Time Lapse

It took me maybe five seconds in the yichud room to start feeling uncomfortable. It took maybe another month for me to realize just how wrong things felt. It took my husband quite a bit longer to figure out that there was something serious going on; he would tell you himself that he enjoyed and encouraged his own ignorance. He knew that things weren't perfect - it would have been kind of difficult to miss all the signs - but he didn't realize that I was totally miserable or that the evil d-word was floating through my mind. It took a lot of time and a lot of therapy for him to come to terms with the magnitude of the problem.

My husband is a pretty optimistic guy. He generally accomplishes this by ignoring any negatives and focusing on the positive. This is a wonderful midah, but it means that he doesn't actually deal with negatives. He pretends they don't exist. It seems to have worked for him in most aspects of his life. I, however, am not so good at ignoring what I don't want to see; I insist on dragging problems out into the open, where presumably they will be easier to deal with. I am capable of laziness and of hoping that time and inertia will make action by me unnecessary, but I am not capable of pretending the problem doesn't exist. Thus, I forced my husband to acknowledge the existence and importance of what was going on in our marriage. However, once the problem was visible, he had no tools to deal with it: his usual tool of aggressive ignorance would no longer work.

Since that cruel pulling away of the wool over his eyes, he's been sinking deeper and deeper into something closely resembling depression. This is ironic, since a few months ago, he was accusing me of being depressed and trying to convince me that Prozac would solve all our relationship problems. Actually, for a while I was convinced that it was a possibility, and I considered going on an anti-depressant, all in the name of leaving no stone unturned.

Forced acknowledgement is worse than just ironic, though; it's counter-productive. Before, I could be reasonably certain that if I managed to straighten out my own issues, we would be okay. Now, though, my husband has a whole set of issues and unhappiness all his own. That means that if I do fix things on my end, we're not home free and happy. We're needing to deal with problems that I created post-wedding. I'm not so selfish as to think my husband is not entitled to have his own issues and to be upset at times. But these aren't his issues; they're still mine. I don't want to have to fix them twice, especially when the second time around I'll have to deal with them in an unfamiliar brain pattern, so that I don't know how to reassure him in a way that will hold. And it hurts to know that I've made things worse - again - by following the experts' advice.

Irony has a way of escalating. I used to think that one of the reasons that I couldn't emotionally connect with my husband was that he didn't need me emotionally. After lots of therapy, we have managed to get him to admit he has issues with dealing with emotions. Most men are less in tune than women are with their emotions, but he is less in tune with his emotions than even most men, and by his own efforts to make himself that way. I need to be needed, and I didn't feel like he needed me. Now he does, because he certainly isn't capable of handling these newfound emotions himself. The irony is that making things worse may be a catalyst for making things better. However, that is probably a false hope, since I don't really want to help anymore. We have too much negative history at this point.

But I'm trying to be fair. He had to put up with months of my extreme misery, even though he spent most of that time in denial. Yes, I've finally managed to achieve apathy - who would have ever thought I'd think that was an achievement? - and he's a few months behind me in getting to miserable. If he had to put up with me, I should be willing to let him have a few months of self-indulgent sulking. It's a shame we couldn't do the misery thing at the same time, but then, maybe the marriage would be over by now if we had. Although I'm not convinced that that would be a bad thing. Prolonging the misery is not a goal I strive for.