How to know if you married the wrong person

Thoughts on the anniversary of a failed marriage (my own)

Would you like to know how to tell if you married the wrong person? It’s easy. 

Step 1: Get married. 

Step 2: Wait for the shit to inevitably hit the fan.

Step 3: Take a look at the person you married. Are they are still standing next to you, upright and useful? Or are they in a crumpled heap on the floor?

That’s how you know.

The night before I got married — 13 years ago today— I had the best night’s sleep of my life. I had precisely zero qualms about my impending marriage, not a single doubt that I might be making a mistake. I had not any sense of foreboding, nor the slightest shiver of uncertainty. Not even an old fashioned case of nerves disturbed my rest that night. I have never been more at peace with anything in my life, before or since, because I fully trusted that the person I was about to marry would be my lifelong anchor, cheerleader and friend. It turned out my confidence was catastrophically misplaced. It was not the beginning of a wonderful life together. It was the beginning of a long and challenging journey; one that saw me move to five different countries in search of a better quality of life, only to wind up an unemployed single mother of a 4 year old son, living on state benefits, a mere five years after the happy day of my marriage. That time taught me many lessons — most of them through the severest of teachers, heart-break and loss.

These lessons I can distill down to 4 simple statements:

1. There is no force on earth stronger than the power of denial.

Denial is most definitely not just a river in Egypt. It’s a heavenly body with a gravitational pull stronger than the sun, around which entire families (as well as ideologies, organisations and political systems) are organised and held in place. The human desire to convince ourselves we are doing the right thing, the human ability to rationalise, the human tendency to protect the ego over everything (even our own children) is a universal phenomenon. Never expect it to be otherwise. Most of all, expect it of yourself. I was in denial about my ex’s drinking even after he confessed his alcoholism to me. Yes, that’s right, he told me and I did not believe him. Why not? Because I did not want to. It was a threat to a lifestyle we had developed together and held so dear, predicated on a carefree and gregarious joie de vivre in which long, wine-filled dinners played a central role — to our very identity as a couple. A year later, after things got so bad that I left him in Germany and moved Belfast, in an attempt to rebuild my shattered life I went to an Al-Anon meeting. I listened as a man recounted his ex’s descent from loving mother and nurse to a woman so ravaged by her addiction that she threw everything away rather than stop drinking — her children, her home, her marriage and her career. And as I listened to him recount this sorry tale, I actually had the thought: “that’s not us,” when in fact it very much was. I was in that very moment living through the same experience as this stranger, but rather than allow that reality to sink in, I convinced myself that my situation and my husband (who I had left) and my marriage (which I had ended) were all better than that. We were not.

2. Talk is cheap

I am not a therapist, but this I do know: if you are trapped in “we need to talk about it” mode in a relationship, you are not making progress toward a better place. If arguing, pleading or convincing play a significant role in your communications with your husband, wife or partner, then you are in a talking trap and you need to get out of it.  If you find yourself having the same fight over and over again, then before long you will be at breaking point. In these situations, talking is the same as spinning your wheels. It is fruitless. Busting out of patterns is shockingly difficult, and talk alone does not cut the mustard. In order to free yourself, you need action, action, action. Doing creates momentum. Momentum breaks you out of the destructive stasis. Doing what? That totally depends. It could be carpentry. It could be dance. It could be running. It could be writing. Anything repetitive, anything that breaks you out of your thoughts, creates a new channel in your brain free from the energy-sucking, late-night, intense discussions that come when two people have lost each other but cannot let go.

3. It is so much better to be alone than to be around unwell people

Up until my marriage fell apart, I considered myself a highly social person. I had a lot of dear friends. I always welcomed company. I organised and hosted parties regularly. That all ended when I left my husband, as old friends mysteriously got busy and an awkwardness or coldness creeped in to some of the friendships I held most dear. After a while, I tried to recreate that fun and sociability in my new life, but found that fate was putting in my path some questionable characters. Thankfully, I was able to see that, and I chose solitude over chaos. This is one of the most important things I have ever done — especially because I was vulnerable in my loneliness to the seduction of false friends. It was hard: I had a new partner, we had a domestic life, but I longed for the connections I had felt with friends since my teens. What did I do with that longing? I just simply endured it. I stopped trying to connect, or reaching out. I stopped resisting the solitude and I grew to appreciate it, a lot. I appreciated how the solitude kept me safe, and how it kept my young son safe, from people we did not need infecting our precious mental and physical space with their chaos and strife and drama.

4. There will always be a part of those closest to you that is totally unknowable. 

It takes no great insight to say that going through a divorce changes you. But how it changes you, and how you allow it to change you, is a more interesting question. First, you must reckon with yourself and how you — the captain of your life — oversaw a sinking as spectacular as the Titanic. Then, if you want to love again, you have to let go of, or at the very least recalibrate, your expectation. Which is not to say you lower your standards. But you have to recognise that ultimately, no one is going to fulfil you, or fix you, or help you. You must do that for yourself. The most unsettling thing about the collapse of a relationship as serious as a marriage is just how you can live in intimacy with another person for years, and then one day they are a stranger to you. The humbling process of a divorce takes certainty away, but there is a silver lining. You accept that you may never know a person completely — but in so doing, you relinquish any attempt at controlling them. That way, you can both remain free, together.