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

by Kimberly Harrington

With parenting they say the days are long but the years are short. But now the days are years and time is meaningless.

circumstances. It is choosing us over others’ opinions of us. It is choosing to do what feels right, right now, and worrying less about what the typical divorce script looks like or what the future might hold.

When there is a writer in a marriage, there is an unfair advantage. Because that version (this version) will be the only version recorded, as if it is the one true version. I am here to tell you it is not. I have done my level best to be careful and fair while portraying my experiences honestly, sometimes darkly, other times perhaps a little too cavalierly.

Memory is fallible and perspective inherently biased.

- He is not curious about my work, I am not curious about his. In general, we stopped asking each other how we were, what we thought, and what we wanted a long time ago. We stopped being curious about each other, period. 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.

We still parent our kids together. He makes dinner every night and I decide whether to join him. We are roommates. Which is what we were before, but now everyone knows.

else’s. I thought I knew who would last (and is “lasting” even the point?). I thought it would be easy (it was so easy in the beginning). I thought if your marriage was hard that just meant you didn’t love each other enough (who knows, maybe it does?). I thought there could be nothing worse than divorce.

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 thought adulthood replaced childhood, and marriage replaced whatever the hell it was that I had been doing, like an upgrade in the machine.

Marriages are made of people. And whether we like it or not, how we became those people is where our marriages begin.

I had always assumed I would be famous and spent a great deal of time draping sheets around me to replicate evening gowns. I would stay up late and watch The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson and feel like sitting on that couch was my destiny.

It’s never too early to believe you deserve the world’s attention simply for being you.

I rarely heard my parents fight, but I also didn’t think of them as being in love or even being friends. They seemed to be bloodlessly ticking through a list of life tasks with almost no emotion to show for the process or one another. They had married only a couple years out of high school and I was born shortly thereafter. Needless to say,...

We had been just three people—then two, after my father moved out—who resided in the same space but lived independently from one another. I was an easy child but a pissed-off teenager and I felt I had earned the right (don’t we all). I was already becoming a weed that would always find the crack in the sidewalk to sprout from, without ever needing to be

tended. Why answer to anybody? What was the point?

It was easy to pin my bad attitude and burgeoning character flaws on my parents’ divorce. It was the easiest thing in the world.

inside. Just once I would’ve loved to be able to turn to someone around my age, someone who grew up in my house with the same parents in the same town at the same time, and be able to say, “Can you believe this shit?” Just once I would’ve loved to know if someone else who was even a little bit like me would’ve also been waiting for things to come crashing down.

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.

Maybe I assumed these were the qualities that would make me good in the long run. Sacrifice. Loyalty.

Our phones contain something worse than our secrets, they contain the truth. What we really say, how we really feel, typed with letters, applied to texts, said off the cuff, sometimes about someone you love for an audience that is definitely not them.

We were trapped inside our own lives. We had made commitments. We had responsibilities. We were just on this slow, boring march called life with children.

When we ask, “what happened?” in a scenario like this we are demanding a play-by-play. We want to know where hands and mouths and private parts were. We want to know who did what to whom (do we?). We want to know, after the physical tally, was there love? Well, that’s what I wanted to know anyway. 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?

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.”

The importance of common enemies in a marriage cannot be overstated.

Ability to conjure whole worlds with vague phrases like “did you get the thing at the place” and “you know, the whatsit”

Ability to agree to leave a boring party simply by making eye contact then motioning with your head toward the door in a diagonal half nod

Custody battles over a comforter that isn’t even all that great

Encyclopedic knowledge of buttons easily pushed

That just as things were getting easier was not the time to make them harder again. Why do people love to complain about how hard their lives are then seek out novel ways of making them harder still?

“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?

But “the rest of my life” had a different ring to it as the years went on. For one thing, I got older, as the living tend to do.

But it was done. Well, for us it was done. It was just starting for everyone else, including our kids. The fear of this moment, the moment of telling them, had almost singlehandedly kept us married. But it was finally here.

My friends and I spent so much time going on and on about what we wanted men to do and not do, all the many layers and nuances they must contain. I wanted men to be feminist and progressive and also reflect on their privilege. I wanted men to be equal partners, thoughtful fathers, and dudes who kept their emotional labor demands to them-fucking-selves. But in this phase, this not-looking-for-marriage, not-going-to-have-kids-with-you, do-not-care-where-this-goes phase, all I needed to know was 6'2". Firefighter. Lawyer.

Children are the undeniable markers of time. We can see not only year-to-year but sometimes day-to-day that time will swallow us all whole. We wonder if we are making the most of it now. We wonder what we would do differently then. We often think the time for action is in the future, when we will surely get it right. And then we arrive at the allotted time realizing we have done so little of what we had set out to do. We were so sure we would. But the years had somehow grown shorter, they shot by faster, and now we feel haunted by everything we left undone.

I will often skim these pieces first, because that’s how reading works now, pre-reading to determine if reading-reading is worth it.

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

Let’s attempt to comprehend an actual existential threat. Let’s do what we said we always wanted to do—withdraw from everything and cancel every plan. And if you were awash in privilege, still had a (nonessential) job or a safety net, it also suddenly became this: Let’s learn something. Let’s give this meaning. Let’s work on ourselves. This pandemic is an opportunity. Let’s come out of this better than we were before.

It did not start well. We thought there were still rules, so we tried to stick to them and then snapped at each other when we failed.

And I told them that, as I got older, the only thing I had finally figured out about life was it was only the day right in front of me. It was all that was promised and even then, it was only promised minute-by-minute, like putting one foot in front of the other.

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 work out, even when we don’t understand what “working out” even means.

People will keep falling in love, they will keep getting married, and they will keep having kids. And you can tell people all you want about everything that could go wrong but no one will listen. You wouldn’t have listened. What did it have to do with you?

It’s human nature to focus on what is right in front of our faces most of the time, believing no other perspective is possible. We let our disappointment or sadness or anger trigger our personal mythology repeatedly. Whatever we’ve believed about ourselves, especially the bad stuff, we double down on. Of course this is happening. Of course it is! What did I expect? Stupid bitch. But in taking the long view I’ve found myself coming

to surprising and, fine I’ll just say it, comforting conclusions.

From the time I was a teenager I had been begging the universe to love me. Please love me. But more than that, care for me. Make me feel cared for. Send me a handsome boy I can love and care for, too. Send me someone who will bring me flowers and remember my birthday and all the other crap teenage girls wished for based on popular culture in the mid-1980s. I didn’t know screenwr...

The narrative arc around divorce only tilts toward the extremes, so imagine my surprise that, for once in my life, I am backstroking through the gray areas.

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 I committed to plow through one diary after another instead of dip in and out of them weeks or months apart, a more accurate portrait than the one I remembered began to take shape. I stopped cringing and started appreciating. I wasn’t as dumb as I thought I had been nor was I as unhappy. Even though I felt neglected or alone in some ways, I sought out other supports and relationships that enriched my life and kept me safe.

I wasn’t as exclusively focused on being in a relationship as I had remembered. I wrote about sex a lot and clearly in some unsparing detail (oof, but also, some of it was kind of hot?). I was just trying to understand the world and my place within it. I was just trying to be happy and I was happy, often. Sometimes as I read I would lightly touch a page, feeling the indentations of ballpoint pen made thirty-four years ago and think, I see you and then you know what, you really are okay, you really will be okay.