Baby Come Back

So in late January 2012, I returned home from the hospital, all arteries in my heart now coursing with blood, happy to be alive but saddened by the realization my marriage was a regret. I'd been married for 27 years. The past few years had been hard; I knew something was wrong with my marriage in 1994 when I had an affair and moved out for a year, but we had moved past that, or so I had always hoped.

The truth is, after my affair, my wife never wholly trusted me again, and it showed in a hundred different ways. I eventually moved back in and worked hard to make the relationship work.

I went to therapy twice a week and got us to see a sex therapist.  When some of the men at Landmark (the new name for the parent company of what was once called est) told me how they had tried a new program, the Sterling Men's Group and that it had saved their marriages I jumped at it. I read about a new book by a therapist that was, or so it promised, "saving marriages." I bought it for my wife, and she read two chapters, called it male propaganda, and gave me the silent treatment for a week because I gave her a book she disapproved of. She would argue with me about what the book said. Finally, I told her I didn't read it, didn't know what it said, only what it promised.

My wife started going to weekly therapy with me at some point, but when the therapist called her on her shit, she bailed; too hard for her. She also ignored a few of the suggestions from the sex therapist and did not want to do the women's equivalent of the Sterling Men's Group.

Once, my therapist had me write out a letter to my wife containing everything I tried to do to save my marriage and all of her negative responses. I was not to give her the letter, this was just for me to process the facts, or so I thought. It ended up being two pages long and detailed all of my attempts to rescue us as a couple and her lack of response and worse, her lack of effort; I could not come up with a single thing my wife had done to try and save our marriage. I read the letter to my therapist, and she told me to read it to my wife. I will let you imagine how well that went.

The day I came back from the hospital, I was contacted on Facebook by a woman I dated in high school when she was 14, and I was 17. She wanted to apologize for how she had treated me 39 years prior, that it had always bothered her, and that she just wanted to explain why she did what she did: I basically scared the fuck out of her because when she was with me she felt in love and at 14 that was the last thing she wanted. This was my first real exposure to the results of my naivete regarding relationships, and to be honest, she had devastated me at the time.

We began chatting on Facebook, then on the phone.

At the same time, my wife, who had been a real bitch to me lately, was treating me like I was made of porcelain and walked on water. I knew it was just a reaction to my near death and nothing more, but it still made it more difficult to leave. I had tried before and failed.

Two weeks after I returned home, I left my wife.