She and I typed out a few texts back and forth, and then she called. No one else would be disturbed by the call; by then I was separated and living in my own home, with my own blissfully unshared bedroom. My sister was shocked, and simultaneously talking through her to do list and next moves. She had always been more of a woman of action than I was, and she didn’t stay around anyone who didn’t want to be around her, not even her own spouse of three decades. Her mindset was, if he wants to go, I’ll let him go so I can figure out life without him.
I’ll be honest: there was a part of me was excited that I wasn’t going to be alone in ending a marriage. We could be solo queens on opposite coasts. I sent *that* meme to her, you know the one (see below). I also wondered how she would feel about me, knowing I had an affair, and how this would affect our relationship. A few years earlier, a married woman flirted with my brother-in-law at work and texted racy photos to him under the guise of trying to find the right bra (a different woman than his affair partner, by the way, apparently my brother-in-law was a hot commodity). She concluded the conversation about the racy bra shopping woman by saying, “Who does that? Bad people, that's who!” I could have disappeared into a bush, Homer style, with her ruthless character assessment. I too had sought and involved myself with a married man, which made me one of those bad people. Now that we were having this early morning conversation resulting from her husband's affair, I had to confess.
(*That* meme)I was on the opposite side of the same coin, separated from my ex several years after he discovered my affair. I wondered if that information would change her opinion of me and our relationship with each other.
“It might feel like he did this to you,” I told her, “but this wasn’t about you. It was about him.” I was sharing what I discovered about myself, from my own experience and subsequent introspection. I knew my words might not be well received by sister as she was working through the immediate aftermath of a bombshell, yet she heard me.
In the following months, I heard about the active repairing my brother-in-law did, the way he reckoned with who he was, and what patterns he had carried into his marriage. By spring the following year, my sister needed a break from his navel-gazing and subsequent existential crisis. She was tired of constantly being expected to validate him because being introspective and having realizations about himself, especially the shadow parts, was new to him. I was a few steps ahead of him, having reconciled most of the shame I felt over my own affair. We had both gone for coworkers, and as someone who was on the other side of it, I could see how cliched, predictable and common these middle-aged tropes could be. I also knew the default expectation for the betrayed spouse was to leave their unfaithful partner, posthaste!
We like to think we know what we’ll do in these situations. In reality, the answers are not immediately clear and the resolution usually doesn’t occur quickly, or neatly packaged.
My sister decided to visit, and stay with me and my daughters in the townhouse I had bought to get out of my own marriage. While she had come to my place for a three week hiatus, my sister would retreat to her room nightly so she and my brother-in-law could spend time on the phone with each other. During the day he would dutifully send her photos of his location and what he was doing, without her asking. She admitted to me that she understood he was rebuilding trust, but she wanted to be past this part, for both of them to feel like this task was no longer expected or required. It had been less than six months, but she was gentle with him when they talked on the phone, and they related to each other like friends. Oh, I remember thinking, while feeling the tiniest pang of envy, they actually like each other.
The older sister I had grown up knowing as occasionally cruel, had the ability to talk to her husband and repair their marriage together, and own her part in the breakdown of their marriage. I couldn’t help but contrast that with my own marriage, and the way we seemed to stay the crisis stage indefinitely. My ex had been unwilling to account for the negative patterns he contributed. His thinking seemed to be, “You broke the marriage, now you fix it!” He seemed incapable of understanding that my decision to have an affair was a symptom of larger problems, not the root cause. I didn't deny that my actions devastated him, but I wasn't going to agree that our marriage had been good simply because our relationship worked well for him. After years without making headway, I wondered if this was a power play; was it possible he wanted to remain the forever scorned spouse so he could rub my nose into the mess whenever I stepped out of line?
We met in college and had gotten to know each other on a surface level as cadets, with a few shared events and even a few dates, but only because he was romantically interested in me. I was young, and not discerning enough to understand that just because someone was interested in me didn't necessarily mean they wanted to know who I was, or understand how events in my life had shaped me.
My ex’s nickname for me was “Beautiful.” But the person who called me “Beautiful” also teased me for having “pancake butt,” a joke that my ass was flat, a highly undesirable physical feature for black women. “You need to do squats,” he would say, without me prompting him for advice. I purposely did not do squats, as I am the type to settle into passive aggressiveness whenever someone directs me to do something to accommodate their preferences. (For the record, it’s not flat, it’s just not that prize of prized buttocks, the bubble butt)
For the longest time I didn’t run for exercise, out of the belief that I was not a runner; my mile times were not putting any land speed records at risk. This mentality began for me at West Point, and carried through my short time in the Army, all the way until I was 38, and I took my ex's invitation to go running. I usually declined, concerned that I was too slow and would hold him back, but surprisingly, I was able to keep up. We ran together sometimes and while he was supportive, he also felt compelled to joke about my "hamster" stride. I run with a gliding style, despite my name, I am not a gazelle. The ways I accomplished things were generally considered inferior and treated like an odd little quirk when they differed from how he did things.
