They were the couple that everyone looked at and thought were the benchmark of how Marriage Can Work. Together for years, good parents, pillar of the community. But what it looks like from outside someone else’s relationship isn’t what the truth is.

A few weeks ago LOD and I caught wind that another couple we knew might be splitting up. I was beyond stunned. They’d also been together forever, and they were one of the couples that made me realize that the white-knuckling and thinly-disguised despair that characterized my half of my marriage was not pre-ordained by the act of getting married. It seems impossible that they’d split. But what it looks like from outside someone else’s relationship isn’t what the truth is.

We happened to be together, having a meal with the kids, when it came to light. God bless technology, because we had a text discussion about the whole thing while the kids were oblivious, telling us stories and eating burritos. At one point I asked LOD if it made him feel worse when couples we really thought were meant to be with each other split up than our own split had made him. Our divorce was inevitable–we never should have gotten married in the first place, although I’m glad we did because we have two amazing children–but for people who really truly loved each other and could have been with each other forever? That, to me, is tragic. It hits me hard. And I wondered if it hit him hard, too.

LOD just texted to ask if I’d seen that Dooce and her husband are splitting up. I hadn’t, but hearing the news is sobering. Again, they seemed so happy together. What it looks like from outside, yadda yadda.

I wonder what it feels like to have lost not just your idea of how your life was going to go and the picture you presented, but to have lost something real and strong and true. I am sad for anyone who sees another way things could have gone and wishes things had gone that way. I wish I could tell anyone in this spot that it is going to turn out better than you imagined you life would be. But I can’t. I had nothing solid to hold on to, so letting go was no great trick. I can’t give assurance to anyone who is losing something that lived in their heart.

I hope, hope that for all of you things are better in two years. They won’t be better in six months, in all likelihood. But they can be better in two years. And I hope that they are.

I have just escaped from the busiest semester of my entire life. I cannot recommend taking Corporate Strategy, Operations Management, Financial Management, and Cost Accounting all in the same semester while also working full-time at a job involving a lot of travel.

But other than the enormous timesuck of all that, everything’s good from my end. The honeymoon period of school is over for the kids, so they’re happy about the long winter break, but they like that their two houses are so close to each other and that they have more space and that everyone’s more mellow and has more emotional energy. They’re making friends, and we’ve got playdates scheduled for when they’re back from visiting family this week. They have a lot more space and time just to run, and hang out, and be unstructured. That’s what I wanted for them–space and time and freedom.

LOD seems to have been super-busy these last few months, too, but I assume he’ll dip in and tell what he’s been up to, too.

I want to publicly thank LOD for giving up a free night last week and massively rearranging his schedule so I could stay another day on a work trip to attend the wake of my friend’s mother. He didn’t have to do it, and it took some maneuvering on his part to make it work. I am so glad I got to go to the wake, to see my friends and their families and say goodbye to this lovely woman who should have had 20 more years with her grandchildren. All the pinkwashing in the world won’t bring her back.

Some relief, some sadness. All letting go.

We had The Talk right after Thanksgiving 06, and over the next several months I felt I was the one fighting for the marriage, while she was merely trying to dissolve it as expediently as possible. If you refuse to fight for something, it’s easy to be a revisionist historian and argue that it was never anything in the first place. And to seem so uninterested in reconciliation when we had our boys to think about was beyond my comprehension.

When Moxie first told me that our entire relationship was basically a lie, I lashed out, calling her all sorts of things: cowardly, deceptive, lazy, parasitic. I also resorted to emotional cheap shots, like throwing that Kali story back in her face. (Besides, CREATION is only as good as what you’re creating. Since when is creating a divided household a good thing?)

The reason for this reaction is pretty obvious: I was scared to death. I’d had almost no experience with divorce, and what little I knew seemed very mother-centric. And the idea of losing my sons left me with an unrelenting dread that gripped my throat until her signature on our divorce agreement assured me otherwise.

And that’s the key point: When I say I was fighting to stay married, I was really fighting not to be divorced. Because I had a lot more interest in being my kids’ father than remaining my wife’s husband.

When I read that article, and Moxie’s reaction to it, I felt waves of comfort and recognition. And I hope the author follows up with an article that includes the social pressures that push men into marriage. Because even though I’ll always remember my wedding day as a happy one, I also admit that part of me got married because I thought It Was Time. That marriage would make me A Grownup. And anyone who makes a life decision based on a Seinfeld sketch (or two) deserves what he gets.

Ultimately, our marriage happened because each of us thought the other loved us enough to make it work, and she was the one who was brave and aware enough to realize it was doomed.

So, in a way, she called horseshit first.

The other day when our nine-year-old came to my place after school, I happened to see that Moxie had left this in his math book:

As it turns out, you can pull a Kali on a marriage and create something that is, though not ideal, eminently livable: the situation when you’re glad she’s no longer your wife, but you’re also glad she’ll always be their mom.

I was in that 30%.

I knew, all along as we were dating, that there was something not really amazing about us together. And it all came together for me two days before the wedding when I just had the stark realization that he wasn’t the right person for me, and that I would never be able to trust him with who I really was.

Before you say, “What kind of cold-hearted bitch would marry someone knowing he was wrong?” Well, I wasn’t cold-hearted. I just put all my faith in culture instead of in myself. I thought that getting married would give me security, especially to someone who looked good on paper, very solid. On paper we came from the same background (all middle-class white people from two-parent homes are alike, right?) and the age difference (8 years) was actually good because it meant he would be more stable. And I thought that security meant safety, that he would keep me safe from myself.

I was scared of the energy in me that I’d never learned to process as a Good Girl. I was scared of my desires, sexual and otherwise. I was scared that I really was Kali, Goddess of Destruction, as my dad had teased me when I was a teenager. (It was only during the divorce process, when I was taking a burlesque workshop with Victoria Libertore, that I found out that Kali is the goddess of destruction and creation. AND CREATION.)

