Marriage Ruined My Marriage

“Why can’t you be more coquettish?” My mother would say.

This was after my divorce, and I was working for Goldman Sachs. My mother could not understand why I was not landing a second husband on Wall Street, especially since my dad had been a finance guy. I mean, why wouldn’t I want exactly what she had? Why couldn’t I be more like her?

Because I just wasn’t. Not when it came to men, love, sex, relationships and marriage. I came away from my own marriage with an array of feelings about it. And they weren’t great. It wasn’t because of the man I married. He was everything a woman could want - a funny, smart, educated and employed, extremely personable guy who was a cross between Val Kilmer (RIP) and Don Johnson in 1980s Miami Vice.

It was me. I just didn’t get it. And, in many ways, I still don’t.

I don’t get the rules, roles and regulations. The expectations, the pressure and assumptions. The matrimonial structure. The institution. I don’t get what any of it has to do with love.

It’s not that my parents failed to model love. They did. There had never been a raised voice or harsh word uttered in my home. Not ever. My father adored my mom, and my mom worshipped my dad. With one older brother, we were as nuclear as a nuclear family could get.

Dad worked, mom stayed home, and it was church every Sunday. Well, every Sunday until I refused to go because I could not stomach the people there pretending to be good and kind when they really weren’t. The same women who preached the virtues of love and acceptance in church were the women at our summer cabana club who lounged about on beach chairs that looked like Fruit Stripe gum and prattled on, spewing pejoratives about the very people whom they called friends.

I was eight, and there was no convincing me that God was into gossip circles. It was those people in that so-called holy place that birthed my lifelong aversion to hypocrites - - and organized religion. That aside, it did not put an end to my mother’s preaching despite my absence from Sunday services.

Mostly, she sermoned me about God and sex. Marriage and sex. God and love. Love and marriage. What was conspicuously missing was love > sex. The push on marriage preceding sex, rather than love preceding sex never sat right with me.

For her, it was easy. She and my dad fell hard for each other on day one. It was the 1940s. A blind date led to happily ever after. Good for them. What a gift. But then, as a result, she saw her life with my dad as proof that life worked according to society’s script. Instead, I saw how many people following that script were being suffocated by it, myself included.

What did I know? I knew what my mother told me. I followed the path set forth by my parents. I obeyed the orders handed down to women that defines them by role rather than by who they actually are. I married at 23.

Eight years into it I was working for Chanel and loving it. My husband was traveling a lot for his job with MCI, which was the major telecommunications company of the time and later acquired by Verizon. We knew we were in trouble, but we also knew we still felt love. God, it was so confusing. We tried to talk, tried to connect, tried to understand what was happening, or had happened, to our relationship. For my part, though, I was muted by guilt.

I felt guilty that I wasn’t a better wife. I felt guilty that I wasn’t dying to stay home and have kids. I felt guilty that I was curious about life and my place in the world. I felt guilty for wanting to work. I felt guilty for wanting to be free. I felt guilty that I didn’t just fall into the mainstream with the same ease that everyone else did. I felt guilty that I wasn’t what the world said I had to be if I wanted to participate in this thing we call love.

After a clunky attempt at conversation, my husband and I reasoned that a simple date night would be a better way to assess if we could find our way back to where we started. We decided to cuddle up with our two precious chihuahua-terriers, light a fire, order in and watch a movie. I shaved, and creamed, my skin with Chanel N° 19 so I’d smell nice and feel smooth, just in case…

I flipped through the cable channels, and after going through several rounds and finding nothing appealing, I stopped clicking the remote at, The Little Mermaid.

Disney. Perfect.

No thought, no triggers, just a bunch of cartoons swimming around singing.

Boy, was I wrong. Oh. So wrong.

I looked at my husband to get a read on his reaction. He shrugged, knowing that based on our options, it was that or nothing.

I set out the Chinese food we had ordered, with plates and utensils on the coffee table while he prepared the fire. We settled in with dumplings, chow mein and won ton soup, though had only had a few bites when the villainous wicked sea witch, Ursula, waved her evil wand and muted Ariel, the little mermaid. In one stroke, Ariel lost her color, texture, shape and ability to move. She was stuck in place, a black, amorphous, worm with vacant, yellow-green eyes, barely wriggling. I gasped and then dropped to the floor, sobbing into my hands.

His head snapped, his eyes bulged. “Oh my God. What?" He pointed the remote at the TV and pressed pause. Gently jostling my back, he said. “What is it?”

“That’s me.” I whaled.

“What’s you?”

“That!” I exclaimed twisting my arm behind me and pointing my index finger at the screen.

“Ursula?” He asked incredulously.

“No. Not Ursula. Ariel.”

“What do you mean that’s you?”

“That’s me!”

“How is that you?”

I buried my face deeper into my hands to obsucre the words that I did not want to say, or hear. In what eeked out as more of a whimper, I said, "I'm dwindling like that into someone I don't recognize. You know, the color, the fullness, the texture. My texture."

“Here,” he said as he introduced the edge of a throw pillow to the side of my face encouraging me with a little tap to lift my head so he could slide it underneath. Instead, I rolled onto my back to face him.

“That’s how you feel?” He said with his eyes fixed on the the image on the screen.

He turned back to look at me with wet, bloodshot eyes.

I nodded.

Choking back tears, he swallowed and cleared his throat, though the effort to stabilize his voice failed. “I’m so sorry,” he crackled.

We were divorced within a year. No hard feelings. I moved to New York City. He moved to Colorado. I took the dogs. I had a new job at Barney’s New York and a new life in the heart of Chelsea.

Clean slate. Total freedom. And a new perspective, which is only to say that my old perspective had been blown to smithereens and I had to try to figure out how I really felt about love, sex and marriage. Even though I had long stated that marriage ruined my marriage, I also obliquely knew there was more to it than that.

So, I set out to recast myself in a role that I felt I would actually be able to play and spent the next 30 years re-scripting a better storyline for the love in my life.