Marriage
How to recover from a broken heart? I despise the question because it sounds like the way we treat everything with easy formulas and “ten easy steps” to solve a problem. It sounds just like how to recover from a broken leg. The way it’s phrased has a sick Dr. Phil stench about it. People let me tell you, life can’t be reduced to formulas. That’s one of the reasons we have so many people losing it. They’ve been skating on simple formulas for years. Then, when they finally run into that unyielding crisis that won’t change for the better no matter what they do, everything gets reduced to two options where they either lose it and embark on a course of destruction in some form, or experience a kind of death and rebirth from which they emerge as better individuals who now realize they were self-locked into a small way of living. Too many take the first option through weakness.
I can’t tell anyone how to recover from a broken heart. There are too many variables involved that might make my advice useless in another’s particular case. But what I can do is tell you what happened to me and how I managed to overcome it. As you read it some part or perhaps the whole might resonate with you. Only then might you be willing to apply what I say, and it is only then that you should be willing. After all we’re not talking about lancing a boil here, we’re talking about life. One-size-fits-all options are only found in cheap stores and cheap advice.
I’ve been married to my wife Jennifer for 28 years. When I married her I had absolutely no idea what marriage was all about; no realistic understanding of what it took to maintain a marriage. I only knew that I loved her, she was beautiful inside and out and that I saw no reason to look further when I’d found what I wanted. She was 19, I was 22. We were both Christians. She had been one and I became one through meeting her. I realize that tells you absolutely nothing. Christians get divorced and break up almost as much as non-Christians. I only mention it because it’s part of the psychological background of my marriage. In retrospect however I believe it was our Christian belief that marriage wasn’t to be taken lightly operating in the background that helped make the difference.
In the later nineties we began having problems. I can look back now and see that the root of the problems was selfishness. But at the time I was too busy trying to justify myself to admit that. I had been stuck in a dead end job for some years. We had two boys and I had no real prospects of making better money without a real career change. I made such a change but I had to take some financial steps backwards to do it before we could eat the fruit of the change. Failing to understand and deal with money properly is a primary destroyer of marriages and I wasn’t learning that truth very well. I focused so much on making that change that I blocked my wife out of that process, feeling that I was justified because I simply had to make this work. I didn’t realize that our line of communication was almost non-existent and that without one a relationship simply cannot survive. You begin to grow apart and before you know it, psychologically speaking, you and your mate are in different worlds. My wife had repeatedly tried to speak to me about it but sometimes it came across as accusatory. So though I listened in a surface manner I basically started ignoring her. The pot was boiling and I was too stupid to know it.
One time she approached me in the usual manner and began talking about all the things she perceived to be wrong. I, as usual, listened but didn’t really listen. In fact I argued with her about her perceptions. All of a sudden she poured forth a hot torrent of complaint that came out with such emotional force that I was completely startled. I could tell that this release of pent up emotion was serious. I just stood there while she let it all out over about half an hour. I was so stunned I couldn’t speak. But I could also sense that it was not a good time for me to speak. I simply let her have the floor.
After that I could tell she had crossed a line. She was decidedly cold to me and spent a lot of time chatting online and doing things that I wasn’t involved in. Time and again I tried to talk to her and persuade her to talk to me. But she was done with that. Every time she refused my attempts to set things right I viewed it as not caring about our marriage. It began to make me very angry and that anger came out in my words. It only made things worse and she even told me she didn’t love me anymore. I was scared now. This was very important to me because I come from a broken home. My parents divorced when I was in high school and it devastated me. I swore I’d never do the same to my kids. Now I saw myself being pushed inexorably toward that cliff’s edge. My heart was breaking. Desperate I began looking for books that might explain things to me.
After a good search I did find some books that seemed to relate to my case. After going through them I found what shocked me. They told me a lot but they told me something about my wife that I never would have understood otherwise. They said that once a woman gets to the point of closing herself off as my wife had done then the worst thing a man can do is to keep trying to bring her out with arguments. It’s past time for that. All one can do is to leave her alone and treat her well while requiring absolutely nothing from her. That goes for companionship and sex. It said there was no guarantee that she would ever give her heart back to you but that if she did this was the only way. I pulled this information from a combination of Christian and non-Christian authors to see if there was any agreement between them. There was agreement and disagreement as you might expect. But it was worthwhile to see points of agreement.
I knew what I had to do. Despite my failings I loved my wife. It was obvious from what had happened that I hadn’t understood some of the most fundamental realities of relationship. So I mentally prepared myself to leave her alone. It was the hardest thing I ever did. Part of the marriage benefit is being able to come home from work and having someone to share with, someone to touch and hold. But that was out. I went to work and came home every day knowing that my wife had nothing she wanted to offer me. My wife is beautiful. So it did not help to see her walk through the room in her nightgown and know that I couldn’t touch her. Fortunately she would still give me sex from time to time. But after that was over she’d go back to her world. I was grateful for any togetherness.
Online I sought out web sites where people had marital problems and I was amazed. There were a lot of people out there going through the same thing I was. How, I wondered, did society let people get into something as serious as marriage without ever giving them a hint of what it took? I felt so stupid. My problem was a well known one but everybody walked into it like it was a minefield. It was completely avoidable. There’s nothing like feeling stupid on top of being heartbroken. Yet, faithfully, I left my wife alone. Any space she needed I gave. I asked for nothing. After several months she would sit with me on the couch sometimes. I was as happy about that as if I was courting her. But then she would go back to her coldness. She had mentioned a couple of times that she thought I should move out to give her more space.
It was getting close to Christmas and one night I decided to pack my things and go. I had already been through the roller coaster of emotions, the sheer devastation and feeling of utter failure that I couldn’t make things work. But I then came to a point to where I knew that, as bad as it all felt, I couldn’t afford to let the sense of that suck me into the vortex. I would take whatever shaky steps I could in some direction.
My wife came out and saw my things in the middle of the floor and asked what I was doing. I told her I was leaving as she’d requested. I said this without anger or drama. At this point she seemed to be ready to reevaluate. She took me by the hand and said something about it being close to Christmas and that the boys wouldn’t understand. Maybe I should wait until after Christmas. I was surprised. But I said no. I was tired of playing with this and I would feel better by making a move. I then told her to make up her mind what she wanted to do. I had been willing to put myself through some pain to keep my wife because I knew I’d contributed to driving her away. But I couldn’t do it forever. I was ready now to accept whatever came. A friend of mine had a slogan on her web site that always stuck with me. It said “life is good if you’re strong enough to live it”. I was learning to be even with a broken heart.
My wife told me to stay. And from there on we proceeded to repair our marriage. Sure, we still butt heads from time to time. That’s part of living with a mate. But we don’t grow worlds apart. My wife is a good woman. Better than I deserve. I’m thankful that we made it through that very painful episode. I’m also thankful that I learned that a broken heart doesn’t have to mean a complete surrender to circumstances. Broken hearts are survivable if you’re strong enough to live through them.
There is no magic formula for fixing or maintaining a marriage. There is sacrifice and there’s nothing magic about that. The Bible speaks of it. I found not a few so called Christian authors who wrote as if the whole thing was almost a matter of saying the right incantations. I found others who spoke straight. Being Christian gives one no magic back door when we’ve spent so much time doing something in a non-Christian way. But it does give one the strength to move towards true healing instead of blowing our brains out.
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