Memories from my Happy Marriage
Posted: June 28th, 2011 | Author: Molly Monet | Filed under: happiness | Tags: loss | 13 Comments »
I just finished Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. I’m not sure why I read it. Maybe because recently I’ve gone out a few times with a widower. Maybe because I was curious to see what Didion’s concept of magical thinking was. Or maybe just because it got great reviews. What I do know is that I did not read it thinking that it would be a poignant account of a very special marriage. And I did not read it thinking that it would make me reflect on my own once very special marriage to my ex.
Didion and Dunne were married writers who spent pretty much all of their time together. They would accompany each other to medical appointments, take regular lunch breaks together, and, of course, read and edit each other’s writing. They were best friends that practically shared their every thought with one another. Her grief over his passing was obviously to be expected. What did take me by surprise, though, was how much their marriage reminded me of my own.
My ex and I were graduate students together for six years and had a very similar kind of relationship. Except for the hours that we taught class, we were virtually never apart. We walked to school together. We went to the gym together. We ate lunch together. We walked our dogs every evening together. We watched reruns of Northern Exposure together. We did the crossword puzzle and ate dinner every night together. People were amazed that we had so little time apart, but we really loved it. Or maybe it was just the ritual that we fell into, but it worked for us.
Now I see that our marriage started eroding once that idyllic graduate student togetherness was no longer possible. We each went to work three days a week at our respective colleges. My ex had to commute 95 miles each way during the academic year, and that took a lot out of him. Our sweet Jonah, whose birth we celebrated and whom we clearly adored, disrupted our dyad. The social and emotional energy that my ex once had reserved all for me was now spent by the time we put the kids to bed. It became harder and harder for us to find the intellectual and emotional connection that once came so effortlessly.
The last five years of our marriage were so fraught with tension and emotional distance that I had kind of forgotten what our love was once like. Until I read Didion’s memoir. The way that she described her intimacy with John was both beautiful yet painful for me because it brought me back to those early years with my ex. Her aching loss all of sudden became my aching loss. I, who have been so relieved at the demise of my difficult marriage, realized that I have never really mourned the loss of my happy one. Yes, I once had a very happy, very special love that I never could imagine would end. Yet it did, not the moment that we split up, but several years before.
So as any great book will do, Didion’s writing shed light on my own life, and her grief forced me to experience my own. She also rescued from the recesses of my memory some of the wonderful moments that my ex and I shared. For that, I am grateful because it seems that I had been engaged in some magical thinking of my own by failing to remember them. Yet as her memoir demonstrates, we all have certain coping mechanisms when it comes to dealing with loss.
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I have a hard time remembering happy moments with the one significant, pre-marriage ex. Like you, I think this may be post-breakup coping mechanism hangover. Perhaps I should read this book – sounds like a window into a wonderful symmetry.
Thank you for this post Molly. I have not read the book, but just your description brought up some feelings for me.
For the past month or so, my ex and I have been living in those memories of our good marriage and trying to rebuild our relationship. The problem of course is that we’re ignoring the reasons why our marriage ended in the first place.
At first it felt good to do this… bask in the love we once had. But I have not been able to keep this pretty picture in my mind for very long before the reality of our situation disrupts it.
I’m taking a very long and difficult journey here that sometimes feels like a waste of time and the cause of unnecessary pain.
I don’t know how it will turn out, but I too feel like I need to mourn the good marriage we had… I’m just not there yet.
Lorene
Oh Lorene- You’re at a tricky stage of uncertainty, caught between the beautiful and the ugly. I wish you luck and hope you and your ex find a way to be loving in the present, maybe forge a different kind of love.
Laura- I highly recommend the book. It’s thought-provoking and well written. It’s an interesting meditation on relationships, death, and destiny.
Thanks Molly, I hope so too. :)
This is so tender and vulnerable. Thanks for opening yourself up to us. Having left a long term relationship (with a church) bitterly and angrily several years ago, I think that your thought of mourning the happy time is something for me to let myslef explore. And, not to be trite…but one of the things I love about scrapbooking is that it helps me hang on to the happy memories!
Adrienne recently posted..Not Feelin’ It
Its sometimes hard to remember the good I once had when the negative is all I see now. I know, though, that it was really good at one time and for quite a long time. I can’t help but feel sad over the loss of what was once the main joy in my life.
Michele recently posted..Patience
Joan Didion explores an intensely personal yet universal experience a portrait of a marriage–and a life in good times and bad–that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child.. I realize that wealth doesnt except you from grief but I felt this book was needlessly full of details that did nothing but drive a wedge between me and this woman.
Grief finds its way into our hearts at such odd moments. But grief can be a means to healing and so I welcome it, wallow in it, and move forward. I loved this book too, though the details are vague now, I think it was five or six years ago that I read it. It was startling to think of how much of me I will lose if my husband dies or we divorce and vice versa.
Shawna recently posted..Springtime in Paris
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