"More difficult in any way you want to name"

Recently a reader e-mailed me privately to ask, "Am I the only one of your readers who believes D when she says that you have nothing to do with the break up of her marriage? I'm in a very similar situation myself ..., and I can say with both honesty and accuracy that my relationship with a, or indeed any, man other than my husband in no way contributed to the demise of my marriage. I'd be willing to bet that leaving her husband was something that D had considered seriously more than once, but the leaving seemed just as unappealing as staying, and very certainly more difficult in any way you want to name. I say, give her credit for being an adult - a very astute and self aware adult - and accept what she says, not just as the truth as she sees it, but the truth."

For myself, I have to agree that I am coming to a similar conclusion. It is true that some months ago, when D first talked about divorce, I couldn't help but be struck by the timing. (It was right after our first date.) And so I assumed that somehow her divorce was all about me. Self-centered little prat, ain't I?

But I have come to realize that this makes no sense. D has been talking to me lately about the disintegration of the life she knew, and she has made it abundantly clear that she does not imagine I am somehow going to magically fix everything. She takes it for granted that I have no plans to leave Wife, and that we will continue to live in different states for the forseeable future. She recognizes that I have not promised her anything to the contrary, and that (if anything) I am on the whole unhappy about and uncomfortable with her impending divorce. But it's not about me, so my opinions (rightly) count for bupkis. For good or ill, it is about D and her husband and their thirty years together. Nothing else.

But to say it's not about me is not to say it is simple or easy. My correspondent is right about that. D has been going through an absolute hell of a time the last ... well I guess it has been two weeks since my last post. She saw her husband for Easter, wrote me glowingly about the vigil and the service, and then got into a bitter fight with her husband over some comment he made about the Easter litany. I don't know the details, obviously; I wasn't there. But it sounded like the kind of fight I have with Wife sometimes, that just materializes out of nowhere. One minute you are discussing something inconsequential, making idle chit-chat over morning coffee; the next minute somebody says something wrong or ill-considered, and there are tears and shouts and recriminations and nobody quite knows how you got there. D told me that she replayed the conversation and the fight over and over in her mind the rest of Easter Sunday, as she drove all the way back to the city where she works during the week. And the more she chewed it over, the worse she felt.

This story, by the way, constitutes proof (if proof were needed) that D is telling the literal truth when she says the divorce is not about me. Fights like that don't really materialize out of nowhere. They can't. As in physics, nothing comes of nothing. Fights like that can only appear and intensify that fast if they follow well-trodden pathways, cuing scripts that have been rehearsed between the same two people for years, ripping the scabs off of very old hurts. Whatever the history between D and her husband -- and I am coming to realize that I know next to nothing about it -- it long predates anything to do with me, or with our affair.

When I spoke with her on the phone yesterday, D was in a bad state. She was mad at me for ... well, nothing, really, when you come right down to it. And after we had talked for an hour she no longer sounded mad. But she still had this fight with her husband on her mind; then work has been crazy for a month or more, and she is heading into a month of even more intense craziness; and everything is falling apart. Look at it from where I stand, Hosea, she implored me. My marriage of thirty years is ending -- thirty years of high hopes and ideals and promises. My children are both away at university, but honestly they are both pretty conflicted about this. I am looking at having to do things for myself that I have never done in my entire life. Hosea, I've never had to do my own financial planning. I don't even know how to do my own taxes -- I've never done them! My work is run by madmen, and I have no idea if I will even have a job by the fall. I spend twelve hours a day at work, and then I come back to my apartment where I am alone! And I'm looking at being alone for decades to come, very likely for the rest of my life, ... with only brief visits with you here and there when you can get away. And meanwhile you go home to your wife -- here her voice caught -- and your children and you can be domestic with them, and .... Do you know how hard it is for me to talk to Wife every day and listen to her complain about you, and all I want to do is scream at her "You're living with the man I love and I don't even know when I'm going to see him again, and you have the gall to complain about it?" And then at the end of the day you can go home and ... Hosea, where is my home? This little apartment I'm renting to be near my work? Or the house that I own with my husband, where he lives and I don't? Or where, exactly? I know that I've chosen the situation myself, and I know that you've never promised me anything, and I don't even think you owe me anything, ... and I know that the only way out is through. But Hosea, some days it is so hard.

Some days it is so hard. Got that. And lately she has been going through a lot of those days.

I wish there were something I could do. I hate for her to suffer like this. When I hear it, I feel like a jerk for not abandoning everything to catch the next plane out to where she is. But I know it's crazy to think like that. And I know neither of us is really planning on crazy. And so I know this means she is going to go through a lot more pain before this is all through.