MY WIFE IS LEAVING ME
I usually write about either politics or philosophy at this site. Pardon the departure into the personal. Who can I talk to about it? Everyone I talk to about it wants to fix it, at which point the conversation becomes empty and shallow, as I realize as soon as the conversation is over.
It’s not exactly a surprise that my wife wants to leave me now. She’s been talking about it, in one way or another, for the full two years that we’ve been married. But she never followed through with it. But there would be these moments when she’d get depressed and start saying that she didn’t love me, that she was “dead” here, that she had never loved me, or at any rate not after the very beginning if even then. After those moments it felt terrible to be bound to her; it robbed the world of all its beauty.
Returning from a business trip last weekend I brought up the subject, I asked her to have a “serious talk.” I told her that I loved her and tried to explain what I meant. What I loved about her: her curiosity, which sometimes fired my interest in things I had never been interested in before; her considerateness to others on
birthdays and holidays; her never-boring-ness; the way she would get interested in people; her observant-ness; her love of photography; her commitment to truth… The memories we shared together was a part of our love too: our travels together in Russia, in Uzbekistan, in Africa, in Pennyslvania and Virginia and the Big Sur coast. And then the affection I had for her: all the things that were really meaningless in themselves and yet, just because I’d grown accustomed to them, I had a certain affection for. And then sexual attraction; even then I desired to touch her… I told her that when I asked her to marry me– that I would love her and be loved in return, commit to her and receive her commitment in return– she had a right to say yes or to say no and walk away, but not to say maybe, not to say yes and then partly take it back over and over again. And that she didn’t have a right to live the way she is living now, living with me without loving me and without commitment, still undecided.
She said the beginnings of a no, and asked if I wanted to talk it over. I said that if she were to answer yes, I wanted to talk about it, but if it was no, we’d better
not; I’d already heard it before, and it was hurtful. I repeated her words: that she didn’t love me, that marrying me had been a mistake, that she was only living a lie being with me, that she felt “dead,” and so on. And as I said it she began to cry. Hearing her own words repeated back to her made her cry. And then I fatally took pity on her. I embraced her, I said that if it would help to say what was inside her…
I’d heard it before in different ways but this time somehow it hit me harder. She told me that she couldn’t love me “as a husband,” that she’d tried as hard as she could… When I write her words again now it seems the only response to them is suicide. If differences in interests or whatever mean that there’s a lack of a
“basis” for the relationship… I don’t really understand her explanation, I don’t understand what it means… But if that can happen, if a woman can just not love her husband and have to leave, if there isn’t some divine law forbidding that, then the universe should never have been created.
The religious prohibition of suicide has been directly relevant to my life several times. In the past 72 hours I have thought it over again and again– is there some kind of loophole? If a person wants– if he needs– to die, if all his desires are for non-existence, isn’t there some way that can be arranged, without falling foul of the divine commands? It’s that that I can’t confess to relatives, to my mother, to my sister. They would be horrified, call it blasphemy– it is, no doubt– they would be wounded, and of course they would tell me not to, and who knows what they might do? Arrange for the cops to visit the house and remove all sharp objects perhaps? Demand that I be forced into counseling. It’s an interesting question: what are the state’s powers to prohibit suicide?
It’s a desire driven by emotions– the loss, the humiliation, the sense of terrible waste, the emptiness, the thoughts, the tormenting thoughts– but also rational: I have nothing to live for that would give me satisfaction. Furthermore the choices, looking forward, seem bleak: Marry again, someday, or don’t. Either option seems dismal. A single elderly man is simply pathetic: he imposes on
everyone who sees him a feeling of pity. But to marry again! To make oneself vulnerable to the fickle feelings of another person; that at any time she could decide she no longer loves you and walk away. The only motive I can imagine for doing that– now– is to avoid being a single elderly man and imposing pity on me.
It’s not that I believe life has no pleasures in store. I know there are many of them, from a good book to a symphony to flowers in spring to a good debate on philosophy. But they are not enough. Not enough to make it worth it, to justify enduring the boredom, the loneliness, the labor and griminess and hypocrisy that are a normal part of life; not enough to make it worth enduring the thoughts in particular, the memories of the times we spent together that are associated with the shameful repudation and loss, the memories of her saying I don’t love you as a husband…
If suicide is divinely prohibited, I suppose I must obey. To obey resentfully is no doubt a sin, but not so bad a sin as to disobey I think. Also, there’s no way to exit this world without doing it messily. One can’t just disappear. The shame of suicide affects one’s family, affects my colleages (who would be deprived of my ongoing contributions to our joint projects), affects the people who gave me
student loans and have a right to be paid back, affects my landlords, my friends. Someone would have to find the body, someone would have to clean up the blood and bury it. I never litter in the public parks; would it do to leave my body there? The case against suicide: it’s bad manners.
The only thing that makes me not want to kill myself is the following (perhaps true) fantasy: God will triumph, destroying Satan and all his works, and among those works is my wife’s idea that a wife owes no obligation to her husband, that if she doesn’t, in her opinion, “love him as a husband,” she is entitled, nay she must, in order to avoid “living a lie,” leave her husband. That idea must be destroyed, cast into the pit, vanish into the endless night– or else the universe is incurably sad and should never have been created. And yet I don’t want my wife to be damned. My love for her, my affection for her, remains. My fondest dream– it is so easy to slip into the realm of illusion and imagine that it will be so, but a high price is paid for that pleasure– is that she’ll love me and come back to me. And that leads me immediately back to I don’t love you as a husband, and the thoughts, and the aching desire for suicide…
