After I Do

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

don’t really know what I am even sorry for. I feel as if I’ve been sorry for months now without a reason. What am I really doing wrong here? What is happening to us? I’ve read books on it. I’ve read the articles that show up in all the women’s magazines about marital ruts and turning the heat up in your marriage. They don’t tell you anything real. They don’t have any answers.

Sometimes people do things because they are furious or because they are upset or because they are out for blood. And those things can hurt. But what hurts the most is when someone does something out of apathy. They don’t care about you the way they said they did back in college. They don’t care about you the way they promised to when you got married. They don’t care about you at all. And because there is just the tiniest part of me that still cares, and because his not caring enrages that tiny part of me, I do something I have never done before. I do something I never thought I would ever do. I do something that, even as I’m doing it, I can’t believe is actually happening.

Ryan and I are two people who used to be in love. What a beautiful thing to have been. What a sad thing to be.

“So what does this mean?” I ask quietly, gently. By saying the words out loud, I have changed our fate. I have set us in motion. I am ripping us out of this comfortable prison once and for all. I am going to solve this problem. I have a lot of other problems, and I know this is going to cause a whole new set of problems, but living with someone I don’t like isn’t going to be one of them. Not anymore.

That’s when I fall apart. I don’t melt like butter or deflate like a tire. I shatter like glass, into thousands of pieces.

He’s going to kiss someone else, if he hasn’t already. He’s going to touch her. He’s going to want her in a way that he no longer wants me. He’s going to tell her things he never told me. He’s going to lie there next to her, feeling satisfied and happy. She’s going to remind him of how good it can feel to be with a woman. And while all of this is happening, he’s not going to be thinking about me at all. And there’s not a thing I can do to stop it.

These letters are the evidence of how ugly our marriage has become and yet proof that we are tied to each other. We can hate and love, miss and loathe each other all within the same breath. We can never want to see each other again while never wanting to let go.

“Isn’t it nice,” he says, “once you’ve outgrown the ideas of what life should be and you just enjoy what it is?”

I say yes because I believe, on some level, that thoughts become words, and words become actions. Because if I start saying it’s working, maybe in a few days or a few months, I’ll look back and think, Absolutely. This is absolutely working. Maybe that conviction has to start right here,

when I feel the elevator drop, all I can think is that my mom has lost her mother today, and she’s not crying. She’s fighting to make this day right for her son. For her grandchild. Look at the things we are capable of in the name of the people we love.

I’m going to let you in on a little secret. It’s a lesson learned by those who have faced the most miserable of tragedies, and it’s a secret that I suspect you yourself already know: the sun will always rise. Always.