12h ago

Why did becoming myself pull me away from the man I loved?

[From my diary] January, 18th 2023 I remember how, two years or so after we started to date, I sat at our dining table, and a sudden realization crashed down on me: that I smiled forcedly. Any time we spoke. We were chatting about something completely innocent when I noticed how much I had been pretending, adjusting, imitating, and that for such a long time. My previous boyfriend once told me I had a “poker face”, and I was scared I’d look not friendly enough. … In the coming years, I was like a fruit being peeled off more and more layers, discovering myself, drifting away from my beloved one. This past relationship had quietly formed around a version of me that was performing — smiling on cue, adjusting, imitating — and the more I stopped performing, the less the fit held. Becoming yourself is not always an addition; sometimes it is a subtraction, a peeling away of the accommodations that once made closeness feel possible. I did not stop loving him. I stopped being the person the love had been arranged around, and there was no guarantee the two of us would still match underneath. The crashing and crushing realization The realization arrived suddenly, without any transition. I was sitting at our dining table, talking about nothing in particular, when I noticed that my own smile was effortful — that I was holding it up the way you hold up something heavy, and that I had been holding it up for a very long time. Illustration provided by Supportive Stranger The sociologist Arlie Hochschild gave this kind of effort a name in 1983: emotional labor. She distinguished surface acting, where you display a feeling you do not have, from deep acting, where you work yourself into actually feeling it. A forced smile is surface acting in its purest form, and Hochschild’s point was that it is work — real, depleting work, even when no one can see it. I had been doing that work any time we spoke, for years, and had not once registered it as labor. The body keeps the ledger the mind refuses to. Later I remembered doing the same with many other people. That was one of the moments that made me wonder how little I knew about myself. And surface acting does something quieter than tire you, though it tires you too. It stands between you and your own feelings. So much of my attention went into producing the right mood — pleasant, warm, faintly excited — that I lost the thread of whatever I actually felt beneath the production. The performance did not only drain me. It drowned out the very signal it was meant to be sending. Ghosts that order us to smile The smile had an author, and it was not my ex husband. It was not even the boyfriend quoted in the entry. My previous boyfriend once told me I had a “poker face.” What the entry leaves out is that the line did not surprise me when he said it. It only confirmed something much older. My father used to tell me, when I was a girl, that my face had no expression. I do not know now what he was looking at — whether it was some quiet distress, or simply the face I was born with, or an ordinary child’s seriousness read through the expectation that girls are supposed to be smiley. I have decided not to litigate the face itself. The point was never the face; it was the verdict laid on it, and how early it was laid. So by the time a boyfriend handed me the same phrase years later — and he probably meant little by it; I notice I am quick to excuse the men I have left — he was not introducing an idea. He was reinstalling one. Illustration provided by Supportive Stranger The psychologist Dana Crowley Jack described this kind of internal monitor in her work on self-silencing. She called it the Over-Eye: an internalized, judging observer, usually assembled out of other people’s standards, that watches the authentic self and orders it to comply — to stay pleasant, to mute whatever might read as too much or not nice enough. Mine was assembled in childhood and reinforced by a man I trusted, and then it followed me, intact, to a third person’s table, still issuing its instructions: look softer, look friendlier, do not let the unguarded face show. Good girls are all smiley kids The instruction was not even idiosyncratic; it was the standard one handed to women. Marianne LaFrance’s meta-analysis of 162 studies (LaFrance, Hecht and Paluck, 2003) found that women do smile more than men, but that the gap widens sharply when people believe they are being watched and nearly vanishes when they think no one is. The smiling tracks social expectation, not inner weather. LaFrance called it emotion work. My father’s idea that a girl should be sunny was only the household version of a pressure that turns out to be everywhere. Illustration provided by Supportive Stranger Here is the part that still unsettles me most. At some point in the marriage I said it out loud — that I thought I was forcing my face — and my husband told me, plainly, that I did not have to smile all the time, that it was all fine. He revoked the order. And it changed nothing. I went on smiling on cue, went on performing, because the Over-Eye does not take instructions from whoever happens to be in the room. The man who could have freed me was not the man who had installed the voice, and the one who installed it was long gone and could not be made to take it back. What a smile was never measuring There is a deeper error folded into all of this,: a smile is not always a measure of affection. James Gross and Oliver John, studying what they called emotional expressivity in the late 1990s, established that how much feeling a person shows on the outside is a fairly stable trait, and only loosely coupled to how much they feel inside. Expression and experience are separate dials. A low expresser is not a low feeler. A forced smile, then, proves nothing about warmth, and a neutral face disproves nothing either. We assume the quiet, unsmiling person feels less; the research says only that less of it reaches the surface. Where affection actually lives, according to the communication scholar Kory Floyd and his affection exchange theory, is spread across at least three channels: words (I love you, praise, reassurance), direct nonverbal acts (touch, holding, closeness), and supportive behaviors (doing things for someone, showing up, getting involved in the practical work of a life). Relationship researchers reviewing the popular idea of “love languages” (Impett, Park and Muise, 2024) reached a compatible conclusion — that people value the whole range of these expressions rather than one true channel, and that love is less a single language to be matched than a balanced diet. None of those channels is the face. I had spent years guarding the one doorway affection does not actually use, terrified that a slack mouth would betray a cold heart, when the warmth — mine and his — was coming and going through entirely different doors. Me, the onion Funnily, my original family name (given to me by my father), sounds similar to the Russian word for “onion”, and “onion” was the one of the names I was teased by at school. That’s why the metaphor: a fruit being peeled off more and more layers, discovering myself, drifting away from my beloved one. And peeling onions always makes you cry … It is worth noticing that the metaphor is one of subtraction. I do not describe growing, or adding, or blooming. I describe layers coming off — and underneath them, both a self I was discovering and a distance I was opening. Illustration provided by Supportive Stranger The pediatrician and analyst Donald Winnicott drew a line, in 1960, between what he called the false self and the true self. The false self is a facade built early and maintained to meet the expectations of others; it is accommodating, watchful, good at being whatever a situation requires. The true self is the spontaneous, unmanaged one underneath. There is a small relief buried in the distinction: the accommodating self is not a freak’s invention. It is one of the most ordinary things a person builds, and most of us are running some version of it. Whatever I had been doing at that table, I had not been doing something strange. I had been doing something nearly universal, and only just catching myself at it. Illustration provided by Supportive Stranger The forced smile, the adjusting, the imitating — those were the false self doing its competent work. The peeling was the true self surfacing. Why a true self does not always seal the marriage There is a version of this story in the research where it ends well. Stephen Drigotas and Caryl Rusbult, with their colleagues, named it the Michelangelo phenomenon in 1999, after the sculptor’s idea that the figure is already sleeping inside the stone and the artist only releases it. In a good relationship, they found, a partner perceives the self you are growing toward and behaves in ways that affirm it, and that affirmation actually helps you become it, while drawing the two of you closer. The chisel can be loving. But the theory has a sharper edge, and it fits my case better. The sculpting only affirms when the partner’s image of who you are becoming matches the self that is actually surfacing. When the figure emerging from the stone is not the one the partner had been carving toward — not the self they expected to release — the same devoted attention curdles into something else: surprise, resistance, a quiet failure to recognize you. He was not cruel with the chisel. He was carving faithfully toward a person I turned out not to be becoming. The bond had formed around the layers, not the core, and so the same uncovering that should, in the kinder version, have brought us closer was instead the thing that set us apart. I was not drifting because I had stopped loving him. I was drifting because the person the love had attached to was, layer by layer, ceasing to exist. When one of you becomes someone new

19 min

Jun 30

Why couldn't I believe a kind man loved me?

