The day I realized my husband had become more sensitive than I was the day I knew our marriage was really over. Of course the very fact that we were enduring our third round of counseling should have been my first clue, but the onset of his very realistic Blanche DuBois impression was the thing that finally brought this realization home. Not only did his behavior make me irritable and resentful as hell, but I felt like my territory was being invaded. I should have been the one who cried during arguments and begged for another chance to make it right. But now that the end was really in sight he had finally woken up to the truth of the matter: we were over. And his incessant whining about how broken hearted he was made it really tempting to bitch-slap him.
His hysterical behavior was initially brought on by the fact that I quit moping around the house with him, he did little else, and started going out with my friends again. He was never one for socializing in the first place (a red flag I should have seen waving madly in the days before I committed my life to him) but I guess I thought this was something that would change over time. Of course, that never happened. (Note to self: in the future remember that you can’t change anyone’s behavior but your own and even then it’s an uphill climb.) It wasn’t as if I hadn’t asked him to accompany me to every social occasion we were invited to but 90% of the time he declined, so I finally wised up and just quit asking. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result and I decided it would be best to save what smidgen of grey matter I still possessed and move along. I guess up to that point I’d been waiting for someone to take me by the hand and guide me: “We’re walking, we’re walking….”
At some point, the various career paths I was forging began to segue into a few good gigs and I found myself creeping out of the suffocating fog of marital disappointment and back to the land of the breathing. Unfortunately, this was the time of separating paths for us as he found himself unemployed and unhappy. I’d tried to bolster him, soothe his ego, pep-talk him back to action but he would have none of it. And in the end, I realized that I couldn’t save him; he needed to save himself, to stand up and walk tall. Instead he sank deeper and deeper into the land of self-pity and self-loathing. It was as if he was living on the dark side of the moon with nothing but the echo of his fears and belligerent mood to keep him company. But on the bright side, I hear the green cheese there was mighty tasty.
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