Divorce. Thanks Obama

[qt4x11]

Now that I’ve had a chance to really think about things, I realize now a few issues in our marriage that were a lot more serious than they seemed at the time and probably contributed to the disaster of a divorce situation.

I married my wife when she was 27. At the time she was a beautiful young woman, just gorgeous - blonde, blue eyed, beautiful face, curvy. She rocked my world in bed and I had absolutely no problem with her moving in with me, our suddenly getting pregnant, and our quickie wedding all within the span of 9-10 months. Now that I think about it, that was not enough time to really get to know someone and assess the long term viability of a marriage relationship with that person. What was I going to do at the time? This girl was already living with me, and we had a baby on the way.

Once my daughter was born, my wife turned all her attention to being a mother. My wife was also going to graduate school in addition to working a full time job at the time as a school teacher. I remember her saying ‘good I’m pregnant now so I don’t have to watch what I eat’. I of course was horrified, as a man, but I didn’t say anything. It took my wife many years to lose her pregnancy weight. We had another kid, my son, two years later - so she really did not start to lose the pregnancy weight until after he was born. Our sex life continued, because I’m a horny guy and honestly the sex life was still good despite everything. I didn’t like to dwell on this, because I had newborn babies at the time, I had career stress to deal with etc. - but sometimes I would think that she looked very different from the beautiful young nubile woman that I married, she seemed overweight and matronly to me. I tried to subtly suggest that she take better care of herself. I was a marathon runner and was exercising pretty much every day at the time - I suggested she go running with me, she refused. I offered to watch the kids so she could go to yoga class or something, she never took me up on it. I didn’t want to appear insensitive but I didn’t mention it. Except one time when I said ‘you need to lose weight’ to her - I don’t know what was going on when I said that, to be perfectly honest I think I was just going through a lot of stress at work and took it out on her, yeah I’m an a******. Years later, in the heat of divorce discussions - she threw that one back in my face.

So what happened was - to my delight, about 2-3 years ago, my wife started biking regularly and also went on this diet that allowed her to lose a ton of weight. It was almost like a miracle, I was delighted. She also started dressing nicer, and wearing makeup more often. She grew her hair out really long. I was overjoyed at the time. She started posting pics on FB and of course, everyone was commenting on how beautiful she looked. Now her beautiful face is haunting me, I’m just the a****** who was insensitive to her.

Another thing about my wife is that she is a very social creature. She absolutely adores meeting new people and being around her friends - there are one or two friends in particular that she loves being around. But I didn’t like being around those women. I always got a bad vibe being around them, I can’t really describe it. Also there was always this issue that I had before we split up - I never had time to work on my business and work on my music. After coming home from a 60 hour work week, cleaning the house, doing the homework, putting the kids to bed, etc. it would be 11pm and I would be dead tired - so I would only be able to work on the business for like an hour, of course I was too tired to think straight and not much got done.

So I really valued my free time, because I was still an ambitious guy with a lot of interests, even though I had a lot of responsibilities as a father. I became ruthlessly discriminating with my time, trying to carve out blocks of time for myself where I could work on my mobile app business and my music. I would not go to social functions with her. She would ask me to go to dinner with her friends or something and I would ask her if I could skip it. She wound up going to a lot of these functions alone, I think it made her sad but she never mentioned how she felt about it, other than saying she wanted me to go out with her more. I was just obsessed with working on my own interests, I don’t know. In the past few years, really ever since I turned 40 - everything just seems like a race against time to get everything done from my bucket list. On top of that she would also minimize and sometimes even denigrate the things that I was doing. She did not support all the time I spent making my first album, and she didn’t really support me working on iPhone apps in my spare time. There was always that tension there between her wanting me to be more social with her friends, and me wanting to carve out time for myself to work on my personal interests.

Of course now I have a lot of time alone to work on my personal interests, even though I’m miserable work and my music are really helping me get through this. I also have a lot of time, and clarity, to think about things that happened between us. Even writing this down now, I still feel like all of our problems could have been worked out by communicating with each other better, or going to counseling.