[From my diary] February, 23d 2022 I will never believe that such a beautiful man can love me. I am seeking for deviations in him, for some pervertedness that would explain his interest in a freak like me: a socially awkward, unsexy, fake nerd without any girlfriend skills. I can never believe I deserve someone who will not abuse me. To compensate for the dissonance — me dating a handsome kind man — I invent his abuses, like dirty mugs and forgotten grocery lists ... When you are certain you do not deserve to be loved well, a kind partner does not feel like relief — he feels like a contradiction. The mind resolves contradictions, and it is far easier to find fault in one person than to overturn a lifelong belief about yourself. So you go looking for his cruelty, and when you cannot find it, you invent it — small, deniable, the size of a dirty mug — until the relationship finally matches the story you already believed. Let’s talk about the science behind this phenomenon. A contradiction the mind cannot solve I named the mechanism myself, inside the entry: to compensate for the dissonance. The dissonance was between two things I could not hold at once — that I was, in my own description, a freak who deserved to be hurt, and that a kind and beautiful man had chosen me anyway. Both could not be true. Illustration provided by Supportive Stranger I learned about the cognitive dissonance theory while doing my PhD in media studies, but the theory goes far beyond media research and extends to routine life attitudes. What I remember about it, is that existing attitudes are very difficult to change, unless there is some physical threat to you. What else does the science say on the subject? Leon Festinger, who gave cognitive dissonance its name in 1957, observed that the discomfort of holding two contradictory beliefs pushes us to resolve it, and that we almost always change whichever belief is cheaper to change. Overturning a conviction about my own worth, built over years, was expensive. Rewriting one man was cheap. So the man was the one who had to give in. Searching for confirmation, as easy as it goes I blamed him for forgetting his sun glasses next to the couch, saying, I could have stepped into them and cut my foot (at home, I often run around without my glasses, bump into things, and then complain about the chaos). That was also the clever Elsie talking inside myself, but that’s worth another post. I knew from the media studies that confirmation biases make us search for facts aligning with our existing believes in the media reports, but we do the same thing with our personal experiences, unrelated to media consumption. The psychologist William Swann calls this self-verification: the pull to seek out experiences that confirm what we already believe about ourselves, even when the belief is unkind. In his studies, people with negative self-views often preferred feedback that agreed with those views over warmer feedback that did not — because being seen accurately, even harshly, feels more stable than being seen well and waiting for the correction. A man who treats you gently while you are braced for the catch does not feel safe. He feels like a trap. On dirty mugs ruining our marriages To be honest, dirty mugs should have been in quotes, as I only used them as an example of a “small thing like this” that has a bigger impact than you can expect. In one of my previous posts, I complained that my ex husband took over all household tasks, making me feel small. Well, I was not quite honest with myself, forgetting to mention that I made a big drama a few times when he did not start the washing machine or forgot to put my tea pot into the dish washer. Apart from the cognitive dissonance theory and self-verification, another explanation of my actions seems plausible in the aftermath. Sandra Murray and her colleagues described the same pattern in their work on what they called risk regulation. People who doubt their own worth tend to underestimate how much their partners actually love them, and when closeness leaves them feeling exposed, they protect themselves by finding fault — devaluing the partner and the relationship before either can do the hurting. The fault does not have to be real, or large. It only has to be enough to justify keeping a little distance. A dirty mug is not evidence of his cruelty. It is evidence of me, preparing myself for it. What it doesn’t mean I was not scanning him for danger because he was dangerous. Neither didn’t he have his own “dark sides”: here, I am only talking of what I have invented about him, because I was scanning him since his goodness did not match the verdict I already carried about myself, and I needed to find the justification for the verdict to stay right. Illustration provided by Supportive Stranger The conviction that one does not deserve to be loved without being hurt is almost always learned somewhere, long before the kind man arrives. It is information about what came before, not a measurement of worth — and deserve may be the wrong word entirely. Nobody earns gentleness by being good enough for it. It is simply how some people treat the people they love, and being on the receiving end of it is allowed, even when it does not yet feel believable. And I know very well where this pattern of distrust is coming from: from where I learned all other things in my life, from my own family. But that is worth another publication that I am currently planning. I write these reflections while building Supportive Stranger, a small iOS app for journaling through the moments when the kindness seems undeserved and you are torn between contradictions. Thanks for reading Divorced me! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit divorcedme.substack.com

8 min

Jun 23

Did moving together too early jeopardize my marriage?

