In life, there is no do over machine. No unringing the bell, or taking back certain events. What is done is done. There's an analogy about relationships that I like, that involves a comparison to cement. In the early days, the cement is pliable. But the things that happen in those early days can wind up affecting the shape and state of the cement once it's set.
When I first moved in to my soon to be husband's apartment, I had come from Korea, from my first and last duty assignment. His place was decorated but some of the things on the walls were from other women. When I wanted to make his place our place, I removed some of these things.
The centerpiece, a pen and ink drawing of a scene in the African grasslands, of hunters with their spears and shields, and the words "My Father's People" underneath, was a gift from an ex girlfriend. Her father was from Burundi, so this cliched little scene was possibly rooted in something genuine. It was a college project that she was going to throw away, and he asked her if he could have it. A nice enough story, and at the same time, I didn't want this hanging on the wall in my home. When I approached him to figure out what we could do with it, he revealed that his parents paid $80 to have it framed. My suggestion was to take it down, but store it and take it with us the next time we visited his parents.
Marriage is about compromise, and I thought this was fair enough. At the time, he agreed.
Here was my shortcoming: I was insecure. This was my first (and supposedly last) big real life relationship with someone. I don't have a problem with exes, but there are exceptions. This one in particular was a fame seeker. Once, my husband said, "Did you know I dated an Olympic skier?" What I felt wasn't jealousy. I didn't want to be an activist-actress-artist-athlete. I wanted my husband to stop flaunting past conquests in an attempt to see if I cared. I wanted protection, not provocation.
And there was my husband's shortcoming. He liked throwing out bits and pieces of his past like chum, to see if I'd go into a frenzy. There wasn't a consideration of my much slimmer past, or of how he might have felt had I casually tossed out similar tidbits. It often felt like his way of making sure I knew what I had: a man who was good enough to date an almost famous Olympic athlete. I now realize this not so subtle marketing of his worth was his own way of dealing with being insecure.
Months after the compromise, he was deployed, and I was home, tending to our pets and the apartment. The art was stowed safely in the laundry room, and life was peaceful. Then, in an email, my husband decided to share an idea. "Let's keep that artwork," he proposed. "It may be worth something some day. We could even send our kids to college."
There's a thing in my professional life called "Requirements creep." It describes how an organization may want something to fulfill a defined need, but over time that something can balloon into more than the original idea, with cost and time needed for development of that magical solution reaching unreasonable proportions. This was compromise creep. I felt my offer was fair, a meet-in-the-middle fix, and now my husband felt it was acceptable to override that with what he wanted: to keep the artwork.
The more I thought about this, the angrier I became, until one evening, I pulled that artwork from its cozy hiding spot, unscrewed the frame, and thoroughly stomped the "might be worth something someday" creation into "definitely worth nothing now" oblivion. It felt damned good to put my foot through that foam board. I wish that piece of art had been a lot larger to prolong my satisfaction of destroying it. I fully understand why rage rooms have become a thing.
Was it immature? Certainly. Did I let my feelings do the talking? Absolutely. Did it calm the fury? For a little while.
I told my husband what I did, and he made sure to say "It's okay. I'm not angry." How magnanimous.
We never sorted through this issue in depth. This "cement moment" kept coming back. After a certain point, past some unspoken statute of limitations, a neat little trick happens: you become the problem for dredging up "old shit." In this relationship autopsy phase (we are separated now, over twenty years later), I look at who I was, how I felt, and why I acted how I did. I look at what fed my insecurities, how poorly equipped I was to sort through my feelings and articulate them, how so many seemingly little slights can erode a relationship over time. Often when I revisit these cement moments, I'm angry at myself for not doing a more solid job of standing up for myself.
It all sounds foolish, but what I know now, after decades of this relationship, and so many years of living, is that the surface issues we argue about aren't really the source of the conflict.
Here's what I should have asked:
Why was my compromise not enough?
Why did he feel so entitled to push for what he wanted, to keep the artwork?
What was so special about this artwork that he thought it would be worth enough to put theoretical children through college?
Why couldn't he ask himself how he'd feel, had the situation been reversed, and we kept some bound-for-the-trash art project from one of my exes at my insistence?
Given how everything panned out (and I am responsible for my own share of offenses), I can also recognize how young we were, how ill equipped we were to commit to a serious relationship when we did, and how many of these seemingly minor missteps wind up forever trapped in the cement, because the chance to smooth them over has long since passed.
