A Study of Marriage: Young, Old, Broken, Whole.
“Fuck you. You can go to hell.”
It’s a line I’ve said to Mark in my addiction. It’s a line he’s said to me in his withdrawal.
We don’t fight, not with raised voices. We hold onto things quietly, silently until we’re ready to wield them as a sword. All it takes is one swing to fell the other.
The truth is that we’re two broken people with painful pasts. Pasts we’ve wrestled with in therapy as individuals, talking, talking, talking to peel back the layers of: why am I the way I am?
There are times when we’ve grasped the answer, or so we thought. Grounded ourselves in a new truth and felt the goodness of our relationship at its best.
We were in Venice, Italy on New Year’s Eve in 2018. It was one of the times when we were at our best. While waiting for the jetlag to wear off and the fireworks to explode over the lagoon in celebration of the new year, we walked San Marco’s square. The winter chill kept the crowds away and we explored unhindered.
It was then that we saw it, the statue in the art gallery window. An optical illusion. A man and woman standing. But how? Their hollowed-out centers made it seem as if they were floating. We went inside. Admired expensive art we could never afford. Mark snapped a picture.
I forgot about that picture until last week.
It came through in a text: Do you remember, he said? I was sweeping the kitchen floor, cleaning up the crumbs of breakfast. As far away from the memory of Italy as you could get. I couldn’t remember.
The day before our youngest had stumbled on our CD and DVD collection, from it he pulled a “CVD,” he called it.
“What’s this?” he asked.
“That’s our wedding video.”
“Can I watch it?”
“Sure.”
At the sound of the TV, the other two came running.
They cringed and snickered at the sight of a young version of their parents. I carried on with whatever it was I was doing, probably sweeping the kitchen again. More crumbs. Always crumbs.
When I came back into the living room we were cutting the cake, Mark and I. Not a cake, but Strawberry Shortcake. I watched as he gently fed me a piece. Then I took his face in my left hand and lifted a piece to his mouth with my right. It’s tender and lovely. We were so clearly in love. Infatuated with one another. Lost in one another. We kissed and everyone gathered around the cake table cheered and clapped as they do at a wedding.
It is not like that anymore. It will never be like that again. That newness.
“I don’t remember.” I text back, but the picture was so familiar. I knew we’d been somewhere far away, together. And then I remembered: Italy.
“I remember now…and yes. Together we make a complete image…moving forward toward the next thing.” I text back.
The ellipses pulses. He’s writing back.
“Yes, and also my thought, thoroughly and equally blown apart but still standing, even walking, together, caring something forward…”
I am crying.
We’ve been blown apart on more than one occasion. Each of us in our childhoods. When foreclosure and unemployment buried us in debt. When our son was born with a birth defect. This past year when years of unspoken resentment rose to the surface in a “fuck-you-you-can-go-to-hell” moment.
This fall felt like a critical point, one where we could pause and shift course to turn toward one another or continue on our trajectory and turn away from each other. That slow almost imperceptible slide to roommates, to ships passing in the night, to going through the motions of marriage.
“I feel like there are so many unspoken things between us,” I said in September.
“You’re right,” Mark answered. “There are things I want to say to you…I don’t think I can say unless there’s a third party listening.”
I had my own truths, hefty ammo if I had used it in the heat of an argument. Things I know would have cut him down swiftly. Raw and harsh, and perhaps unforgivable. I assumed what he had to say was the same.
To our credit, we respect and love each other enough to not do that. Which is perhaps why there was so much that had accumulated. We are peacekeepers.
So we started couples therapy together.
At first, our sessions were angry. We both had so much resentment stored up. But the conversations forced us to articulate those feelings and excavate exactly where they had come from.
The cracks are where the light pours in, they say. Sometimes that light illuminates the thing you least want to touch. The hard and sometimes ugly truths of the way we fail each other, even when we are trying our best, even when our intentions are good.
Slowly our sessions were laced less with anger and more with regret. And with that regret came acknowledgment and apologies. We saw how the past twenty-one years together have changed us. We were able to honor who we have been, who we are now, and who we can become.
We saw each other in a new way.
We can’t get back to the newness of being newlyweds, but there’s something more beautiful about this new way of seeing each other. It is richer, deeper, more meaningful than the newness of our early years together.
There is a Japanese practice of mending broken pottery called Kintsugi, where lacquer laced with gold is poured into the rift, highlighting the break instead of hiding it. The pieces become something new, something entirely itself, when it is brought back together. It is not the same, but it is beautiful in its brokenness.
The mending of marriage is the work of Kintsugi. It is pouring light into the cracks to make the pieces whole again. The crack becomes the beautiful part. And mended together you are new. With this newness comes an understanding of each other at a deeper level. There’s freshness in the relationship, a falling deeper into love, not an infatuated love, but a compassionate, empathetic, knowing love.
When we graduated from couples therapy our therapist said she was so proud of us. We are proud of us too.
Young. Old. Broken. Whole.
Maybe, it’s worth mending.
With love,
Sarah