[From my diary] January, 15th 2022 I can spend hours hugging him, lying next to him on the couch, wrapped into his strong arms. But when I imagine still being with him in ten years, it makes me feel sick. Scared.I told him — after our first breakout — that marriage is not my format. That I want him to be (again) my secret lover to visit me spontaneously, a partner-in-crime for adventures in the mountains and in the bedroom. Like when we were dating.I told him we moved together too early. Things settled down too quickly. It is not boring, it feels lifeless, like a bus schedule printed on a cheap sheet of paper. Couples rarely struggle only with whether to live together; just as often, the harder question is when. In the consulting room, the timing of cohabitation turns out to be one of the quiet hinges on which a relationship swings — not because there is a correct number of months before sharing a home, but because that decision is so often made for a couple rather than by them. A lease ends, a job lands in a distant city, a living situation becomes unbearable, and what ought to be a deliberate, mutual transition arrives instead disguised as relief. The couple slides across a threshold neither of them quite chose to cross, and the consequences of that mistimed step are rarely loud. They tend to surface later, and subtly: as a bond that feels secure and yet, inexplicably, lifeless. On contradictory feelings and self-expansion that stopped Lifelessness and boredom are strong words, and it kept wondering me, why and how could they co-exist with the feeling of security and affection. In fact, an anthropologist — Helen Fisher — spent her career arguing that romantic life does not run on a single feeling but on three separable systems — sex drive, romantic attraction, and attachment — and that they do not have to fire together. Attachment is the calm, deep, steadying bond that makes another person’s body feel like home. It is entirely possible for that system to be fully online while the others have gone quiet. Read this way, the two halves of the entry stop contradicting each other. Being soothed by him was attachment, real and not performed. The sickness at the thought of a decade was a different instrument giving a different reading. I was not lying (to myself, in the first place) when I felt safe, and I was not lying when I felt scared. The psychologists Arthur and Elaine Aron gave that second — negative — feeling a mechanism. Their self-expansion model proposes that people are drawn to relationships that enlarge them — new experiences, perspectives, capacities — and that much of the rush of early love is the rush of expanding quickly. In a 2000 study, couples who did novel and stimulating things together reported more satisfaction than those who did pleasant but familiar ones. Boredom is what that running-down feels like day to day; lifeless is the diagnosis underneath it — not a relationship with too little going on, but one that had stopped enlarging me. The schedule was the proof. Ten more years of it was simply the same sheet of paper, extended. From secret lover to a companion The therapist Esther Perel has written for years about the quiet war between security and desire — that the very things which make a partnership safe and knowable are often the things that extinguish wanting, because desire feeds on distance, novelty, and a degree of the unknown. The fantasy of a secret lover is, read closely, a fantasy of restored distance: a wish to make a familiar person unknown again. Illustration provided by Supportive Stranger There is an older distinction underneath this. The researchers Elaine Hatfield and Ellen Berscheid separated passionate love — intense, uncertain, novelty-fueled — from companionate love, the warm and stable bond that tends to follow it. Most couples make that transition and experience it as deepening. The phrase we moved together too early, things settled down too quickly describes the passionate phase being closed before it had finished — filed under companionate while I still wanted the charge. And so “marriage is not my format” might not be a complaint about him at all. It might be accurate information about me: that permanence and cohabitation themselves, and not any particular man, are what flatten the thing I live for. Why we moved together so quickly When I finished my PhD in Dresden, I could not find a job. I did three internships—I started one and finished two—but none of them turned into an offer. In Dresden itself there was barely anything to apply for. I got one offer in Berlin, close enough to keep my life intact, and it was actually a good one, but I turned it down, which I regretted later. All of this landed on top of an already difficult phase in my life. Before any of it, before I had even started dating him, I had broken with my family, so the disappointment of the job search settled into an already lonely time. My boyfriend—who would become my husband, and then my ex-husband—lived in Dresden, and his family was from that area too. We had started dating while I was still there, still finishing the PhD, and we had vaguely imagined staying. We never really discussed the future; it just quietly became serious. Then I looked further afield, an offer came from Munich, and I took it. The job itself was stupefying, and I was wildly overqualified for it, but it was a job, and I moved. In Munich I rented a room from an old lady. On paper it was a shared apartment; in practice I had no rights there at all. She had lost her adopted daughter and had some unresolved trouble with her son, and I think there was something narcissistic in her—she tried to adopt me, in a way, while imposing endless rules. She kept me awake, staying up near my room until the middle of the night, making noise. When I tried to set boundaries, politely, she would not accept even that. She threw my soap out of the bathroom. Through all of this we commuted, every second weekend. On Friday evening I would ride to Dresden with strangers, organized through an app—a kind of arranged hitchhiking, not dangerous, sometimes even funny, but always exhausting. Four or five hours on the road, then Saturday together, then Sunday only until lunch, and then nine hours back to Munich by bus, in the best case. The next weekend he made the same trip in the other direction. It was punishing, and slowly he got exhausted too. So when the old lady finally told me to move out, and I started hunting for yet another room I could afford, the obvious answer arrived. He saw a future for us. He said we should simply move together—Munich was bigger, easier for him to find work—and he found a job quickly. We found a beautiful flat. After everything, it felt like an enormous relief. But I had put myself into a golden cage. The whole romance of us had lived in those road trips: seeing each other only twice a month, missing each other in between, having to put real effort into being together. And then, abruptly, that stopped. Commuting is not pleasant—I do not want to pretend it was—but that phase, even though it lasted a year, ended too early. We had never had the time to know each other outside of a shared apartment. We never learned how we argue, how we negotiate, how we spend free time together. We skipped straight past the romantic phase without finishing it, moved in, and were somehow supposed to become a calm, companionate couple. We never made that transition. Does speed jeopardize the relationship? The most cited framework here is the “sliding versus deciding” model. Stanley, Rhoades, and Markman argue that cohabitation often occurs rapidly, and that speed combined with ambiguity can land people in situations that are hard to exit because of inertia from accumulated constraints — situations they might not have chosen had they been more deliberate. The core idea is that couples slide through the transition without an explicit mutual decision, after which shared leases, finances, and routines create “constraint commitment” that keeps lower-quality relationships together longer than they otherwise would last. Thus, the answer is “it depends, mostly on the decision process rather than the calendar.” Speed correlates with risk largely because fast-moving couples are more likely to have slid in without resolving commitment, not because elapsed time is itself protective. Was it bad that I was (also) longing for a sanctuary? There isn’t a literature using the word “sanctuary,” so let’s map the folk concept onto the two adjacent research constructs: reasons for cohabitation and attachment (safe haven). Both are defensible, but it is worth naming the bridge explicitly. Illustration provided by Supportive Stranger The synthesis the literature supports: seeking a partner as a safe haven is normal and healthy within a securely committed bond. The risk appears when the refuge motive substitutes for mutual commitment — it tends to co-occur with attachment insecurity, and once shared living adds constraints, the person seeking shelter can become harder to leave and harder for, producing the “stuck” pattern rather than a chosen partnership. Is cohabitation the only format? Of course, not, but … The direct research term is Living Apart Together (LAT) — couples in an ongoing, self-defined relationship who deliberately keep separate homes. Irene Levin framed LAT as a historically new family form that lets people have the intimacy of a couple while retaining individual autonomy. Two honest caveats on the “healthy” framing. First, the autonomy benefit is gendered: for women in particular, LAT can offer increased autonomy and control over resources. Second, the satisfaction evidence is mixed — a couple of recent studies found LAT couples were generally less satisfied with their relationships than married or cohabiting couples. So “stays committed and exclu

15 min

Jun 16

Why did I miss him most when he stopped being lonely?

