Fairly often I have a client ask whether or not his marriage is bad enough to justify a divorce. Even though they ask, I think they know this not the kind of question I can answer for them. It’s a personal call.
But as a psychologist I have a unique perspective. I get to see people at every phase of life; whether they are struggling or thriving in a marriage, in the process of divorcing, divorced, dating new people, remarried or even living unmarried in old age. I have even seen the same person through each of these phases over the course of their lifetime. This perspective has biased me in favor of working out problems in marriages rather than dissolving them. This is true in relationships with or without kids, although the presence of children ups my bias toward saving the marriage.
In the early 90’s I started working with Bill, a hard driving young businessman who had started a company and built it into a thriving enterprise. While his work life was great, his home life had collapsed; hence, his trip to see me.
Bill was married with two young girls, ages six and four. He described his wife as hostile, selfish and child-like in her neediness. According to him, she would punish him for weeks if he had to go out of town for business trips, resented his success, and rarely showed anything but hostility towards him when he was home. He was asking for my support to help him end his marriage.
I suggested couples’ therapy, but he stated gravely, “The time for that was a couple of years ago. I have no interest in subjecting myself to her abuse anymore. I just want to leave without creating any more hostility and minimize the pain for my daughters.”
Despite my anti-divorce bias, his arguments were convincing. It was his choice after all. So we turned our attention to making the best of a bad situation for him and his girls. We spent the next two years helping everyone adjust to the divorce. Bill got on Prozac fordepression and began to neglect his business. He sold his company and stayed on as a consultant, but was eventually fired because of his lack of focus at work.
A few months later, Bill started dating “a gorgeous and very positive” lawyer whom he had met during business. He described her as the opposite of his wife: “very independent, kind-hearted and giving.” He became completely swept up in the new relationship and felt his life was back on track. On a high, he discontinued his Prozac and his therapy.
Four years later, Bill returned. He had been married to the lawyer for three years, and had started a new business venture which was doing very well. The problem was that the lovely young lawyer was now “showing her true colors.” In fact, he stated, “She is more abusive and needier than my ex.”
Bill knew I wasn’t completely surprised. At the time of his original therapy I had suggested to him that if people do not learn some key life lessons, they may create relationships one after the other that are almost identical. Either they choose partners with similar issues or they find someone who allows them to enact a similar role each time. While Bill didn’t buy this argument at that time, he had to admit that his life was unfolding “Second Verse, Same as the First.”
But this time Bill agreed to bring his wife for couple’s therapy.
When the three of us met I was able to see Bill in a new light. While I had known that Bill could be a workaholic, what I did not know was that as soon as his relationship felt solid, he would bury himself in work and become completely absent to his partner. He would leave for the office early in the morning and return late at night. When his wife asked for some attention or affection, he felt criticized by her. He would then withdraw from her when he was home and even stay at work longer to avoid the conflict. The only way to get him to pay attention to the relationship (or appear to anyway) was to pick horrible fights with him. He’d start coming home earlier, but he’d feel so angry and hurt that he would completely withdraw.
“There’s no way to reach him,” his wife said.
Bill had always described himself as loving and completely accepting of his wife, and in a way he was. He expected very little from her and when they weren’t in the midst of hostilities he could be very affectionate. That is, when he wasn’t working…which it turned out he thought he should be doing all of his waking hours.
(Notice, that the complete story never arrives in the therapy room until the spouse does.)
His lawyer wife was also pretty accepting, but when she reached her limit she could become horribly abusive. She would scream, cry, call him names, and then wonder why he withdrew into his work. They had built a relationship that brought out the worst in each of them.
After our fifth couple’s session, Bill called to cancel the next session. He had moved out when his wife slapped him in the face during an argument. He scheduled an individual session with me several weeks later and fell into the same pattern of depression and anger as he and his wife moved through their divorce. Again, I helped him cope as well as possible with his divorce.
Fast forward to a few months ago. I got a call from Bill and scheduled an individual session. It’s been 17 years since he made his decision to leave his first wife. He is no longer a young businessman and of course I’m not a young psychologist, either. We’re both greyer and our facial lines are a little deeper.
Bill’s smile is tired yet warm. Now in his late 50’s, he has just sold his company for an amount of money that should have made him happy, but there is a heaviness anddepression in his voice. Wealthier than he could have ever hoped to be, his life is empty because he has no one with whom to share his success. He does feel some satisfaction that his daughters seem to be happy and successful in their young adult lives. But he wishes he saw them more as they seem to coordinate most of their lives around their mother and visit him mostly as afterthought.
I ask Bill if he’s dating anyone. He shakes his head and sighs. “I don’t really have much interest in that. I’ve read that story all the way to its sad ending. I don’t need to go through that again.”
Bill is as depressed as I’ve seen him. His ex-wives might tell you that he wanted to be alone by the way that he treated them. But the truth is, despite his tendency to disappear when he is in a relationship he does not do well without one.
My job with Bill now is to help him go back through some of his relationships and learn from them. He has to believe is that there is hope that if he invests again in a relationship that the story will end differently this time. But his hope has to be real; he has to learn that he can be different with a woman and create a different kind of relationship. If he can do that, his story might eventually have a happy ending.
I look across at the graying businessman slouching before me and without much thought ask him if he wishes he could go back in time and try to figure it all out with his first wife.
“Of course, she wasn’t really that bad. I was just so obsessed with work and I didn’t know how to deal with her anger,” he said.
“So learning how to be less obsessed is important,” I say. “Maybe that’ll be easier now that you’ve so clearly made it in business. Believing that you can stand up to a woman, be with her and tell her what you think rather than avoiding her, that’s what you needed 17 years ago and what you need now to get back into living your life, right?”
Bill swishes his Starbucks Latte around in his Venti cup and smiles, again, warm and tired. “So you gonna give me a pill for that?”
I start to say something and he interrupts. “I want to believe I can do that, yeah.” He looks back into his latte. “I can see how that would change things…”
