Uncertainty in Experiences
- Nov. 20, 2017, 5:11 a.m.
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- Public
It’s been 4 weeks since K and I separated. Life seems so strange now. Neither of us could believe we stayed together so unhappily for so long. It would have been 10 years together in January. I’ve gone through every stage of grief 20 times over I think! I have moments of relief, that I know this is the best for both of us. Moments of regret that we couldn’t make it work, that we stayed so unhappy for so long. Moments of deep sadness that what we had is gone, that it can never be what it once was. Moments of anger that it came to this. Moments of blaming K, moments of blaming myself. Most of all it’s shaken me to the core. It’s a wake up I so desperately needed. To see that I had spent so long alive but not living, only existing. A shell of the man I once was. I want to take this time now to rediscover myself, reconnect with myself. Sure, it would be amazing to live on the other side of the world for 6 months and have a once in a lifetime experience, but reality and dreaming are far between. I have 2 kids who need me, a business to run. I can reconnect with myself from any corner of any place, environment is just a myth. But how to reconnect? I’ve enjoyed the extra ‘alone’ time from the separation, the splitting of the kids between us and giving each other space alone. It’s been a welcome relief, but a wasted one. Most of the days are spent working and the nights cooking and watching whatever is decent on TV. No reconnection. No deep exploration. No real ‘time alone’. Always distraction.
I sense when I am in my heart and when I am in my head. I know my heart is talking when I realise that this is for the best. That we can be better people apart. Better parents apart. When I question my whole notion of marriage and relationship. Is the nuclear family and the house we own a broken dream? Am I so conditioned by society to believe that is the goal that I have not been able to see another way for a relationship to function healthily? To question the status quo? Is the idea of a nuclear family right for any of us? Are we really by nature and instinct monogamous creatures? Are we meant to meet ‘the one’ and stay with them our whole lives? Or are we meant to have many ‘the ones’ and experience the richness and depth that can come from these different encounters and experiences? I feel that this experience is beyond just a decision between K and I. For better or worse it feels out of our hands alone. That still doesn’t stop the anger, the resentment. That is when I know I am in my head. I convince myself that she ‘used’ me. I join parts of our life to make a ‘story’ that could easily sell that notion. I bought her plane ticket over here when we first met. I paid for the ongoing immigration visas. The rent. The food. Everything. in 9 years she worked no more than 9 months. I paid for everything including her courses to better her development. Now she has her citizenship, a job, a friend network and she leaves me. Sure, it sounds convincing. It sounds like a slow burn catfish. If I wanted to make myself out to be a victim I could play that game. But what’s the point of that? I know in my heart it was never her intention to ‘use me’. We had incredible times together. To focus on the financial side of things is to hold a power over her that is unnecessary. There is so much more to us than that. It won’t matter in another 10 years and it certainly won’t matter when this life is over. But it doesn’t take away the hurt. Sure, we can say it was a mutual split, it was. We both agreed we could not go on like this. The difference is the motivators, the driving force. She was motivated by a desire to be alone, to be ‘free’. I was motivated by frustration, of being tired of not being met in our relationship. We said that it was a good thing we could end amicably, that there didn’t need to be nastiness. But I’ve said things I can’t take back in the moment. The pain is real. I need to stay in the place where I know there is a greater purpose to this, a reason this has to be. I need to remember that her motivation is not one of selfishness, but of conditioning. With her turbulent upbringing it’s amazing we lasted this long. She has not known ‘family’. A true nomad. No place to call home. I have grown up in the typical nuclear family. Perfectly imperfect. We were always mismatched. Both of us tried. We tried so hard to see the other, to support the other and what they needed. But that level of trying should have been a warning bell. It should not have had to be so hard, we should not have had to try so much. Perhaps we were never right in the first place. I say that she got so much more out of our relationship than I, but again that’s me going to my head place, playing the victim. I need to remember that my pain is real, but so is hers. This has not been easy for her either. She has been going through the same questioning, the same uncertainty.
The next steps are the hardest. We have been privileged to have had a friends holiday house available the last 3 weeks that we have been able to use to split our time and be apart. Now we are back under the same roof and it is so strange. Strange because it’s so familiar but so distant. Nothing has ACTUALLY changed. I am out in the lounge room, she is in the bedroom doing her own thing. The very same things I have been complaining about for years are still here no different, only with clearer boundaries. The loneliness is the same as ever, it is amazing how I can feel more lonely under the same roof as I can when I am completely alone. We need to work out a new living arrangement and we need to work it out soon. I would have wanted to own my own house by now, and yet I’m still stuck in the rental market with no sign of a way out, and this just makes it seem that much harder. We talked about renting a house with a granny flat out the back, that would be good. We also saw a place that had 2 houses under one title which would have been perfect but it was already taken and extremely rare. Ideally we want to be close for the kids. We want them to be able to come freely between our houses. There was talk of living together like roommates, but I told her I can’t do that. That has been one of the biggest issues for me in our relationship, that we’ve already been living like roommates for years and our paths occasionally cross. I can’t keep going like that and hope that one day I can have a more matched relationship. I think she could have kept going that way, I mean she has her issues with me and they are very real, I get jealous, I get passively controlling. But I believe she would have stayed together if it wasn’t for the pressures of married life. That is her reason for wanting out, she can no longer live with the expectations of marriage. I respect that. I would hate to think we were in a relationship where the only physical and emotional connection we had was forced out of an expectation. It had already been that way for a while and it was deadening. All I wanted was a mutual love, a mutual relationship like we once had. Where connection was genuine and natural, not forced. I try to think about another relationship though and I can’t get there, not yet. I need to do work on myself. Sure, I could go and have a fling with someone, satisfy some of those carnal urges that I have felt neglected from for so long, but I need to take a deeper look and see what those urges mean to me, why they are so important to me, and whether I can have a meaningful relationship without that at the centre. I don’t know what the future holds, but I know I can’t stay stuck here for much longer. I need to live, to experience life once more.
Nemoquenihil ⋅ November 20, 2017