[From my diary] June, 10th 2023 When we first met, he was a very shy guy. He had friends, but barely hung out with them. As we came closer, we spent all the time together, as if none else existed around us. But then, around the time we got our puppy, he started to change, to transition into an extravert. It started even before, after we moved together, and he got a new job in Munich. Anyway… The timing does not matter much, but the change in him. Before, he belonged only to me. I did not have to share him with anyone else. It changed. Some relationships begin in a state of mutual seclusion — two people who are slightly isolated from the world finding each other and forming a small, private universe. When one partner later opens up to the world, the other can experience this as loss, even though nothing objectively bad has happened. The early intensity of the relationship was partly produced by the seclusion itself, and when the seclusion ends on one side, the relationship's emotional shape changes in ways that are difficult to name and harder to grieve, because there is no obvious thing to mourn. The partner has not betrayed anyone. They have simply become more themselves in the world. But the world was the thing the relationship had been a refuge from, and when it stops being a refuge, the relationship has to become something else, or fail to. What it means when a relationship begins in seclusion Some relationships start as an oasis. Two people who are, for one reason or another, slightly outside the social world meet each other and find that the other person fills a space the world had not been filling. This is one of the recognized patterns in the early-relationship research literature — the folie à deux of two introverts, the mutual retreat, what some couples therapists call a closed dyad. It is not pathological. It is one of the most common ways relationships begin, especially among people who are shy, recently moved, between jobs, in a new city, or simply temperamentally introverted. The intensity of such a relationship in its early period is partly produced by the seclusion itself. With no other significant people drawing on either partner’s attention, the entire emotional bandwidth of two human beings flows toward each other. Each becomes the other’s whole social world: confidant, best friend, witness to daily life, source of validation, recipient of every observation and complaint. The pace of intimacy is rapid because there are no competing claims on it. Each partner feels, accurately, that they are fully known by the other in a way they have not been known before. This is not artificial. The intimacy is real, and the bond is real. But it is, in a specific sense, bounded — it works because the rest of the world has been quietly excluded. The exclusion is rarely intentional. It is simply what happens when two people who were not particularly engaged with the world to begin with find a relationship that meets them where they were. What it means when one partner stops needing the seclusion The trouble arrives when one partner, but not both, begins to open up to the world outside the relationship. This can happen for many reasons. A new job that brings new colleagues. A move to a city where the partner’s pre-existing friends are easier to see. The slow restoration of confidence that being loved tends to produce in a previously shy person. Sometimes a small life event — a promotion, a hobby, a pet that draws them into a new community of dog owners or neighbours — opens a door that had been closed for years. Illustration provided by Supportive Stranger The partner who is opening up usually experiences this as growth. They have become more themselves, more confident, more engaged with the world. They have nothing to apologize for. From the inside, the change feels like becoming a better version of who they always were. They still love their partner. They still come home. They simply no longer need the relationship to be their whole social existence, because they have begun to have an existence outside it. The other partner, the one who has not similarly opened up, experiences something very different. The early relationship — the one that began as an oasis, with all of his attention flowing in one direction — has ended. It has not been replaced by anything dramatic. He has not become distant or cold. He has not stopped loving. He has simply begun, in small increments, to share his attention with other people. Friends he used to barely see. Colleagues he is now spending time with. The neighbour he met through the dog. There are dozens of new small claims on his time and his stories and his energy, and each one is innocent, and none of them mean anything, and together they have changed what the relationship is. Why this is so hard to name The painful thing about this kind of loss is that there is nothing to point at. The partner has not done anything wrong. They have, by every conventional measure, become healthier. To complain about a partner becoming less lonely sounds either selfish or pathological, and the partner who is grieving the change often cannot bring themselves to say what they are actually feeling, because the saying of it would seem to be a request for them to go back to being lonely. Which they cannot, and should not. So the grief stays private. The remaining-introverted partner watches as the relationship’s emotional shape changes around them. There are still good moments. The love is still there. But the quality of attention has shifted. Where before he was fully present, fully theirs, now he is partly here and partly somewhere else — checking his phone for the group chat, telling stories about people they have never met, going out for evenings that do not include them, coming home with social energy spent on others. The relationship now requires sharing, where before it had not. And the sharing is not really about time — although the time matters — it is about the structural fact that there are now other significant people in his life, when before there had been only her. The exclusivity of mattering, which had been the secret heart of the early relationship, has ended. He no longer belongs only to her. She has to share him, and the sharing is with people who, individually and collectively, did not exist as far as the relationship was concerned a year earlier. This is what the entry’s final line is naming: Before, he belonged only to me. I did not have to share him with anyone else. It changed. Why the partner who opens up rarely notices what has been lost The asymmetry is also worth understanding. The partner who is opening up to the world is usually so absorbed in the newness of it — the friendships, the social confidence, the sense of becoming more capable in the world — that they do not notice what their partner is experiencing on the other side of the change. The partner who is grieving is grieving something invisible: not behaviour, but a quality of attention that has dimmed. There is nothing concrete to point to and ask the partner to stop doing. If the grieving partner does try to say something, the conversation often goes badly. “You spend more time with your friends now” is easily met with “yes, isn’t that good?” — and it is, by any normal measure. “You don’t seem as focused on me as you used to be” sounds like a demand for the impossible. “I miss when it was just us” sounds nostalgic in a way that the other partner cannot quite take seriously, because the just us phase was, in retrospect, a phase produced partly by his loneliness, and asking for it back sounds like asking him to be lonely again. So most of the time, the conversation does not happen. The grieving partner carries the loss alone. The opening-up partner does not realize what has changed for the other person, because for them the change has been pure expansion. Both partners are operating on different maps of what the relationship has become. What it doesn’t mean It does not mean my husband was wrong to grow more social, or that his transition into being more engaged with the world was somehow a betrayal of the marriage. He was becoming more fully himself. That is what people in healthy environments tend to do, given time, and being loved is often one of the things that gives them the safety to do it. He owed me his honesty and his presence, but he did not owe me the continued seclusion that had defined our first phase. It also does not mean the early phase of the marriage was unreal or that the intensity of those years was a mistake. The intensity was real. It was simply produced by conditions that did not last. The mistake — if there was one — was not in either of us, but in our shared inability to notice that the relationship’s foundations were quietly shifting, and to find a way to talk about what we both would have needed in order to build something new on the new foundations. Illustration provided by Supportive Stranger What it might mean, looking back, is that a relationship which begins as a mutual oasis has to eventually be renegotiated when the oasis dissolves — or it cannot survive the change. The renegotiation rarely happens explicitly. Most couples never sit down and say, the conditions under which we fell in love have ended; what does our relationship need to become in order to continue? That conversation is too abstract to have, and the change is too gradual to notice in time. So the relationship either finds a new equilibrium without anyone meaning it to, or it does not, and what looked like a slow drift was actually two partners on different sides of an invisible threshold. How a couple talks about the difficult fact that one of them has grown in a direction the other did not — that is its own subject, and one I am not sure I have an answer for, even now. I did not name researchers directly in the post this time. The themes her

14 min

Jun 9

Why didn't he leave when I was being cruel to him?

