Friday evening after work, I found out from my wife and partner of six years that she was done with our relationship, she told me to leave. I had arranged some counseling sessions for us, but in the first minute of the first meeting with our counselor, she announced her intention to quit the relationship for the last time. That was the opener. The session was over before it started.
Until this moment, her intentions had been carefully guarded from me, for their surprise effect, and in this moment I was truly caught off guard. But we had been separated for most of the past couple of years and our relationship's success seemed pretty unlikely. This would be the first time that we would be in the same place together to try to work things out, but alas it was not to be.
The counselor was a woman with a pronounced facial tick. Every few seconds she would make an extra hard blink, squeezing down with her eyebrows. It would happen sometimes in rapid succession. She seemed extremely stressed out.
I was blindsided. The news was tough. Behind it all I kept thinking about Woody Allen. I mean, what do you do?
The bomb dropped on a Friday evening, and I knew I had to scramble to find a place to stay. I ended up surfing the couch of another of her ex-husbands, I mean, whose consolation could possibly be more understanding? For a couple of hours two men sat together, both dumped by the same woman, I told a few of our stories, and Nik looked at me with his funny and understanding grin. We shared stories of our bewilderment and love for the unattainable.
Of course, at the moment I was devastated. Obviously, I would have preferred to work things out, since I had worked hard along the way to make it work.
Through the course of the evening that followed, I mentioned to a few people in passing that I was going through my first divorce, and most looked back at me with a very understanding and often comedic expression.
In the beginning, our legal marriage was arranged spontaneously and as a kind of joke when we realized that there were mutual legal benefits for us. There was only one witness, and we told no-one about it for several years. The premise in the beginning was that we each also expressed a great passion for and interest in the actual practice and art of relationship and lifelong commitment. The relationship itself, our conscious involvement with each other, our effort to communicate and connect deeply, would be our future, we told each other. The commitment and love of being together would be the important part, and the marriage itself, would be financially convenient and something we could dissolve if necessary. She had been married four times before, and we both recognized that with realism.
Earlier in my life, in my 20’s, I studied a lot of psychology and self-help stuff, and spent years as a member of a community whose culture it was to refine the art of relationship. When I met my wife, at 39, I felt equipped with at least the basic tools of self understanding, certainly enough to at least embark upon a conscious commitment and a relationship based on good communication.
Well, so much for my all of my smarty pants best intentions, huh?
I spent the night on her ex’s couch, hardly got two hours of sleep listening to the clock ticking over my head, and at dawn slipped out the front door into the morning to ask myself what to do and where to go.
I jumped in the car and headed into the city. It was a beautiful morning and there was very little traffic as I drove over the floating bridge on Lake Washington, glistening diamond water and dark blue sky, into the beautiful city of Seattle.
With no direction at all, I just followed my hands on the steering wheel, and ended up at the front door of a wonderful little neighborhood café called Zoka, a place I knew from living in this neighborhood some years ago. In fact, near the Zoka is where I lived when my ex-wife and I met a half dozen years before.
I had a very inexpensive little studio carriage house, a small room over a garage, with a clawfoot bathtub, and a small place to cook. No closet. I was living like a monk at the time, in this tiny place, and it worked out quite well for me then. Super affordable, excellent location in a great walking neighborhood right in the middle of Seattle, where rents can be impossible.
Rents in Seattle are through the roof, and of course we are suffering from the national economic collapse just like the rest of the country. I’ve already got a couple of small mortgages, so finding somewhere affordable to live, immediately, was a real financial and survival priority. If I didn’t step correctly and make something happen, I could surely end up in some very dire financial straits. Talk about stress.
After enjoying a cup of coffee at the café, I decided to cruise around the old neighborhood for a few minutes, and within a couple of blocks I was rolling past my old carriage house apartment. How perfect would it be if the place was vacant, and I could go back to the simple and small scale life that was my bachelor existence before my marriage. It would sure be a timely solution. As I drove past, I peeked through the windows of the place and saw newly painted white walls in a place that appeared to be empty.
I had to knock on the door of the main house and find out if my old place was available. It was great to see Gene come to the door, and the smile on his face from recognizing me on his porch was a real lift to my spirits. Not only was my old place vacant, but Gene seemed really pleased to have me back as a tenant, and I fell right back into the same rental agreement that I had arranged before.
At this moment, as I write, I sit in the empty and freshly painted room, white ceiling and walls and floor, a complete blank slate. at the end of my first day as a jilted husband, and for the first time in a couple of days I'm full of hope and good vibes.
Somehow the sensation of being back here, back where I started, reinforces the karmic destiny that is an aspect of my relationship’s demise. What I mean is that I entered my marriage full of (over)confidence that my best intentions and my stalwart commitment would be all that was necessary to carry it all the way through our lives. I was wrong. Painfully, embarrassingly, humbly wrong. The chemistry of our relationship somehow continued to slip away from me, and none of my best intentions would be bringing it back. How did I not know that all of my intentions and actions, good bad or indifferent, just could never carry a relationship of two? I never saw the slowly mounting sum of the effects of my blindness and off-course efforts. The break up was certainly not what I wanted. I needed to go back to the beginning of the lesson and start over.
Here I sit.
And to top it off, get this: as I was exiting the freeway into the neighborhood this morning, I noticed some signs along the side streets, and realized that today is the day of the University District Street Fair. The street fair marks 25 years to the day since I first rolled into Seattle from New York, right off of the freeway and straight into the same neighborhood, on the same festival day, having no idea where I was and what to expect from this place.
It’s 25 years later today, and I have the overwhelming sense that what I know in life now is actually less than I knew all those years ago, when I knew Everything. My assumptions have been wrong, my definitions have been wrong, my self assessment? Wrong. I’m probably not even telling this story quite right.
And still, with everything I have ever been embarrassed of, ashamed of, guilty for, my life feels like a golden opportunity to start over.
Start over with my un-learning, remake it all. It certainly will not be the First time, and there is not much chance this is the Last time either. Every day is another opportunity to un-learn my towering stack of old and stuck ideas, and to go into the day more open to the Lesson than I was the first (few) time(s) that I may have missed the point.
I really don’t think I can single-handedly effect the outcome of a two-way relationship. I can do my best, but a love relationship of two needs four hands, four eyes, four feet, two hearts working together. I don’t think there is an easy formula for successful relationship, and I don’t think successful marriages just happen to lucky people.
No, I can’t fix much. What I can do though, is embrace the process of letting go and starting over. I think it’s never too late to re-examine and re-consider old ideas, and to be open to new ones.
