It wasn’t really that I was unhappy in the initial decades of the marriage, but I wouldn’t have described myself as happy. I really didn’t feel very much of anything; it seemed simply like going through the motions. In many ways there had been an inadvertent trade: identity and career plans for motherhood, the settling for part-time freelance writing instead of the magazine editing career in New York complete with white cat and white shag area rug in a loft studio envisioned by a girl long ago. [...]
My husband and I started talking on the one day a week we saw each other. In the absence of the day-to-day pressures of a marriage, we found common ground. He had begun a relationship with a woman. I was surprised to find myself jealous of her given my own sexual exploits. We spoke with sadness about the failings of our marriage, the desire we both had to have worked harder to make communication successful. We began couples therapy. We kept connecting on Sundays, and in those Sundays we found that the flame of our marriage had not totally burned out, that the spark we had felt all those decades ago as teenagers was still there. Was it possible it could be reignited? [...]
My “marriage sabbatical” could easily be written off as a mid-life crisis, and probably has all the trappings of such. It certainly didn’t seem that simple at the time. I can’t imagine the track my life would have taken if I had just continued going through the motions, doing the things society expects of us, that we expect of ourselves.
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