So getting married was about Settling Down and starting the rest of my life. I had this idea that I was going to be a good wife. And be a food writer (very genteel profession) and have children and raise them carefully and then. I don’t know what, then. Just fade away, I guess.

And LOD was a nice guy. An Eagle Scout. He called when he said he’d call. He assembled Ikea furniture for me. We pretended we thought the same things were funny. It was nice, after having my heart broken repeatedly in Mexico, to have someone steady, who got my Electric Company references. And I believed that stupid, stupid aphorism that you should marry someone who loved you more than you loved them. I knew I could surely love him enough, enough to make him happy.

So I didn’t, for even a millisecond, entertain the thought of not marrying him. I couldn’t not marry him, because then what would I do? And I don’t mean what would I do on that day instead of getting married. I mean, what would become of me? Of the rest of my life?

I was in shock the day of our wedding. I got my hair done, put on my own makeup, drove myself to the church. Put on the gorgeous dress my mother had made for me. Sucked it up and sucked it in, said the vows even though I was screaming inside and when the pastor pronounced us married my heart sank and I realized what I’d done. So I Made The Best Of It.

Until I couldn’t anymore. The road from our wedding to the day I told him I couldn’t do it anymore was long and painful and bruising. But along that way I was being compressed and hardened without even knowing it. I thought I was weak, and am still, sometimes, shocked at how strong I am.

I am not proud of how small I was back when I got married. I wish I had had the strength and honor to trust myself and trust that God had something better for me. But here I am, now, and I’m ready. That’s all I can offer.

OK, it wasn’t that bad. But I think all interested parties are glad it’s over.

Moxie and I were each combating our specific stresses. She, after all, was trying to maintain her usual life of working a full-time job and maintaining her studies, while 1) living with her parents, who were 2) being so nice to her ex-husband. In contrast, I was biding my time between freak-outs over the simple ideas that 1) I was ending just about everything I knew, and 2) I was destined to live under a bridge somewhere. (Hopefully near Zingerman’s.)

And when it came to any “discussions,” I knew I didn’t have any friends in the room. So I’d made a point of keeping my mouth shut, and my head nodding its way out the door, in order to stay as un-underfoot as possible. (Overfoot? Is that a thing?)

All of this is a recipe for disaster on its own, even if we had been visiting as an intact family. That we aren’t anymore raised the Scoville scale by a few degrees. But my having to extend my stay to ten days instead of seven before I was able to rent my house was the final shovelful of Scotch bonnets in the bubbling cauldron of million-alarm chili.

This two-week break has been the soothing Pepto that all of us needed. And now that the Ten That Should Have Been Seven are over, after all the rending of garments and gnashing of teeth that tested the limits of mutual empathy, we’ve got what we wanted in the first place: two houses within walking distance of school and each other.

After her buying attempt fell through, Moxie had two rental houses to choose from, and she went with the one that is about a quarter-mile farther from mine.

Well played.

And as I walked away slowly, doing my calming breathing that I learned in prenatal yoga class 10 years ago, I thought, “We haven’t fought like this since we were married, when we were living in the same– Oh.”

Wow. Being in the same living space, even though we tried to not be there at the same time as much as possible, was just trigger city. At least for me. I was constantly on edge and had no emotional reserves whatsoever.

The morning after that fight, LOD found a house to rent. And then he went back to NYC to pack. And, God willing, we will never have to live in the same space again, because it’s a stressful place to be.

As freakin’ if.

The first thing I have to admit here, before God and country and blogosphere and ex-wife, is that I am a big, fat jackass. I blame New York City, which infuses you with a false sense of superiority over anyone who doesn’t have the stomach to forge an existence in the urban jungle. When I knew we were moving, I figured finding suitable housing in Ann Arbor would be a piece of cake. It’s just a college town, right? Thirty-six thousand students figure it out every year!

Right after we signed, I took the boys to New England for an extended family tour while Moxie headed west to, among other things, look for rental housing for me. This was a bad idea, because:

• REVELATION 1: Ann Arbor is lovely, and people like it here. Renewal rates in apartment complexes are ~20 percentage points higher than normal.
• REVELATION 2: Housing is challenging here, because several houses are in foreclosure and therefore can’t be rented. Which also has a lot to do with REVELATION 1.
• REVELATION 3: Landlords aren’t so hot to rent to you if 1) you don’t work full-time, and 2) they haven’t met you. And my line of work is something you have to explain, in person, so they know you’re a normal person who won’t pull a Carter Hayes on their property.

I know: To most people who live in the real world, this isn’t all that revelatory. But to me, a 20-year renter in the soot-filled amusement park of Manhattan, it’s a cold pop in the jaw.

Amid the scrambling and Realty Miasma, I was able to speak at BlogHer11 on a panel about blogging and relationships. And on the way to the airport, Moxie and I spent an hour talking about easements, and Orangeburg tile, and the lifespans of roofs and furnaces. I am truly down the Rabbit Hole.

I miss them. And they miss me. Yesterday the little one called me and told me he missed me.

I wonder when this gets easier.

I’m busy here, so it could be a lot worse, if I had time to think about their not being with me.

I wish I could smell their sweaty little heads right now.

My parents live 45 minutes south of Ann Arbor, so we’ll finally have a support system in taking care of the kids. We can both have houses with yards, walk to school, and our kids won’t witness any more knife fights or be told their mother is a whore by addicts in the subway.

I don’t know which I’m more happy about–moving to Michigan, or having this negotiation over with! This was almost harder than the initial negotiations for our divorce. I think we’re both a little bit in shock.