In 2019, we visited Manhattan with our kids to watch a Broadway show and walk through Central Park as a birthday gift for our oldest daughter, who was turning 14. I bought the show tickets and he did the rest, to include booking the hotel and driving us into the city. City driving never fazed my ex, and that made so many of our trips feel easy. In contrast, I avoid city driving; my anxiety spikes at the tightly packed roads and the sheer volume of cars parked tightly next to sidewalk curbs. During that trip, everything went smoothly, except my ex left his suit jacket in the hotel closet.
Three weeks later, I would be visiting West Point to meet up with friends to spend time together, watch a parade, and wander through a maze of tailgates before winding up in Michie Stadium for a home football game. I dreaded telling my ex that I had planned this trip, and I remember talking to my individual therapist about it. "Anticipatory dread" is what it’s called, and I imagined the interrogation that would ensue around me traveling alone to see friends. “You don’t have to ask permission,” my therapist said, “just tell him you’re going.” I eventually did exactly that, and surprisingly he seemed fine with it, no rubbing my nose into the mess or acting like I had a nefarious agenda. The hotel where we had stayed had agreed to hang onto the jacket, and I was going to detour to Manhattan on the way to pick it up before meeting a friend for lunch on the Upper West Side.
I was making the five-ish hour drive alone, which meant I could get myself into Manhattan any way I wished. I crossed the
Everything went as planned, and I spent the next day at West Point with my friends. After perusing a number of tailgate parties, we made our way to box seats in the end zone. Whenever I was there for a home game, I was usually in the regular seats with the masses. I hadn’t even known this section of the stadium existed. I took a photo of my view from the box and sent it to my ex to show off my good fortune.
Could this have been said differently?Notice the lack of “Wow, that’s great!” or “Cool! Have fun!”
His reply amounts to ensuring I know, while my seats are “big money,” they are also “not necessarily the best.”
I replied:
When I made it back home, and I shared more about the trip, I explained that I had taken the train from Tarrytown to get into Manhattan. You could insert the record scratch right here, because we didn’t get any further.
My way of getting into the city was problematic to him. Mind you, I was traveling alone, and there was no one inconvenienced by my way of getting into the city, but because it wasn’t the way he would have gone, my choice was odd, nonsensical, and something to dissect.
"Why didn't you take the train from New Jersey?"
“Because that’s how I wanted to go.”
“But that’s stupid! It would have been shorter to go from New Jersey!”
Never mind that he benefitted from this trip; he now had his suit jacket back. We wouldn’t get to talk about how kind the hotel staff was, and how no one would accept a tip for keeping the jacket for us. He didn’t get to hear about my adventure on the subway and how I mistakenly took the train to Canal street, or how a transit cop kindly gave me instructions on getting myself to the right station in the opposite direction. He wouldn’t hear about how I got to watch the parade with my friends, followed by a group photo with the Superintendent, a three star general and the first black superintendent at West Point. He wouldn’t hear about the football game, or about anything else that happened that weekend because we got stuck on the way I chose to get myself into Manhattan, and how it wasn’t the way he would have gone if he had to catch a train into the city.
This kind of obstruction was pervasive in our marriage and I couldn't understand it. My friends could listen, and ask questions in a curious manner, not with the aim to judge or provide unsolicited commentary on why my method was wrong, or stupid. How do you connect with a person when they didn't want to get past critiquing your transportation choices to hear the actual interesting parts of the story?
When I challenged him later on the conversations we had about this trip — the texts about my not necessarily the best football tickets? Well, that was just how he related to his friends. Apparently his friends dogged each other out on a regular basis, it was just how they connected.
In an attempt to understand, I kept revisiting the way our conversation about the trip went off the rails (pardon the pun). My ex shared that part of the issue was that he was uncomfortable with me traveling alone after the affair. He also acted like this like this was how people interacted, as if debating basic adult decision making for mundane travel options was just part of life. My conversations with him bore no resemblance to conversations I had with anyone else who was close to me; the way he acted towards me was not friend behavior. When he and I were in agreement, things were fine, sure, but when I did things that did not match his thinking, I became the weirdo, the incompetent, the fuckup.
When I addressed his fixation on how I decided to make my way into Manhattan?
“I thought you should have taken the train from Edison because it's a safe town.” he said, “I don’t know anything about Tarrytown.”
