow, twenty-five years later, it still is. And, somehow, it still worked for a long time anyway. I have come to this understanding: None of us will ever truly know the people we think we know so well. Our best friends. Our siblings. Our parents. Our partners. People are fundamentally unknowable. Even our children, people we have made. When all is said and done, we tell ourselves a story about who we think we are. We tell ourselves a story about who we think other people are. Their flaws, their motivations, their innermost thoughts and desires. We prefer our versions. We understand our versions. But all that aside, what we all have in common is this: Please see me, please care about me.

I never doubted I was loved. I still don’t. I know I am loved. But I’m not sure I ever felt particularly cared for, especially when caring for me felt challenging and when it would’ve mattered most. There is a difference.

That’s not to say our first date progressed in a way that led me to believe we had a future. It was awash in red flags, but red flags are like passages in the Bible: you can pluck them out of context and bend them to suit the story you wish to tell.

I already knew life had a way of running away with you and suddenly a city you thought you’d live in for a year or two becomes six years or eight and you end up hating it but by then you’re stuck.

I think I might’ve assumed moving forward meant moving on. That all we had to do was put all those miles between us and loss. I didn’t know yet that grief, especially that depth of grief, wasn’t something you just moved on or away from. Especially when it is mostly silent, mostly hidden. Especially when I assumed Jon was coping because he never overtly said, “Look at me. Can you see me? I am grieving.” Because I somehow believed if I just didn’t bring it up he wouldn’t remember. I didn’t want to remind him, as if he had somehow forgotten. I wish I had said to him that week, maybe, let’s not go. I wish I had said to him that week, I think you need to talk to someone, if not now then soon. And certainly if not me, then absolutely someone, please. I wish I had said, I don’t know what to do but I promise not to ignore this. But I ignored it. Because I didn’t understand it and ignoring it was easier. Ignoring it would always be easier.

We had historically done best when our enemy was a common one. Lost jobs, lost babies, illness, death, failure. All the hits.

I wonder now if perhaps the happiest you can ever be is when you don’t know too much, when you don’t know what’s happening right under your feet, when you trust everything is just as it appears.

I assumed however much drinking we were doing was fine as long as the other person agreed. I assumed whatever sex we were having was the correct amount according to marriage and phases. Whenever we’d hit streaks, less drinking or more sex (never both at the same time), I’d consider us fixed through the simple magic of not having said a word.

I remember all the times since when I wished something would happen. But I never made a single move, I never said a single word. I did not love him any less, but maybe I would never be loved enough by him or anyone. Maybe it just wasn’t possible then, maybe it’s not possible now. Or—honestly, why woe-is-me read even that much into it—maybe I just wanted to have more sex? Fuck it. I have been trained by a lifetime as a girl, an adolescent, a woman to frame everything using the handy and acceptable construction of love and relationships. So palatable, so pure. God forbid it could be more primal than that. Jeez Louise.

I never cheated. Not once, not ever, not even a kiss, not in twenty-five years. It was just a story I had believed about myself. In Miss Americana, Taylor Swift talks about how stars can become stuck at the age when they became famous. I have come to believe the same thing about the age when you get married. Whatever you believed about yourself then is what you will continue to believe for years and decades to come. Unless something—or someone—shows up to change your mind. It’s quite something to expect to be the sinner and instead turn out to be the saint.

But what if none of that happened at all? What if the true transgression was revealing our brokenness as a couple instead of anyone else’s bodies? What if we were already so far gone we just weren’t really even all that nice to each other anymore? What if we had lost the most basic and polite levels of respect for each other through the process of having and raising children, keeping a household afloat, arguing over fucking bathroom remodels? What if he felt an ongoing level of loss and grief in his own life—both parents now gone—that I didn’t even understand, that I never thought to ask about, because I was so committed to my own story about what was and wasn’t working? What if I assumed a person who smiled a lot was absolutely fine? What if my entire emotional response system had been built around the “squeaky wheel gets the grease” and I had married an efficient and silent wheel? What if he thought I had everything I needed? What if we just never talked enough to find out? What if everyone around us assumes we’re happy?