[From my diary] January, 13th 2023 “Why didn’t you go?” Why didn’t he leave me, when I was so cruel, day after day, snapping at him and giving him hateful looks, drilling into each small “mistake” and inventing mistakes of his? Why did he actually stay? Was it love? Pity? Habit? A casual belief all would turn fine? I wanted him to go, to save me the guilt for ruining our marriage. Later, after I eventually left him, I tried to get him back, futilely, but it gave me an excuse to feel myself betrayed and abandoned. Not sure, why I needed it, but I did. When one partner becomes intermittently cruel inside a marriage — snapping, criticizing, withdrawing affection, inventing small failures in the other — the cruelty is often not really about the partner who receives it. It is the visible surface of an internal collapse the cruel partner cannot yet name. The non-cruel partner sometimes stays through this not out of weakness or codependence, but because they are doing exactly what the cruel partner has not yet learned to do: keep the marriage alive in the hope that the storm will pass. The painful afterthought, years later, is often the question of why they did, and what it cost the partner who could not stop being cruel that they did not leave. What cruelty in a marriage often is The first thing worth saying is that intermittent cruelty inside a marriage — the snapping, the cold looks, the hunting for small failures — is rarely about the partner who receives it. Researchers studying marital deterioration have observed for decades that one of the most common patterns in failing marriages is the projection of internal collapse onto the partner. A spouse who is becoming unhappy in the marriage, but cannot yet face what that unhappiness is asking of them, often expresses it as low-grade hostility toward the other person. Each small criticism functions, internally, as a partial admission: something is wrong here, and if it is your fault, then I do not have to be the one to act. The cruelty is, in this sense, a substitute for the decision the cruel partner cannot yet make. As long as the relationship can be framed as the other partner’s failure, the cruel partner does not have to confront the larger question of whether to leave. The hostility produces a steady supply of small grievances that justify the ongoing unhappiness, and the unhappiness justifies the hostility. The loop is self-perpetuating and exhausting, and it often goes on for years. What makes it so painful in retrospect is the recognition that the partner being treated cruelly was rarely the actual cause of any of it. The mistakes were small, or invented, or significant only inside the frame the cruel partner had constructed. The looks of hate were often produced by something internal that had nothing to do with what the other partner had just done or said. The marriage was deteriorating, but the deterioration was being attributed to the wrong source. A different reading of what the cruelty might have been There is another way to read the behaviour I described in that entry, and it is one I have only begun to take seriously in retrospect. Illustration generated by Supportive Stranger It is possible that the cruelty was not really aimed at him at all. That it was aimed, in a confused and indirect way, at no one in particular — or at me. What I was doing was not punishing my husband for things he had or had not done, but signalling, in the only way I had available, that something was wrong with me and I did not know how to say so. Researchers studying adult attachment have a term for this kind of behaviour: protest behaviour. It describes the disorganized, sometimes destructive outward action a person produces when they are in distress, do not understand what they are in distress about, and have not learned to ask for help directly. The behaviour does not match the situation. It is not really a response to what the partner is doing. It is the surface eruption of something the person carrying it cannot yet name, and the partner happens to be the closest available target. Seen this way, the snapping and the hateful looks were not really about him. They were a sustained, low-volume cry for someone to notice that I was not okay. Notice me. Notice that something is wrong. Ask me what is happening. Do something. Anything. I could not say this directly — I did not know it myself, in those terms, at the time. So I produced behaviour that made it visible the only way I could, even if the form it took looked like an attack on him. This reading does not erase the cruelty. He still received it. The damage to him was still real. But it shifts the question of what the cruelty was for. It was not punishment. It was not contempt, exactly. It was, possibly, a request — for attention, for rescue, for someone to interrupt the state I was in. The fact that I made the request in a form that drove him further away rather than closer is part of what made my situation so impossible. The way I was asking made the asking impossible to hear. If this reading is true, then one of the most painful facts about the marriage is that the help I was indirectly asking for was the help he was least equipped to give. He responded by staying patient, by absorbing the cruelty, by waiting for it to pass. What I needed — and could not name — was for someone to stop me, sit me down, and ask what was actually happening. Neither of us knew how to bring that about. So the signalling continued, in the only register I had, until the marriage itself ended. Why the other partner does not leave There are several reasons a partner stays through a long period of being treated this way, and most of them are not the ones the cruel partner imagines in retrospect. The first is that the cruelty, however constant it feels from the inside, is often less visible from the outside than the cruel partner thinks. Periods of snapping and coldness are usually interleaved with periods of normality, even tenderness. The partner being treated cruelly does not experience it as a continuous campaign — they experience it as a difficult phase punctuated by moments when things still feel like the marriage they signed up for. The pattern is harder to see from inside the marriage than from any retrospective distance. The second is that many people who marry someone they love operate under an implicit commitment to waiting out hard periods. This is not codependence or weakness — it is one of the things marriage is. In a long marriage, this can mean weathering one difficult phase among many. In a shorter marriage, it often means something subtly different: the belief that the real marriage has not yet begun, that the difficulty is a teething period, that the partner one married is still coming into view. A partner who stays through cruelty in the early years of a marriage is sometimes not waiting for a difficult phase to end so much as waiting for the marriage itself to properly start. Illustration generated by Supportive Stranger The third is that the non-cruel partner may sense, correctly, that the cruelty is not really about them. They may be quietly waiting for the cruel partner to come out the other side of whatever internal process is producing the behavior. This is sometimes a kind of patience, sometimes a kind of denial, sometimes both. The non-cruel partner is doing, in effect, the holding work that the cruel partner cannot do. The fourth is the simplest and possibly the most painful: love. People who love their spouses through difficult periods do so not because they are saints or fools but because love is the thing that keeps the marriage alive when neither logic nor pleasure is doing the work. The love was real. The fact that it was being met with cruelty did not change what it was on his side. The fifth is the quietest, and worth naming even when the marriage was not a long one: habit. Even a few years is enough to produce shared routines that exert real gravitational pull. The same kitchen each morning. The dog who has to be walked. The shared calendar of obligations to families and friends who expect both of you. The Sunday rhythms, the worn-in choreography of two people who know each other’s small accommodations. In a long marriage, this becomes immense — the marriage and the daily life become almost inseparable. In a shorter marriage, it is smaller but still real. Habit is not the heaviest reason a partner stays in a two-year marriage, but it is part of why leaving is harder than it sounds, even early on. What it doesn’t mean It would be tempting, now, to read this entry as evidence that I was simply the destructive partner in a marriage that was otherwise fine. That reading is wrong, and it is wrong in a way that matters. The cruelty was real. I am not interested in softening that. But cruelty inside a marriage does not arise from one person. It arises from the specific friction between two people, and the friction in our marriage was not something I produced on my own. There were patterns on his side that I was responding to — quiet withdrawals, things he could not say either, his own ways of holding the marriage at arm’s length while remaining physically present. These do not excuse what I did. They are simply part of what was happening, and any honest account of the marriage has to hold them alongside my own behaviour. For the partner who behaved more visibly badly, the temptation in retrospect — contrary to the time when the marriage still existed — is to take the entire weight of the marriage’s collapse onto themselves. This looks like accountability, but it is something else. It is a final act of the same dynamic I had been performing all along — the inability to share the responsibility for the marriage with him. If I had not been able to share the responsibility for ending it while we were inside it, then taking the whole weight of the failure now, alone,

16 min

Jun 2

Why did he look relieved when I asked for divorce?

