How Did We End Up Here?

I love reading fiction books where a marital struggle is one of the central plot lines. And every time I come across the question raised by the fictional wife - "how did we get here?" I feel like exclaiming - "Exactly! How?" At some point, at the very conception of the relationship, things were very good, and today they are pretty bad, but how did this gap happened? When? Why did it grow so wide?

A very thought-provoking book on mending the broken marriage that I would recommend to anyone is What Alice Forgot by Liane Moriarty. It's about a woman who falls off the exercise bike, hits her head and suffers a very peculiar case of amnesia, where she loses memories of the past 10 years of her life. She wakes up, thinking that she is a 27-year-old happily-married happily-pregnant woman and is then shocked to find out that she is in fact a 37 year-old mother of 3 on the verge of divorce, whose husband deeply hates her. As Alice sets out to explore how she went from being so happy and hopeful to so miserable and bitter, to look for clues to what went wrong and who is to blame, she gradually discovers that both her and her husband are equally responsible for their woes. However her injury let her take a fresh look at how everything started, how perfect their relationship was at one point, which made her more determined to fight to save their marriage.

If I am to trace back the past 10 years of our life together, I know what I will find. All those moments of miscommunication, lack of patience and support for each other, not enough spending time together, constant arguments about raising our son the right way. We were both wrong on endless occasions and pointing fingers to who contributed the larger share of damage will lead nowhere. I know he was a far worse husband than me a wife, even though I wasn't exactly perfect myself. I tried harder though. But as much as I would want him to admit that I will just be wasting my energy. And it's irrelevant any way.

What I need to recollect is the way we were in the beginning. How we couldn't go on a single day without seeing each other. How I blossomed nourished by his constant adoration. How he made me feel beautiful, desired and so complete. I feel nothing like that these days. I feel more broken but also much stronger, bitter but more realistic. What I know now is that everything in a relationship is a chain reaction. He hurts me, I hurt him in return, he hurts me in HIS return forgetting that he started it. And before you know it it's an endless exchange of blows and no one has any recollection how it came to that. But the same concept applies to the "good deeds", "voluntary acts of kindness" or whatever other fancy name there is for just being unconditionally nice. It causes exactly the same chain reaction but this time it results in a trade of good attitude. The only problem is who will start it, who will swallow the pride, let go of the past hurts and take this first step to being a better partner, a better person in spite of a very strong urge not to.

I write for those who want to try to be happy in a hopeless marriage. I am one of those wives who decided to stay even though it was probably wiser to leave. I get many comments from women like me. We all have our reasons. What I've learned from my 10-year marriage is that there are ways to feel happy in a marriage that is so far from perfect, from what you hoped and imagined it would be. If you bring your happiness with you into a relationship, it will always stay with you, but if you sit back and wait for someone to provide it, chances are you are waiting in vain.

Like any life's ordeal, a difficult marriage provides a platform for a tremendous personal growth. Everything happens for a reason. If we find ourselves in a particular situation, it's either because there's a lesson to learn, or because there's something inside us that doesn't function right and we are stuck until we decide to change. The very first and most important change should take place within, and the external changes will follow.

So the right question is not "how did we end up here?" but "how do we get back to where we were and then take it to the next, more mature, happier level?"