The Deconstruction of a Marriage
Somewhere in my reading on grief, I read that in order to do honor to myself and to the relationship, I needed to deconstruct it before I could even consider moving forward and on to another relationship. This made complete sense to me.
Jon’s suicide came out of nowhere, even though I understood suicide to be a reality of being married to someone who had a diagnosis of bipolar 1.
With twenty-two years behind me, I’d been through it, raged over it in a raw form, wound up in my rose room, and found unstable peace.
Ultimately, if I was to do the honest work of moving forward, I had to take my marriage apart. I was about to make the mistake that so many people make: not fully examining the relationship before moving forward. How does someone look under the hood in this situation? You start with the facts that you know about, and then, as those facts are either confirmed of disconfirmed, you move forward with new information. You are boring through the mountain again, but this time the rock of the mountain isn’t placed on the conveyor belt and sent out to be used someplace else. This time you are examining it for content.
What I knew at the beginning was that, overall, we were friends first, and I had married a friend who would engage me in conversations that could go well into the early hours of the morning. Jon preferred sour candy, and I thrived on the sweet stuff of life. We were both adventurous and would try things, either doing them again or deciding against a repeat. He loved his pumpkin pie, and for me it was lemon meringue. It was pie, and we’d have pie instead of cake on birthdays, and it was a good thing.
I understood that he tried to cope with the bipolar as best he could and struggled with doing so in a dignified manner. I knew I was committed to caring for him as best I could, and that meant clearing the house of objects that could be used as weapons on the self. This was hard, and scary, and went along with some sleepless nights. I developed compassion fatigue. I don’t think you can understand how bad it is inside until you’re on the outside of the situation. I recall telling my mother before her death what it was really like. She asked why I hadn’t told her, and I replied that all you would have wanted me to do was to get out. I didn’t like the volatility that bipolar can bring, and yet, I knew leaving would need to be carefully orchestrated. I had sat with this thought and decision for some time. I had considered divorcing him that summer, but I made the choice to stay for the time being. I didn’t know his mind was moving towards a psychotic break that would decide things for him. He’d told me he would not endure that place again.
I came to understand that, while the marriage was not about his bipolar disorder, the mood swings, with their verbal abuse, were a part of the marriage.
In 2010 I made the decision to call him out on the anger and aggression he was showing towards me. Once he could hear it, he was able to work on it and commit to not behaving in that way anymore, and he didn’t go there again. When he began the DBT (dialectical behavior therapy) process, which includes acceptance for one’s actions, things began to level out in new ways.
What was my part in the marriage? As mentioned previously in the piece on exiting the Mormon Church, I was battling some demons of my own.
I needed to understand how everything I was dealing with affected the marriage. Being raised to be a good Mormon girl and woman had a great deal to do with a lot of who I was in the marriage. How did I enter into this relationship?
There was a great deal of suppression involved in the process.
In the first grade, it was the girl who had the pretty white and pink dress and the jump rope. She wore cute little Mary Jane shoes. I didn’t have Mary Janes, and I wanted some. They were so feminine. I thought it was normal to think that way. As an adolescent I couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about boys. I glossed over it and, in doing so, sent it away to not be thought of for years.
Because of my disability and experience at church, I had written off the possibility of marriage.
I met Jon when he came to do a house call on my computer. A friendship developed, and after four years we married.
Being raised Mormon meant that I was supposed to grow up and marry a nice Mormon man. I’d hit the jackpot! I’d married a brilliant man who could have powered the world on a paper clip. It was his out-of-the-box thinking that I loved most about Jon, and he liked that I could go to that place as well.
Still, there was this thing hanging around, and it wasn’t spoken about, and I couldn’t utter the words while he was alive. I don’t get men. I’m supposed to understand men, and I’m supposed to feel attracted to them. I don’t. After his death, the guilt that I felt slowly surfaced. It took several years and didn’t surface in its full ugly form until I’d left the Mormon Church and moved on.
I felt guilty for marrying him, guilty for the sex that really didn’t work well. While thinking all of this, I was also well aware that this was not a one-sided issue. Bipolar disorders affect relationships, and in deconstructing all of this, I came to understand that I was a participant, and there was no blame to be had: just understanding. Blame and guilt are so often miscued in relationships. Looking at this with my own therapist caused me to rethink my thoughts and feelings around having married Jon. In safety, I could admit, actually, that there was no way around this: I like women.