[From my diary] January, 4th 2021 Today I told him I want a divorce. He looked shocked at first, but then rather … relieved. This drove me mad. My ex-boyfriend also look relieved as I announced my decision. Am I such an awful person they all were glad to get rid of me? Or do I only come together with men that do not even dare to end our relationship by themselves, waiting for me to take over the burden of doubt and guilt? Indeed, I only lasted a week or two (like the last time) before asking him if we shouldn’t give it another try. In many relationships that end, one partner has been quietly hoping for the ending for a long time but cannot bring themselves to be the one who acts on it. When the other partner finally does — exhausted by the weight of carrying the decision alone — the avoidant partner often experiences relief rather than grief, because someone else has done the unbearable thing for them. The partner who initiated the breakup is then left with two compounding burdens: the guilt of having caused the ending, and the disorienting evidence that the other person seems to have wanted it all along. Researchers studying relationship dissolution have a name for this dynamic, and it is one of the most painful asymmetries a relationship can end on. The asymmetry of who acts In nearly every relationship that ends, one person ends it. This sounds obvious, but it conceals one of the most consequential asymmetries in romantic life. Researchers studying relationship dissolution — the formal name for the body of work on how relationships end — consistently find that the experience of the initiator and the non-initiator differs profoundly, even when both partners had been unhappy for the same length of time. The two roles produce different emotional aftermaths, different recovery trajectories, and different stories about what the relationship was. Illustration provided by Supportive Stranger The initiator usually carries the public role of the one who caused the ending. They are the one who said the words. They are the one whose name will appear, in friends’ and family’s accounts, as the person who did this. They are also, paradoxically, often the one who suffered longer inside the relationship — because to reach the point of saying it, they had to do years of internal work that the non-initiator did not do. They considered, doubted, hoped, weighed, reconsidered, drafted the conversation in their head dozens of times, and finally crossed the threshold of speech. The non-initiator, by definition, has not done this work — or has done it more privately, or has done it without ever quite reaching the conclusion the initiator reached. This is why, when the initiator finally speaks, the non-initiator’s reaction is so often disorienting. Shock, then something that looks suspiciously like relief. Not happiness, exactly. Not gratitude. Just a slight softening of the shoulders, an exhale that does not match the script. Why some partners cannot end a relationship themselves There is a specific type of relationship pattern that researchers have observed and named, in which one partner has wanted out for a long time but is structurally unable to be the one who says so. Several factors can produce this state. Some partners cannot tolerate the guilt of causing pain to someone they once loved. Some cannot tolerate being seen by family and friends as the one who broke the relationship. Some are conflict-avoidant by temperament and would rather endure years of low-grade unhappiness than initiate a single direct conversation. Some are passive by attachment style — drawn to relationships where someone else makes the decisions, including the final one. In all these cases, the avoidant partner ends up waiting — sometimes for years — for the other person to do the work. They may behave in ways that hasten the ending without ever quite naming it: withdrawing, becoming difficult to live with, allowing the relationship to deteriorate, sometimes engaging in small acts that they half-hope will be discovered. Or they may simply remain present, distant and quietly miserable, until the other partner can no longer carry the question alone. When the other partner finally speaks, the avoidant partner is freed from a burden they had been carrying for a long time without admitting it. The relief is not a verdict on the relationship. It is the relief of no longer having to be the one who has to act. Why the initiator often doubles back Then why I only lasted a week or two before asking him if we shouldn’t give it another try? This pattern is well-documented in relationship research. As the initiator, having done the hardest thing, you often find that the period immediately after the ending is harder than the relationship itself was. There are several reasons for this. The first is that the comparison frame has changed. You made your decision based on accumulated unhappiness inside the relationship — measuring what you had against what you imagined you could have instead. The day after the ending, that comparison no longer exists. The relationship is no longer producing the unhappiness it was. What remains is a different and unexpected comparison: not relationship vs. something better, but loss vs. peace. And loss, in the first weeks, feels much worse than the relationship had felt. The reason for leaving has been removed by the act of leaving, and what is left behind is grief without the original frustration to balance it. The second is the asymmetry of grief timing, and what it makes possible. You did most of your grieving in advance, in the long internal process of deciding. You had months or years to absorb the loss of the relationship while still inside it. Your partner, by contrast, has only just learned the relationship is ending. His grief is beginning at the moment yours is starting to ease. This creates a brief window — usually a week or two — in which both of you are misaligned in a way that makes reconciliation almost inevitable if you reach for it. You are at your most uncertain about whether you made the right decision; he is at the peak of his pain and would say yes to almost anything that stopped it. If you reach back during this window, he almost certainly accepts — not because anything has changed about the underlying relationship, but because the suffering of the first weeks makes both of you reach for the most available form of relief. For him, that is taking you back. For you, that is the chance to undo the act you had not been prepared for the weight of. The third is the disorienting effect of your partner's calm. You expected, somewhere in your imagination, that the breakup would meet resistance — that he would protest, plead, argue, even just visibly hurt enough to show that the relationship had mattered to him. The expected reaction is some form of fight for it. When that reaction does not arrive — when he meets the news with quiet relief instead — your brain looks for an explanation. The simplest one is: Maybe I was wrong. Maybe it was fine. Maybe he is showing me, by not fighting, that I was the one who could not handle it. This is the move that opens the door to let’s try again. Why the second chance never works So you reach back. And your partner, who never wanted to be the one to end things, very often says yes. He was not hoping for the ending so he could move on. He was hoping for the ending so he would not have to act. If you are willing to undo the ending, he is happy to be undone with you — until the next cycle. … And, only a few weeks later, when his grief has eased and yours has been replaced by the familiar accumulated unhappiness of being inside the relationship again, you are both back where you started. Nothing has been resolved. The conditions that produced the ending are still there, and they begin to produce the same outcome again, on a slightly delayed schedule. What it doesn’t mean Still, relief on your (ex-)partners’ faces does not mean you are an awful person, or that your partners were “glad to get rid of you,” or that you were somehow undesirable. The relief on their faces was not about you. It was about them. It was the relief of being freed from a burden of decision-making they had not been able to put down themselves. A different woman, ending the relationship the same way, would have produced the same expression on the same face. It also does not mean these men were cowards or that they did not love you. People who cannot end relationships themselves are not always weak in any general sense — they are often functioning, accomplished, kind people whose specific incapacity is around the act of being the one who causes a separation. Loving you and being unable to leave you are not contradictions. Both can be entirely true at once. What it might mean is that there is a particular pairing — between a partner who carries decisions and a partner who waits to be carried — that tends to find itself repeated until it is noticed. Researchers studying relationship patterns sometimes call this complementary attachment matching: an anxious or hyper-responsible partner finds, over and over, a partner who hands them the responsibility, because each style has learned to recognize the other as familiar. The painful insight is not that something is wrong with you. It is that the pattern you are recognizing — across your ex-boyfriend, your ex-husband, possibly others — is structural, not accidental. The person who keeps being the one to end relationships may be the one who keeps choosing partners who could not end them themselves. Why noticing the pattern matters The most important thing about this pattern is that it can only be interrupted once it is named. As long as you as the initiator believe you are the awful person whose partners all wanted to leave, you will keep choosing the same kind of partner — because the dynamic feels familiar, an

16 min

May 28

Why did my international marriage feel unequal?