I don’t remember how many more times we went back to him. It wasn’t many. Maybe two or three. I don’t remember what either of us got out of it, other than the solid concept of having an objective third-party mediate conversations with your partner. Because in nonmediated, nonobjective-third-party life, one person will often dominate the narrative and make most of the decisions. One person will set the social agenda, pick the city, buy the concert tickets. One person will tell you what you think, not overtly (but sometimes, yes, overtly). One person will tell you who We hate now and who We like now and who We will be hanging out with more. One person will have some sort of control the other person doesn’t have and who else but an objective third party is going to be like, “Hold on a minute.” Nobody likes to think they’re not in control of their own lives as an adult person with agency. But ask yourself who’s in your circle of friends and how exactly did they get there? Whose family do you spend the most time with and why? How did you come to live in that house, why are those sheets the sheets you both sleep on? Why that dog? Why that car? Why this school district? Maybe it is not this lopsided. Maybe you have Big 50/50 Even Steven Energy. But just for kicks, ask yourself how did you really get to all those final decisions? The weekend plan? That vacation? That rug? Your life? We each exert power where we can, without even knowing that’s what we’re doing. We want proof you l...

It is rarely the big things that kill a marriage. It is the little things that whisper to us, “You aren’t in love anymore” or “Are you happy?” or “What the fuck are you two even doing?” but you refuse to listen. Because this is not how it was supposed to be.

He told me I made him feel stupid, like he was lesser than. That when he was texting with this woman and talking with this woman it was nice—for a change—to feel like someone cared about what he had to say or complimented him on anything at all. I made him feel small, constantly.

Funny stories are a sugar glaze. Because you can’t ask your fellow partygoer or dinner party attendee or mutual friend if they want to hear a why-my-partner-gave-up-long-ago story or you’ll-never-guess-what-an-inconsiderate-witch-I-am story or this-marriage-is-in-complete-failure-mode story. As you might suspect, those stories tend not to be people pleasers. But with a funny story, the bitterness slides down their gullets, leaving a smile and a little buzz. No aftertaste. This is marriage as public performance.

I handled it like I was handling everything else in our marriage. I ignored him and just did what I wanted to do anyway. I asked the kids if they wanted to go meet a dog and given they’d been asking for a dog for almost eight years they lost their minds. I asked Jon if he wanted to come meet her and he flatly responded, “no” and turned away.

The kids and I went to meet her. Jon, giving in, arrived to meet her, too. But it was with the resignation of a man on death row. He had seen this movie before. He knew how it ended. We went home afterward to discuss it. This was the most performative part of our marriage. Rarely did we “discuss” anything. I presented my argument, the counter arguments, and then I came to a conclusion that was obviously in alignment with what I had wanted all along. He usually sat there and listened, sometimes sighing. This was just how it had unfolded over all these years, me in a relationship more or less with myself.

We always used to say we were so lucky to have met when we did. This was our destiny narrative. We met at just the right time, in just the right place, at just the right age. I would always joke that if we had met in college we would’ve hated each other. I can’t imagine my wearing-all-black, smoking-cigarettes-while-wearing-dark-red-lipstick, cynical, pessimistic self could’ve tolerated for one single second the slightly stoned, very chill, happy-to-be-alive, smiling, skateboarding optimist that he was. And most certainly, vice versa. It had become a bit of an inside joke, a comforting story, between us. But during the year when we were the only ones who knew we were getting a divorce I said, “What if that story was all wrong? What if we met during the only window when we would’ve gotten along? The only time we would’ve fallen in love with one another? What if it wasn’t destiny at all, what if it was just timing? Can you honestly say that if you met me at a party right now that you’d think we’d make a great couple? That you’d fall in love with me? Do you think you’d look across the room and think we were meant to be together?” “No.” “Me neither.”

I told them we loved and respected one another as friends, and we were pretty good at being parents together. But we were not in love, and that part was important in a marriage. We were not setting a good example of what a good marriage should be. We recognized that might not make sense to them now but I told them one day it would (I hoped).

When anyone has told me that they’re getting a divorce, my knee-jerk reaction has always been to respond, “I’m so sorry.” This feels like the absolutely natural response. Because news like this never feels like good news. And while this isn’t great news, this is also not a tragedy. A relationship has run its course. There are far worse things. We all spend a lot of time in this life focusing on success and failure. And divorce, by its very nature, seems like a failure. I’ve been thinking a lot about this (as you might imagine) and honestly what’s the failure here? Because it didn’t last forever? Many things don’t last forever—including our own lives—but they can hardly be automatically characterized as failures.

I needed to honor how strongly, deeply they were rooted to this beautiful, small, unforgiving state. The guilt of moving just one town over and transferring them to new schools several years earlier had just about killed me. If the past fifteen years had taught me anything, it was that the threat of hurting them would keep me from doing things I wanted to do, jobs I could’ve only previously dreamed of, cities where I longed to live, a different life I desperately wanted to lead. It would keep me in a broken marriage for far too long. It would hold me in place. My guilt and my love would form a cage. It would show me what I could have, but only through the bars, never being allowed to touch it.

