Who hasn't heard the "half of all marriages end in divorce" statistic? If that is the case, where the hell are these divorcee's hiding? There are exactly 5 divorced parents at my childrens' school, which educates roughly 500 students. It doesn't take a mathematician to realize that this is far fewer than that famous statistic would suggest.
Not that I am hoping for others to fail where I seemingly have (not officially, at this point, but perhaps in that direction). But I have finely tuned ears for those stories that are pertinent to my situation in life, at that point in time. For instance, when I was applying for universities, I would be able to filter out any comments about scholarships or tuition fees as I walked down the loud, busy halls of my high school, as though it was the juiciest gossip imaginable. Ditto any Bridezilla stories several years later, once I was engaged. And I hung on to every word of a labour and delivery story when I was pregnant, and every toddler story thereafter.
Now that these stories are old news to me - been there, done that - I barely have the patience for one minute of them before my eyes start rolling back in my head and I try to quell my gag reflux.
However I'm primed and ready, ears perked, to hear real life stories of failed marriages. What was it that finally did them in? What was their marriage really like, once the doors were closed? Did they disagree about everything, or just major things? Did they, at the end of the day, still love each other but just couldn't live together anymore, or hate each other with a vengeance that grew and grew? Please, tell me every little sordid detail and don't hold back.
But no one's talking. When it comes to the good, the bad, and the ugly, it would seem people are not as keen to share the bad and the ugly part, beyond, of course, the all-husbands-are-idiots comments that we trade with winks and knowing smiles. And of the five divorced people I occasionally pass by, I know none of them well enough to delve into their stories. "How's Johnnie doing? And how's that divorce treating you, by the way?" just wouldn't roll off the tongue with ease.
In fact, I wonder if I am missing some social cues, because anyone who spends ten minutes with me, on average, would pick up on my marital problems. And if wine is anywhere on the premises, they will get an earful. Partially because I like to vent, but mostly because I feel like not telling people the status of my heart is akin to lying.
It makes me wonder: is my marriage really as terrible as I make it out to be? Or are my standards impossibly high? And if everyone else is standing around smiling, are they all in love with their spouses and happy as clams, or simply lying?
Not that it matters; I just want their stories. I thirst for them, as only a person crawling through the desert can thirst. So in desperation, I turn to literature.
A picture tells a thousand words; and so do the books piled beside my bed. In the past year I have read Anna Karenina, The Age of Innocence, two volumes of essays by women writers on love and relationships, and, curiously, tributes to their spouses by Calvin Trillin and Joan Didion. I am obsessed with love, especially those who find true love within the bond of marriage; but mostly find comfort in those characters, both real and invented, who don't.
Sometimes I read passages that take my breath away, they seem so close to how I feel, and I am not so alone anymore. Newland Archer, in the Age of Innocence, thinks, "The taste of the usual was like cinders in his mouth, and there were moments when he felt as if he were being buried alive under his future." HERE is something I can relate to. And near the end of the novel, "Something he knew he had missed: the flower of life. But he thought of it now as something so unattainable and improbable that to have repined would have been like despairing because one had not drawn the first prize in a lottery. There were a hundred million tickets in HIS lottery, and there was only one prize; the chances had been too decidedly against him."
Sometimes I think I should be more accepting of my fate, like Newland. Other days I believe it is still not too late to change it.
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