[From my diary] March, 21 2021 I often imagine that I and [my ex-husband] live abroad. “Abroad” I mean, neither in Germany, nor in Russia. Somewhere, which would mean “abroad” for both of us. To make us… I don’t know, how to say… equal? I often feel that my husband is in the better position by being a native. Not needing to translate back and forth in his head. Always understanding the slightest variations in the language. Being able to give a quick, concise, and short answer to a spontaneous question from a stranger. Having a community around him just out-of-the-box. Going abroad… would make us “partners in crime” again. “Isolate” us from the environment, make us unite in front of some common problems, such as bureaucracy, lack of language proficiency, daily routine surprises that all migrants inevitably experience. Now, I am just an appendage to his life, incompatible with the current environment. When one partner in a marriage is an immigrant in the other's home country, an invisible structural inequality sits in the relationship from the first day. Researchers studying intercultural couples have several names for this depending on the trajectory — migrant-spouse asymmetry, trailing spouse, immigrant intermarriage — but the underlying issue is the same. One partner is at home; the other is, however welcomed, structurally outside. The native partner rarely sees this, because being at home is unremarkable to those who are. The immigrant partner often does not name it, because the costs of naming it are too high. So it sits in the room, undiscussed, slowly shaping what the marriage becomes. What it actually means to be the immigrant partner There is an inequality in international marriages that has very little to do with how much the partners love each other, and very little to do with how supportive the native partner tries to be. It is structural. It exists in a marriage from the day one you build a household together, and it did not go away with time. In some ways it deepens with time: the longer I was an immigrant in Germany, the more clearly I saw what being a native actually consisted of — and how much of it I could not acquire, no matter how long I stayed. Illustration generated by Supportive Stranger Being a native means having a community by default rather than by effort. It means understanding the language at the speed at which it is spoken, including the small jokes and the cultural references and the half-finished sentences. It means knowing how the bureaucracy works without having to research each step. It means being able to give a stranger directions without rehearsing the words. It means having parents and old friends and former classmates nearby, a whole social web that took decades to build and cannot be replicated by moving somewhere new. It means looking like someone who belongs, even before opening one’s mouth. I had none of this. I had a job, a home, a marriage, a language I had learned to a high level. But the out-of-the-box belonging my husband took for granted was not available to me, and no amount of effort fully closed the gap. I was always doing more work to be in the same room — translating, decoding, asking for clarifications, missing references, being a beat slower in conversations that the other people in the room were conducting in their own language. The Canadian psychologist John Berry, whose 1997 framework for understanding migration is one of the most widely used in the field, calls this ongoing labor acculturative stress — the cumulative psychological cost of living between two cultural worlds rather than fully inside one. This was not a problem of love or kindness. My husband could not see, most of the time, the labor I was doing, and the invisibility of it was one of the most isolating implications of it. A note on different paths to the same asymmetry It is worth saying clearly that I was not a trailing spouse. (The term was coined in 1981 by Wall Street Journal reporter Mary Bralove to describe partners — almost always wives at the time — who relocated as a consequence of their spouse's job, often suspending their own careers in the process.) I did not move to Germany because of my husband. I had moved years earlier to do my Ph.D. We came together once I was already here. The relevant research term for my situation is closer to immigrant intermarriage: a partnership between a long-settled native and an immigrant who arrived independently. This matters because the trailing spouse literature, while extensive, describes a different trajectory — partners who relocate as a consequence of their spouse’s job or life and who, in some sense, can “reverse” the move by leaving. The asymmetry I am describing is harder to reverse. My move to Germany was my own life project, not a sacrifice made for someone. Going somewhere else would mean unbuilding the life I had built independently, not undoing a relocation I had made for him. The structural inequality looked similar from the outside, but the path into it was mine, not his — and that made the silence around it even more complicated. It was not a thing I could ask him to fix by moving back somewhere with me, because there was no “back” that had been his fault. The research on both situations — trailing spouses and immigrant intermarriages — converges on similar findings about the cost of unspoken asymmetry. The path in differs. The dynamic, once both partners are settled, often does not. Why the fantasy of a third country was so revealing The dream in the diary entry was unusually clear about what was missing. It was not a dream of escape, or of a more exciting life, or of somewhere warmer or richer. It was a dream of symmetric belonging. A third country — somewhere that would be foreign to both of us — would do something the current arrangement could not: it would make us equal in our relationship to the surrounding world. Illustration generated by Supportive Stranger This is why the fantasy kept returning. I was not really fantasizing about a different country. I was fantasizing about a marriage in which I was not, by structural necessity, the partner who needed more help. In which my husband would also need me, in concrete daily ways — to navigate the language, to figure out the bureaucracy, to read the small social cues of a foreign place. In which the two of us would be, as I put it then, partners in crime again, united by the shared condition of being outside, rather than divided by one being inside and one being outside. There is something quietly important in the word again. It suggested that this equality had once existed, perhaps early in the relationship, before the practical realities of one country dominating our daily life had settled in. The linguist Ingrid Piller, whose ethnographic study Bilingual Couples Talk (2002) remains the central work on mixed-language partnerships, observes that many international couples report exactly this trajectory: the first phase of the relationship — often conducted across distance, or in a back-and-forth, or before either partner had settled decisively into one country — feels more balanced than what comes later. The asymmetry tends to crystallize only after one partner has clearly moved into the other’s life. That is when the slow loneliness can begin. The cost of the elephant being in the room We never discussed the “multiculturality” of our marriage. Never discussed it as a problem or a challenge. It stayed that elephant in the room. This silence is one of the most common features of international marriages, and one of the most costly. Researchers working with intercultural couples have repeatedly found that those who explicitly discuss the cultural and structural dimensions of their relationship tend to do significantly better, over time, than those who do not. The silence is not neutral. It is itself a force that shapes the marriage. The same finding appears in the management literature on expatriate placements: large-scale studies of corporate relocations consistently identify the trailing spouse’s unspoken adjustment difficulties as one of the most common reasons international assignments fail. The mechanism is the same one I lived through, even though my path into Germany had been my own — when the asymmetry is not spoken about, it does its work in the dark. There are several reasons the silence happens, and looking back, I recognize most of them. My husband most probably did not see anything to discuss, because the asymmetry was invisible to him. I did not raise it because the practical case for staying was overwhelming — his job, his family, his language, his life, but also my own life that I had built here. Naming the problem would have seemed to require asking him to sacrifice something significant, or asking me to admit that the move I had made years earlier was costing me more than I had wanted to acknowledge. There was no obvious solution, so raising the issue felt like complaining without offering a way forward. There was also a reluctance to suggest that the marriage was, in some sense, harder for one of us than the other — because this can feel like an accusation, even when it is just an observation of fact. So the topic stayed unspoken. And the unspoken topic did what unspoken topics always do in long relationships: it accumulated. I carried the asymmetry alone. My husband did not know he was carrying half of something. The marriage became a place where one of the most defining facts about it could not be said aloud, and the inability to say it shaped everything else that did and did not get said. Why the native partner is not at fault It would be easy, in retrospect, to frame the structural asymmetry as a kind of unconscious unfairness on the native partner’s part. That framing is mostly wrong, and it gets in the way of understanding what is actually happening in such marria

15 min

May 26

Why was it the rambling that broke me, not the fights?

