Wedding Graduates Return

 Today’s post is written by Aly. If you’ve been hanging around the wedding corner of the web for a while, you’ll remember their wedding (I posted some inspiration pictures in my second month of blogging), and that pictures of Aly on her wedding day freed me from worrying that I was making un-feminist choices on mine. Aly also helped me figure out that a family is what you create. So I owe her. Turns out, she recently started a blog, Embrace Release, and after you read this post you need to go read EVERYTHING ON IT, and then join me in begging her to write a book. It’s that good.

The APW staff was joking that we should call today’s post, “Brought to you by Therapy. Consider it.” Because I’m on the record about being pro pre-marital counseling, but I’m pro marital therapy too. The New York Times ran an article this weekend about couples counseling, and they cited a statistic that most couples are unhappy for an average of six years before they seek help. This is a lot like hobbling around on a broken leg without getting it set; the earlier you go in, the cleaner and easier things will heal. Beyond that, this post arguably says everything that needs to be said about how we talk to each other about relationships and what we don’t say about divorce. So without further ado, Aly:

I was in the first grade the first time I heard about divorce. My friend Heather’s parents were headed for it. Frowning, my mother explained what that meant. I remember hearing with wonder about how Heather’s parents would live in separate houses and she would go back and forth between them. My own parents were much more unhappy than Heather’s parents had ever seemed to me. Oh how I wished my parents would divorce!

Now I’m married (illegal as it may be) with kids. We have none of the fighting and philandering that defined my parents’ marriage, but we’ve had our problems. Three months after our first baby was born, we came within inches of divorce. I recently shared this information with a friend who is struggling in his marriage, and he was stunned. Up to that moment, we had represented “shining beacons of trouble-free couplehood” to him. (His actual words.) Just hearing about how close we came to ending it all, and that we made it back from the abyss, made a big difference in his perspective on his own relationship.

In our culture, most weddings are stressful but joyous events where friends and relations gather to kick-off the marriage of two hopeful people. When all the cake is eaten and the last drunk, sweaty guest is pulled from the dance floor, the happy couple is wished well and sent forth. Alone. They might be given some vague instructions like “never go to bed angry” or “marriage takes work” but mostly well-wishers only smile and hug them and say “Good luck!” (while making mental predictions about how long this will last). Our wedding, gay as it may have been, was no different. For some people, this works out fine. They’ve either had good marriage role models or they’re magical creatures who’ve managed to intuit and enact healthy relationship models in the face of an omnipresent parade of nightmarish examples.

For others, things fall apart when they hit the first or second or fifth major bump in the relationship road. My partner and I had some issues from the beginning, mostly communication-related, that caused a poisonous build-up of resentment and slow erosion of trust over a five year time span. I’m an emotional, talk-it-to-death kind of person, given to blubbering. My partner is far more reserved, stoic nearly, given to holding it all in. You can imagine how well this worked for us. After bumbling through a difficult and expensive journey of trying to conceive, we were thrilled to welcome our first son. My partner was mired in a PhD program, though, and I had my own business that required me to work seven days a week. We were cranky, bewildered parent ships passing in the lonesome, desolate night for months.

That’s really not even the half of it but I’m not one to publish the particulars of our marriage meltdown on the internet. Suffice it to say that:

Things
fell
apart.

For me, the situation was made worse by this new, brilliant kind of love that I felt for our son. Whereas my love for my partner was entangled in and half-choked by our issues and past wrongs, my love for my son seemed to course visibly in the electric air between us, pure and robust and incomparable. Sure, he kept me awake night after night and repeatedly threw up into my hair, but my heart pounded, my brain shut up, and birds burst into song whenever I gazed at him. Which was a lot like how I felt when I first met my partner. Which made me wonder if it shouldn’t still be like that with my partner. And if it should be but wasn’t like that, then maybe we weren’t “meant for each other,” and I wasn’t about to do what my parents did by wasting my life and raising my kids in a doomed, miserable marriage!

No, thank you. Continue reading Secrets Of A Gay Marriage