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My husband was a good man, a kind man, but not an affectionate man. When we would watch movies together, we were at opposite ends of the sofa. When we were out together, we would rarely hold hands. I remember not even being able to touch him at night because he couldn’t sleep with anyone touching him in any way. We each retreated to opposite sides of the king-size bed, and the space between us felt like an abyss.
I gave up. I gave up on what I wanted and needed in the relationship. I told myself that what I had was enough, but deep down I knew it wasn’t. I cared about him, but I was slowly, but surely, falling out of love with my husband. I never told him that, but I know there was a part of him that felt it.
At first, there was a sort of resigned acceptance about the whole thing, my way of making peace with what felt like an unfulfilling and disconnected relationship. For the next several years I distracted myself and turned my focus away from my marriage and into my work.
By the eleventh year of our marriage, I started to get resentful about not getting my needs met. So, I passive-aggressively stopped giving him what he wanted and needed (I wasn’t a relationship coach then and like most of us didn’t have the tools to do this in a more emotionally mature manner). I stopped engaging with him in any meaningful way. My comments to him were either short or sarcastic or both. I had a new excuse each night about why we couldn’t have sex. I eventually left.
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I’ve thought about that experience hundreds of times from my perspective, but I wonder what it must have been like all those years for him:
I wonder if he too felt empty and alone.
I wonder if he knew what to do, but resented having to make the additional effort.
I wonder if he felt like the relationship was fulfilling for him, or if he was also just making peace with his own decisions and commitments.
I wonder if he ever thought of leaving the marriage.
I wonder if he lived in fear of being left.
A recent study by Michael Rosenfeld, an Associate Professor of Sociology at Stanford University, reports that women initiate almost 70 percent of divorces. That leaves an awful lot of men that are left.
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I think, of course, there is the occasional man that is blind-sided by their wives leaving. But I like to give men more credit than that. I think most men, at some level, know that their wife is unhappy, but avoid taking action for all the same reasons most of us avoid taking action in difficult situations:
Facing defeat or failure. If a man admits that his wife is unhappy in the marriage then at some level, he may think he has failed as a man and as a husband. The weight and shame of such a thought is just too difficult for even the strongest of us to face.
Not knowing what to do. When we don’t know what to do in almost any situation, we make the unconscious choice to do nothing, to take no action. It’s the same in our marriages.
Change is uncomfortable. In order to do something about fixing the problems or bridging the disconnect within the marriage, he would have to change in some way. He would need to create new habits and engage differently in a lasting way. And because change is incredibly uncomfortable, it’s just human nature that we resist change until we hit a crisis and change is forced upon us (and maybe it’s not a crisis yet).
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Marriages don’t end overnight. There is a period where we live in discontent, and where the relationship between two partners worsens. There is a time where one of the partners lives in fear of being left. And when we don’t talk about our fears, when we don’t face them, they don’t go away. They simply play out in our choices, actions, and behaviors so slowly over time that it almost goes unnoticed. Almost. Until it can’t help but be noticed.
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