[From my diary] January, 5th 2021 Today, we were on the riverside, a casual Sunday morning with our dog. He walked next to me and kept babbling, something he read on social networks. Suddenly, I felt like exploding. I started to talk in my native tongue: “Why can’t he just shut up? Why can’t he just shut up?” He noticed the hatred in my words, his head sunk into his shoulders. His misery made its way into my body, made me bow my head. I kept walking, squeezing my teeth from pity and guilt, from seeing my beloved one hurt. I did not know what to do. The sudden flash of hatred toward a partner one still loves is one of the most disorienting experiences in a long relationship. It is rarely about the moment that triggered it. More often it is the surfacing of something that has been accumulating quietly for a long time — small disappointments, unspoken resentments, the slow erosion of admiration. Couples researchers have studied this pattern for decades and have a specific name for what it signals. It is one of the most reliable predictors of a relationship ending. What contempt actually is, and why it matters There is a difference between anger and contempt, and the difference is important. Anger is a response to a specific provocation: someone did something, and one is angry about it. Anger has an object, a cause, and usually an end. Contempt is something else. Contempt is the sudden conviction that the other person is, in some fundamental way, beneath — beneath listening to, beneath patience, beneath the standard of who one is willing to be in a relationship with. Anger says what you did is unacceptable. Contempt says who you are is unacceptable. The American psychologist John Gottman, who spent decades studying couples in his University of Washington laboratory, identified contempt as the single most reliable predictor of divorce. He could observe a couple for fifteen minutes and predict, with disturbing accuracy, which couples would still be together a decade later — and the strongest signal was not how much the couple argued, or even how hostile the arguments became. It was whether contempt had begun to appear in their exchanges. The eye roll. The slight sneer. The tone that suggests the other person is being tedious by simply existing. What the walk by the riverside describes is the moment contempt arrives. Not as a slow build, but as a flash — sudden, embodied, almost involuntary. Why can’t he just shut up? The man being addressed in this sentence is the same man one loves. He has done nothing in this specific moment to warrant the reaction. He is rambling, mildly, about something he read online — the kind of low-stakes conversational filler that happens in every long relationship, every day. The flash of contempt is not about what he is saying. It is about something else that has been gathering, and that has finally found a small enough provocation to break the surface. Why it shows up suddenly The disorienting thing about contempt is that it does not seem to arrive in proportion to the moment. One can feel it on a Sunday walk by a river, with a dog, on a perfectly ordinary morning. There is no fight. There is no fresh wound. There is just a man talking about something he read, and a wife suddenly wanting him to be quiet forever. The reason it appears this way is that contempt is almost always retrospective. It is the present moment’s interpretation of accumulated past moments. Every time something small went unsaid, every time a disappointment was filed away rather than discussed, every time a need was not met and the unmet need was quietly absorbed — these small currencies build up. They do not appear as a running ledger one can consult. They appear, eventually, as a feeling. The feeling is that this person, in this moment, is intolerable, and the intolerability seems to be about the moment, but it is not. The moment is just the spillover point. This is also why contempt cannot be argued with, in the way ordinary anger can. If a partner is angry about a specific thing, the specific thing can be addressed. If a partner suddenly looks at the other and finds them contemptible, there is nothing to be fixed. The contempt is the surfacing of a long process. Addressing the immediate trigger — the rambling about social media, in this case — does nothing, because the trigger is not the cause. Why the response in the body mattered The most telling detail in the diary is not the flash of hatred itself. It is what happened next. He noticed the hatred in my words, his head sunk into his shoulders. His misery made its way into my body, made me bow my head. I kept walking, squeezing my teeth from pity and guilt, from seeing my beloved one hurt. This is the description of a love that is still very much present. A person who had stopped loving their partner would not feel his misery enter her body. She would not bow her head in response to his bowed head. She would not squeeze her teeth from pity and guilt. The contempt and the love are coexisting in the same scene, in the same body, on the same walk. This coexistence is one of the most painful experiences in a failing marriage, and one of the least talked about. The cultural script suggests that when a marriage is ending, love departs and is replaced by something else — indifference, resentment, eventually peace. The actual experience is often that love does not depart. It stays. It just begins to share the body with feelings that are incompatible with continuing to live alongside the loved person. The two states do not resolve into one. They sit next to each other, and the person carrying both does not know what to do with the contradiction. The line I did not know what to do is exact. There is no obvious move. To express the hatred fully is to wound someone one loves. To suppress it is to let it accumulate further, with the certainty that the next surfacing will be larger. To explain it requires understanding it, and the understanding has not yet arrived. The walk continues. What it doesn’t mean It does not mean the frustrated partner is a cruel person, or that the marriage was a sham, or that the love was not real. People who feel contempt for a partner they love are not failures of character. They are people whose accumulated unspoken material has reached the surface, and whose nervous systems are reporting, in the only language they have, that something has become unbearable. It does not necessarily mean the other partner did anything wrong, either. There is no right or wrong. In that scene from my diary, my ex-husband was talking about something he read online. He is allowed to do that. The contempt was not a response to his behavior in any meaningful sense — it was a response to a much longer history that happened to spill into a moment featuring his voice. The asymmetry of the scene, in which one partner is suddenly enraged and the other is innocently chatting, is part of what makes contempt so devastating. The triggered partner is reacting to something invisible to the other. What it might mean is that the marriage had, by this point, accumulated enough unspoken material that it could no longer hold the smallest ordinary moments without breaking through. A marriage that can no longer absorb a Sunday morning is a marriage that is running out of capacity. The walk by the river was not the cause of the ending. It was a symptom — one of many — that the conditions for continuing had quietly stopped existing. How the love and the hatred can both be real There is a tendency, looking back at scenes like this, to ask which of the two feelings was the true one. Did I love him, if I could think that? Did I hate him, if I bowed my head at his pain? The question assumes one of them must have been the deeper truth and the other a kind of illusion. This is rarely how late marriages actually work. What is more often true is that both feelings were real, and both were operating in the same body, and the marriage had reached the point where they could no longer be integrated. Earlier, the love had been large enough to absorb small irritations without their accumulating. Later, the accumulated irritations had become large enough to break through the love in flashes. The love did not stop. The container holding it had simply begun to crack. This is also why the ending of such a marriage, when it finally comes, is so often experienced as grief rather than relief. The love was not killed by the contempt. The love is still there, on the other side of the divorce, looking for somewhere to put itself. The contempt was just the signal that the marriage could no longer be the place where the love lived. Why the words came out in another language There is a detail in the scene that deserves its own attention: I started to talk in my native tongue. The exploded thought did not arrive in the language of the marriage. It arrived in the language of childhood. This is not incidental, and it is not random. Bilingual and multilingual people often notice that strong emotions — anger, fear, grief, sudden tenderness — break through in the first language acquired, even when the second language has been the dominant one for years or decades. There is a substantial body of neurolinguistic research behind this observation. The native language is processed across a wider, more emotionally integrated network of brain regions, because it was acquired during the years when the emotional and linguistic systems were still developing together. A later-learned language is processed more narrowly, often with somewhat reduced emotional weight — which is one reason why some bilingual people report that swearing in a second language does not feel as transgressive as swearing in their first, or that saying I love you in the second language feels less risky than saying it in the native one. The practical consequence is that under emotional load, the brain reaches for

16 min

Divorced me Podcast

Why did becoming myself pull me away from the man I loved?

Why couldn't I believe a kind man loved me?

Did moving together too early jeopardize my marriage?

Why did I miss him most when he stopped being lonely?

Why didn't he leave when I was being cruel to him?

Why did he look relieved when I asked for divorce?

Why did my international marriage feel unequal?

Why was it the rambling that broke me, not the fights?

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Divorced me Podcast

Episodes

Why did becoming myself pull me away from the man I loved?

Why couldn't I believe a kind man loved me?

Did moving together too early jeopardize my marriage?

Why did I miss him most when he stopped being lonely?

Why didn't he leave when I was being cruel to him?

Why did he look relieved when I asked for divorce?

Why did my international marriage feel unequal?

Why was it the rambling that broke me, not the fights?

About

Information