I was married. I’ll spare you the story of how I met her. It’s inconsequential compared to the reasons I jumped into the scalding marital pot in the first place and then leaped out as late as I did.
What’s to follow is really a brief chance for me to understand more about how I made a (bad) life decision.
Against my better judgment and my own interests, I allowed myself to be joined in marriage to a woman I never truly loved. For as long as I can remember, trying to apply the words “love” and “marriage” to my life had the same effect as a kid trying to shove a square piece into a round hole. I never thought of myself as a person who could either fall in love or be loved, much less tie the knot with anyone. I lived with such low self-esteem for most of my life when it came to romantic prospects that I took for granted the feeling that I would be perpetually alone to face the world on my own. My sisters used to kid me that they foresaw me ending up as a curmudgeonly hermit living deep in the woods and surrounded by all my books, my only friends.
There were many times, especially when a woman rejected me or a fly-by-night romance fell apart, when I successfully convinced myself that love wanted nothing to do with me. I would internalize that trusty old self-hatred and bury deep any evidence of weakness that I had wantonly flaunted in public. Instead of becoming a walking raw nerve, I gathered up my broken spirit and became a quiet and callous human being. I pushed on, and I made the best of things, whatever that meant to me at the time.
But, every failed attempt to deeply connect to another person, especially a woman, chipped away at my emotional reserves. I became afraid. I was afraid of who I had become and what I could become. My blue collar work ethic, instilled in me by my parents and community, and my higher education were certificates on my wall that conferred on me a false sense of security. For all my book smarts, I didn’t know a thing about how to live and I certainly had very little knowledge of what I was capable of.
It felt like my journey through this world had been charted and navigated by other people, people who always convinced me that they had my best interests in mind and only wanted to see me succeed. Being the stalwart people-pleaser I was, I gave their advice and point of view inordinate due, but swallowed my own opinions and gave my own viewpoint short shrift. I was tired of feeling alone, and I was tired of being the outcast and feeling as though I was always two steps behind everyone and everyone screaming at me that I only had to run faster to catch up. When it came to making friends or making love interests, I felt that I didn’t matter, that I was replaceable. So, I worked that much harder to be attentive to their needs and to learn to be interested in their interests and, thus, be accepted and loved.
This was the framework I was working with when I met my ex-wife.
Of course, I cannot speak for her, but thinking back to some of our deeper conversations and how she and I reacted to each other in the beginning I think both of us were in similar places, psychologically. That’s how we got along quite well at first. But, I quickly noticed that she and I were existing on different planes and that the responsible thing to have done was to have stepped back and stopped the momentum that was headed toward a potentially fatal dead-end. But, I was weak and I convinced myself that this was as good as it was going to get for me.
Perhaps it is too soon now to even remotely get close to the radioactive core of why I thought being married was going to fix some malfunction in my system. This statement alone brings up the questions of why I would think I was malfunctioning and what exactly inside me had to be repaired.
I know this post is scattered and that I have come to a state of rest when I appeared to have been on a roll. But, I figure this is just another beginning of an ending. Conclusions will be far and few between.
At least I know this for certain: I am awake and I have a lot of work to do.
Posted by Kev Minh 
Posted by Kev Minh 
Posted by Kev Minh 
