There’s an old saying that hindsight is twenty-twenty. The reason this is true is that once you’ve walked down a road, you can look back and see how you got to where you are. You can speculate on alternate routes, but this route you know. You recognize the potholes, the dips, the cracks and even the places where there’s blacktop rising a quarter of an inch above the cement.
Marriage is very much like that road. You can speculate all you want about how you might have done things differently, but one thing is for certain – you know how you got to where you are right now. It may take you a short time to recognize when you ignored the road signs and you slowed down to weave in and out of traffic.
John and Jane were unhappy. What’s worse – they’d been unhappy for a very long time. But because they loved each other, they kept their unhappiness to themselves. Or so they believed. When did their unhappiness start? If you talk to John and Jane, you will hear two very different answers.
Jane says, “I don’t know. I just woke up one morning and it seemed like a lot of little things accumulated – I wouldn’t even have called it unhappy then – I don’t think.”
John says, “When I couldn’t compete with her. When I kept failing her. When she took pity on me. That’s about when it started for me.”
Jane’s answer puzzled John and John’s left Jane flabbergasted. How could Jane not know when she became unhappy? Didn’t it start when he kept selfishly leaving a lot of the work up to her? Didn’t it start when she was haranguing him about being out late two or three nights a week? What about when he couldn’t get a job? What about when they had to sell the house she really loved because they couldn’t hold onto it? What about when she had to go back to work because they really needed her income?
He sucked as a husband.
John knew that. Why didn’t Jane?
Simple. Jane didn’t know that because what John judged himself by was not what Jane did. Jane didn’t want to acknowledge she was unhappy to begin with. Even talking about it for hours, there were a number of threads that were revealed, but not one giant one that leapt out to say this is the reason why she was unhappy.
In the course of their conversation – Jane tried to defend John to himself, but he didn’t want to hear that. He didn’t want her to defend him again. He grew angry, agitated and upset. Couldn’t she see – that’s what she always did – she made it better. He didn’t want her to make it better. He wanted her to see him for the screw up he was.
Then in a rush – he told her that she didn’t know him.
She denied it. Of course she knew him, she wanted to soothe him, to make him feel better and to take some of the pain away. It hurt her to see him hurting. She knew there wasn’t anything they couldn’t do together – even the hard stuff.
“No.” John told her rather pointedly. Jane did not know him. He would prove it to her. What came next was a rupturing of years of silence. John had lied to Jane. He’d lied to himself. He’d lied to a lot of people. The lie was a small one – truthfully – in the scheme of things. Yet it was the reason why he lied and the length of time that he held onto the lie that rocked Jane.
One of the truisms that she always clung to in their relationship was there was nothing they couldn’t tell each other. They shared everything, the good, the bad and the ugly. John believed differently, because sometimes a lie is easier to tell than the truth. He justified his lies by saying he didn’t want to hurt her or himself by extension.
Once the words were out – John could not take them back. He could not wipe away the hurt that appeared in Jane’s expression. Suddenly, galvanized from his own depression and upset by the hurt he’d inflicted on Jane – he wanted to fix it. He wanted to help – he wanted to make it better.
Jane wanted nothing from him. That’s when they went to see a marriage counselor because Jane’s hurt and anger along with a dozen different threads to small resentments manifested into a much larger injury. John loved her, he insisted. Jane – Jane wasn’t so sure anymore.
This is the second part in a tale that began with The Start of A Story.