That sounded reasonable on the surface. Being concerned for my safety was my ex's typical go-to deflection. After all, how could I argue with a man being protective of his wife? Except this wasn’t really protectiveness, was it? I had gotten myself around safely. Nothing bad happened. He was using Edison, New Jersey, as his frame of reference because this was where his grandparents had initially settled after emigrating from Jamaica. He had spent summers in Edison as a child, therefore it was a safe place while Tarrytown was a mystery. Except we were four decades removed from that era, so the Edison of today isn't going to be the same place a kid remembers.
“I went from Tarrytown because it was familiar to me and I used to take the Metro North into the city from Garrison as a cadet. It's sentimental to me," I said. "No, it wasn't the fastest way to get there, but I don’t know anything about the New Jersey commuter trains.”
“Ohhh,” my ex said, “why didn’t you just say that?"
Why did I have to? Explaining my adult decision making when it wasn’t the way he would have done things felt exhausting. What made my way of doing things less valid to him, and therefore unsafe, unacceptable, or just plain dumb? What made him believe he was the authority on the correct way to operate as an adult? Why did I have to work so hard for basic understanding? He didn't ask questions out of curiosity or a desire to understand me, the questions felt more like gathering information to set up a debate where I was wrong and he was right. This dynamic between us wasn’t some new thing that had developed recently because I had an affair. This was a longstanding pattern that had been cultivated since the beginning of our relationship. Now that I had stopped believing I was the the weirdo, the problem, the fuckup, I was able to see the pattern more clearly. And as things became more contentious between us, the pattern became even more apparent.
On his side, my affair seemed to serve as validation to him that I was, indeed, the problem. And his willingness to stay married was something that required my gratitude, and constant penance. In other words, I needed to know my place.
When I saw that this wasn’t happening in my sister’s marriage, and that they were making real progress in working together to repair their marriage, I understood, given my dynamic with my ex, that was never going to happen. Leaving was the right decision, but I grieved the decades of my life spent with a person, who, at his core, was not my friend and didn’t want to be my friend. This is not to say we didn’t have fun times, or jokes we shared with each other. We had those things, but not consistently, or reliably. For awhile I even consoled myself my reasoning that my husband didn't have to be my best friend, because I already had a best friend. There was even a time when a number of articles were published with the message that it was perfectly fine if you weren't married to your best friend, many of these pieces seemed to imply that the abnormal ones were the women saying they had married their best friends. While reading these felt comforting -- I knew that I had not married my best friend -- I didn't stop to question if the person I married was even my friend. Sure, we had moments when communication felt genuine, and not like a game or a sparring match, but that genuine feeling wasn't consistent or reliable.
In a moment of vulnerability, my ex once shared that he wished I had told him when I was considering having an affair. I remembered thinking, What would that conversation have looked like? How do you discuss something so volatile with a person known to use shaming tactics, or weaponize their feelings so you eventually learn it's not safe to share with them?
If we had been in a place where I did feel safe approaching him with this kind of confession, then that would have meant we were connected, that we would have been actual friends. This would have meant we would have been able to talk openly, without usual friction from judgment and insults. If friendship was the foundation beneath our marriage, an affair would have been an unlikely consideration in the first place. I had made my choices precisely because we weren’t friends, and operating under the radar to get what I wanted was more effective than dealing with my ex .
As we went through our separation and divorce, I learned the words to describe what I experienced in the marriage, and my resulting realizations. I had wanted to split amicably, and eventually realized trying to be friends with someone who seemed determined to make sure I was a half step behind them and perpetually off balance is impossible. In one of our last long conversations, I tearfully told my ex it didn’t even feel like he liked me. He acted incredulous.
“How can you say that,” he said.
"What do you like about me," I asked.
"You're a good cook," he replied.
It felt like a punch in the gut and I sobbed. Decades of marriage amounted to me being appreciated not for who I was as a human, but for what I could do in the kitchen.
"What," he said, the slightest smirk contradicting the concern in his voice. "I thought you liked acts of service! It should feel like a compliment!"
He called later, of course, to ask who helped me.
“It’s handled,” I said, channeling Olivia Pope.
“You got someone to help?" I could practically hear him working through who could have possibly assisted me. I didn't hurry to answer the question and he filled the pause with his next guess. "You hired someone to do it," he declared, as if he had placed himself into my brain and worked out the weirdo's solution.
I didn’t respond. His persistence reminded me of the football seating texts, and the way he needed to know who had done a kind thing for me. Why did it matter? He was no longer needed and I no longer felt compelled to explain basic adult decision making to him or having to hear him tell me why my way was “not necessarily the best.”
