Anger

I have a lot of guilt regarding the failure of my marriage. After all,
the man I married was pretty much everything I wanted. And I still
want. The only reason we couldn't make things work was that I wasn't
happy. He couldn't make me happy. Semantics. I feel guilty.

Anger helps. It's not real anger; it more of a sad, frustrated
disappointment. Maybe disillusionment? I'm not angry, per se, at my
husband, although I think he bears some of the blame for this
disaster. First and foremost in the list of his mistakes was valuing
his Rosh Yeshiva more than his wife. That pretty much doomed the
relationship. But I can't fault him for that completely; it is a sad
but true fact that today's yeshiva world encourages young men to put
yeshiva before family. First they destroy the parents' authority, then
they minimize the wife's credibility. It works fine if the wife is
willing to submit to the Rosh Yeshiva's will, and luckily, a lot of
Bais Yaakov girls are. Poor me; I wasn't. I thought I married someone
who understood the importance of making (and taking responsibility
for) one's own decisions, but it turned out not to be so.

I'm more angry with all the rabbanim and therapists who've been
involved in this. Pretty much all of them have said some version of "I
could have told you that this was doomed from the start" at some
point. Some of them say it multiple times, in multiple ways, and the
message is always the same: I was an idiot to get into this and I
should have seen that this marriage couldn't work. After all, they all
could see it, clear and obvious. Gee, thanks. How helpful. How
brilliantly observed: you see a couple in distress, and you can tell
they're not meant for each other. Such powerful insight. What about
the experts I consulted prior to the wedding, then? Why couldn't they
see it? Isn't da'as Torah da'as Torah? Or were those people just
idiots? What about family? Why didn't any of them see it? (And trust
me, my family wouldn't have been shy if they didn't approve of my
choice. They might not have stopped me, but they'd have said
something.)

My family's been amazing: no "I told you so"s, no recrimination.
Everyone's been supportive so far. Of course, they all knew I was
miserable for a long time, so maybe they're just glad to see the end
of that. Or maybe they're saving the recriminations for when I'm a
little less emotionally fragile.

Mostly, I'm angry at myself. I know hindsight is 20/20, but I saw some
of the signs before the wedding. Why didn't I realize they were
meaningful and not brush them off as things that would improve with
time? And why wasn't I able to get over them and let them get better
with time? I'm a master at beating an issue to death; I'll be doing a
lot of self-flagellation in the next few months.

But mostly I know that no one's to blame. It's just how things are. It
truly saddens me to live in a world where this is how things are, but
we've somehow let our society develop into this. I don't know how to
fix it, and frankly, I don't know that I want to: the people who made
this mess deserve to live with it. The unfair part is that they're not
suffering for it: I am. I'm suffering for a world I didn't create and
don't approve of. Olum hafuch, indeed. þ

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