But I was reminded suddenly this was not how love or even basic attraction worked. We don’t ever see what’s coming. And even if we did, we’re just narcissistic enough not to care. Because attraction and the feeling of being in love is narcotic. It is irrational and beautiful, terrifying and overwhelming. And when you try to interrogate it, you worry it’ll disappear.

This is what Ed from Wisconsin had to say, in part: We create our grief by expecting life to be different than it is.

We create our grief by expecting life to be different than it is.

Anxiety introduces us to a sinister fill-in-the-blank, “But what if _____” and we endlessly fill it with worst-case scenarios. What if I’m alone forever, what if I get sick and no one cares, what if someone I love dies, what if no one ever loves me again, what if everyone’s disappointed in me, what if I end up without a penny to my name, what if I did absolutely everything wrong? But what if we asked ourselves instead, “But what if it all turns out okay?” What if I stopped expecting life to be different than it is? This is me, today. I am going to accept this is where I am. That the past is done. The future is unknown and never guaranteed. I am going to feel grateful for what I have and forgive myself for my mistakes. I am going to accept I’ve probably made fewer of them than I think. I am going to move forward, without regret. I am going to tell the hater in me who looks in the mirror and tells me how old I look, what a piece of shit I am, and how dare I even dress up and go out like I deserve happiness—I am going to tell that voice to zip it, lock it, put it in its motherfucking pocket. I am done creating my grief. I am going to love this life. I am going to love me, today.

It’s hard to parse the emotions that happen at the end of anything—getting fired, someone dying, a friendship combusting, a marriage dissolving. It’s easy to forget anything good came before. It’s easy to think the signs of your future destruction were so obvious. It’s easy to blame or self-flagellate when, really, this is just what life is. It is a series of ups and downs and near misses that are unpredictable. We make choices that are contrary to our beliefs or long-term interests. We want more and settle for less. We want less and sign up for more. We bump around and hold fast to our expectations as if they are contracts. We think outcomes are guaranteed as long as we have witnesses. We want people to change but only in the specific ways we approve of. We make different sets of rules, one for us, one for our partners. That’s what Jon actually used to call it when we were dating and first married: “Oh, different rules. I see.” For example, it was okay if he drank as long as I was drinking but if I was trying to cut back suddenly his drinking was the problem. We focus on fairness, insofar as it’s fair to us individually. We are afraid of what other people think, even when we say we aren’t. We want people to love us and hold us, cherish and fight for us, even when we sometimes don’t feel like doing the same for them. We want to be special even when we think other people are ordinary. We want to be right because that would mean everyone else is wrong. We want everything to ...

One thing I’ve discovered throughout this process is people who stay married and are struggling want to know there is suffering in divorce. They aren’t conscious of this wanting, but it’s there all the same. They want to know the alternative is so much worse than what they’re currently dealing with. They like to imagine there is some sort of reward at the end of their stress and strife, a cookie for toughing it out. That, simply put, the moral high ground will always be theirs.

I used to believe life was a straight line containing a series of stages. And within each stage there was a beginning, middle, and end. But what I’ve discovered is life is instead a series of loops, growing in circumference and range as we age, always finding a way to deposit us right back on land we thought we had long ago left behind. At first I dreaded reading my high school and college diaries because the story I had told myself as time went on was I was just a dumb girl who liked dumb bands, dumb boys, and had dumb dreams. I told myself I would run away, to be smarter and cooler, to be more pure and have better ideas. I would be honest, always, even though women were never rewarded for honesty. I would be a better mother and a better partner and I would never have limits on my love. My parents and my friends and every man I had ever been with had limits and I had never forgiven any of them for it. As much as I initially cringed through the level of detail in some of my entries, tempted to wing each and every one of those notebooks into Lake Champlain (look, I jotted down that I had held a man’s gold necklace in my teeth while he fucked me, a man I recall not at all, and there’s nothing I can do about that now), there was one takeaway from all of it. I was always in there. I had always been me.

When Jon and I met and fell in love, I stopped writing in a journal. I only wrote sporadically in those first two or three years and then I didn’t write in a journal again. The story I had told myself for years was that I stopped writing because I was finally happy. The perception I had of my diaries back then was that I was lost and sad because I was alone. I was a single girl just crying into my notebooks, pathetic really. But rereading them showed me that wasn’t true at all. I was just trying to figure out who I was, what I wanted, and just as importantly, what I didn’t want. I now wish I had kept writing. I wish I had kept trying to figure out who I was when Jon and I were dating, throughout our marriage, when our children were born and when they were little, and even when things started to come apart. I wish I had never handed the job over to someone else, no matter how much I had loved him. It should’ve never been his job in the first place.