"I've got a great idea - let's totally dismantle our lives!"
Gillian and Robin were married for 15 years. They had a great home in New York. After meeting as undergraduates they both went on to achieve doctorates. He was a professor of molecular biology and she was a researcher in neuroscience. Their marriage seemed pretty good. Neither had wanted children and they enjoyed the freedom they had outside their busy careers to give one another attention.
Then one weekend Robin announced at dinner that he wanted then both to quit their jobs, sell the house, leave New York and move to Spain. Gillian was completely astonished. Neither one of them had ever so much as holidayed in Spain and neither spoke a word of Spanish. They'd met and married in New York, they worked in New York, their home and friends and relatives were right there in the city. Their whole life, in fact, was in New York.
But Robin revealed more and more excitement about the idea of leaving. He didn't exactly try to convince her it was a good idea - it was more that he simply kept enthusing about how much he wanted to do it. "I'm 50" he'd say. "If I'm ever going to have a real adventure, it's now or never."
He seemed to want this so badly that Gillian decided after a while that, despite serious misgivings, she'd go along with it.
They resigned the well-paid posts they had loved so much, sold the home they'd lovingly created, bid farewell to friends and family - and went to Barcelona. The Catalan city is of course beautiful, chock-full of Gaudi's flamboyant buildings, busy tapas bars and wild nightlife. Robin seemed hyper-stimulated by everything he saw - the architecture, the Spanish, the food... This was the new life he'd dreamed of.
They moved quickly from a hotel to a rented flat outside the centre and had their two cats shipped over from the US.
Although Gillian felt disorientated by the new culture and foreign language, she made positive efforts to settle. She started to learn Spanish and made the flat comfortable. Robin meanwhile found a job at one of the Barcelona's universities and for a while they explored and enjoyed the city together.
Not for long.
Gill answered her phone one day, mid-morning, and it was Robin. He asked her to come to his lab, now. "There was something strange in his tone. He sounded a bit hyper." But she went, thinking that maybe he'd found a great new place to go for lunch.
When she got there he took her out onto the lawn in front of the building and with no preamble told her the marriage was over. He added almost as an afterthought that he wanted to be single so he could have lots of casual sex with women he'd meet in online chatrooms.
Dazed, Gillian had the impression she was looking at a total stranger. She could hardly believe what he was saying. Nor could she believe the almost throwaway tone in which he was announcing the end of their marriage. Robin seemed not even to realize that what he had said was shocking. In acute midlife crisis, he was too high on the prospect of a new, single life.
In the following months, Gillian struggled to cope with this new bizarre turn in her life. Her previously stable husband and best friend had vanished, leaving her alone in an unfamiliar city on a continent she didn't know, where she had no income and couldn't speak the language. She couldn't fathom what had happened in her husband's mind. She realized now that everything about leaving America had been part of some seismic shift in Robin's identity. She also saw, looking back, that he'd been indirectly expressing anxiety about his age since before he turned fifty. Used to his stability and reliable nature, she hadn't seen the signs of the developing crisis.
Robin left most of his stuff at their flat when he moved out. Gillian continued to receive their joint bank account statements there and was horrified to see he was paying for internet porn site subscriptions, sleazy sex clubs and viagra. On the occasions when she managed to speak to him, he showed no remorse whatsoever for what he was doing. He was also aggressive that she was - inevitably - spending 'his' money to feed herself and their two cats. He showed no interest at all, either, in the pets he'd always made a huge fuss of.
When the 'brand new life' doesn't work out
For over a year Gillian battled to rebuild some sort of life in these shocking new circumstances. Robin told her he wanted a divorce and, unhappily, she agreed. For months they had minimal contact apart from brief emails about the divorce. He told her he wanted to give her as little financial support as possible. "Why didn't she get a job" he asked "and stop draining his finances?"
Then one day he sent an email asking to meet for lunch. They'd finalise details of the alimony so the divorce date could be set. Reluctant and very nervous, she went to the restaurant prepared to find him aggressive and opposed to the settlement being finalised by their lawyers.
To her complete astonishment, he proposed getting back together again and returning to the States. Dazed all over again, she said nothing but just watched and listened as he blithely proposed buying a home together in New York again and going back to their old jobs. Neither his tone nor his words indicated that the pair of them had been estranged for over a year or that he'd been repeatedly unfaithful, uncaring and cruel.
Gillian weighed her options after listening to Robin and some days later she took him back. "I just couldn't face the future alone" she says. "I'm far from certain that I can face a future with him either but I want to try to save the marriage. He's gone through some enormous identity crisis related to midlife and I hope he'll re-stabilise."
In fact, Robin is a long way from having emerged from his midlife crisis and Gillian would do well to protect herself from his chaotic behaviour. The problem is that she has accepted him back exclusively on his terms. He still has the classic totally self-centred outlook of MLC. And a typical sense of entitlement which leads him to feel his needs and desires must be met no matter what the consequences.
Like many men in MLC, he is trying to change external factors in his life rather than figure out and address the internal anxieties and panic he feels. That means he's seeking solutions in all the wrong places. The move to Spain was supposed to make him feel better about himself. It didn't work but his new answer is to move back to the US. He is still seeking relief by changing geographic location. He also hoped that dumping his wife and sleeping around would fill the scary void that opened up in his life in MLC. That didn't work either. He was still looking outside himself or 'self-medicating' as they say on the XXXXX website. Now back in the States, in his old job, he's likely to carry on thrashing about looking for new, reckless ways to feel better.
Unfortunately for Gillian - as for Robin - the rollercoaster ride of MLC looks set to continue..
Formerly Workinprogress H :55 M :over 29 yrs. Together : 33 D : college D : adult BD and left : May 2013 Separated Experimenting/Replay
