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

by Kimberly Harrington

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 ...