Gone.
The Awful Truth About Divorce
I never knew what love really was until I saw my wife
for the first time. Of course, it wasn't actually the first
time, I'd known her about eight years before we started dating,
but that day, in 1987, while I waited in her mom's living room,
I remember completely the moment I realized I'd never actually
been in love before. She waddled into the room (she had a kind
of angelic loll to her walk; I used to say she walked The Walk
of The Truly Innocent) and kind of greeted me like I was the
paper boy. It wasn't a date, I was just giving her a lift to
work. But I was breathless. I was wholly unprepared to meet my
future wife but I knew, at that moment, that was, in fact, who
she was. And, while there were certainly warning signs of the
train wreck, I paid them absolutely no mind.
On our wedding day, I paced nervously about, wishing we could
speed things up so she wouldn't have a chance to change her
mind. Far from feeling trapped or lost, things couldn't go fast
enough for me. This was a person I'm sure I had a crush on since
high school, but I'm just as sure that I loved her from the very
first night, the very first stolen kiss. We were this
cosmopolitan couple. A couple of thinkers. Bourgeois
upper-middles who took in the occasional chamber music quintet
at Lincoln Center, frequented restaurants with exposed brick
walls, hardwood floors and humungous coffee cups. We trolled art
galleries in Greenwich Village, seafood dives on South Street
Seaport and flew to San Diego for work conventions.
She was absolutely my best friend. The person I trusted most in
the world, my relief and shield from a world that never liked me
much. And I lived absolutely and completely for her, only for
her. For that smile, that sense of humor, that Walk Of The Truly
Innocent. When it was working, it worked very well. When it was
not working, the aggravation and pain was small ransom indeed
for all the joy she brought me. It's difficult to explain the
whole You Complete Me business from Jerry Maguire, but that's
what I'm talking about. The Real Thing was such a revelation to
me that it unnerved me to realize how utterly addicted to this
person I'd become, how nervous it made me just to watch her
sleep—sleep—and felt there'd somehow been a galactic mix-up at
the Karma factory in that I, a guy who had trouble putting his
pants on and matching socks—could win the lottery like that. Our
love is like a bright and new creation, I wrote in a song we
recorded in 1989, that's been unwisely placed into our unclean
hands. It blinds us with unearthly luminescence and it feels
like forever. The responsibility I had to her, to God, was
overwhelming.
Which made the problems in the relationship more difficult to
see and, perhaps, more difficult to work on. I mean, I'm sure I
heard her, I'm sure she told me when she was unhappy, but we
figured we were bullet-proof. Problems were for somebody else,
for other people. Divorce wasn't even a conversation; it was
never going to happen to us. So, whatever problems there were
couldn't be that bad. After all, we were in love.
Hurry Up: Impatiently waiting; praying she wouldn't change her mind.
At The Railroad Crossing
The closest example I've seen of how a relationship like ours
could go wrong was a special one-hour episode of the NBC sitcom
Mad About You. Paul Reiser and Helen Hunt's TV couple
fairly well approximated my own wedded bliss— not without
problems, certainly, but nothing earth-shattering, with lots of
warmth and humor and odd friends and neighbors salted in for
good measure. When the episode aired showing the marriage
threatened I wanted to call her, to say, Look— that's it! That's
us! The saddest part, for me, was, the TV couple made it. Real
life is much tougher.
I'd like to think I've grown and learned a lot about myself,
about her, about what went wrong. The truth is, at the end of
the day, we are who we are. I am a lot more mature than the man
she married, and there are a lot of things I regret, a lot of
bad choices I made during that relationship. I have to assume
she has grown and is no longer that woman, either. Today, we'd
almost be two strangers. Two very different people who,
truthfully, might be mature enough to see the train wreck coming
and not marry in the first place.
And that is, indeed, the net result of this maturation process:
you eventually do learn to see the train wreck coming. You learn
to hear the whistle blow and see the massive, blinding headlight
as the klaxons on the service gates blare out and blinking red
hazard lights flare and the swing arms lower across your path.
Things that were always there, but are much harder to see when
you are so dizzy from the vertigo falling in love causes you.
When I hear divorced couples talking about how they “used” to be
in love, it tells me they probably were never truly in love to
begin with. I mean, when I was younger, I fell “in love” every
other week. But God had a surprise in store for me when the real
thing, when real love, came my way. Real love is the kind of
love my Grandmother told me about when she said she re-married
after her husband's death, but she told her new husband she
could never love him the way she loved her late husband. That
that love, that first love, was something so imprinted on her
that there really was no thought of trying to duplicate it.
This must be what the Bible is talking about where it speaks of two people becoming “one flesh.” [Gen 2:24] You are not likely to ever meet a bigger cynic than me, but this sobering realization forced me to grow up and to confront the immense power love— true love— can have on your life. It is a power most if not all men take for granted or never understand as they go through life leaving shipwrecked women, damaged and dysfunctional, in their wake. Like Stephanie Mills, I really have learned to respect the power of love. I don't kid myself and I don't play games with women who have, from my experience, had far too many games played with them already.
