A few years ago, after returning from an ill-fated outing recommended by her exposure therapist, I asked Crankenstein if she could honestly say she was in love with me.
“You first,” she timorously deflected.
What followed was one of the hardest talks we’ve ever had, and once it was over I felt slightly relieved despite our crushing sadness. Maybe something would finally break loose, maybe something would change. Instead, a familiar pattern repeated itself and Crankenstein seemed to quickly banish the conversation from her memory.
She suggested a do-over of that disastrous date almost a year later, a prospect I found unappealing. “Haven’t we moved on from that?” she asked, having apparently reduced our conflicts to those caused by ‘Niles,’ our name for her health anxiety. I saw ‘Niles’ as a huge problem, yes, and certainly our most exasperating, but it was far from our deepest. That distinction belongs to something we’ll call Surprise, Surprise, in a nod to one of Crankenstein’s favorite memes.*
Any decade-long relationship, a milestone we’ll reach this fall, will have had its share of surprises. But without getting into specifics, I’d say ours are, to paraphrase Rufus Wainwright, “a little big stranger, a little bit harder, a little bit harmful to me.” And some of the biggest and most harmful were revealed not during our first year of dating or subsequent two-year engagement, when it likely would’ve altered the course of our relationship, but almost two weeks after our wedding — disclosures that took much prodding and occurred days before Crankenstein left for a professional conference.
By that point I think she had me right where she wanted me. Later, I cynically wondered if I’d been selected for that reason. Was I nothing more than an easy mark? Had she observed the blind loyalty I inexplicably felt toward my ex and wanted something similar for herself? But I could never give Crankenstein quite the same latitude I’d offered my former partner: I was older and warworn and rather more jaded, and our relationships were nothing alike.
Crankenstein and I weren’t first loves or star-crossed or any of those heady things that make our earliest romances so memorable. Our pairing was based on love, yes, and attraction, but above all else it was rooted in pragmatism and compromise. The lesbian dating pool is shallower than a Kardashian (and diving into it is even less appealing now, with all the ‘queer’ idiocy that’s coalesced around women in general, and especially those who are same-sex attracted), and we recognized in each other qualities, compatibilities and values whose rarity we prized as women who’d been ‘out’ for much longer than most of our peers.
What we wanted — and what I thought we had — was a partnership grounded in shared goals, in mutual trust and respect. I’d never completely had that with Ex, who’d withheld more of herself than either of us could admit, and Crankenstein hadn’t had time for serious relationships when her studies, training, and eating disorder had previously come first. Surprise, Surprise revealed I’d never had it with Crankenstein, either. The foundation of our relationship had never been strong enough to support the future we’d planned, and even though we were married on paper she was more wedded to her career, and to her trauma and neuroses, than she could ever be to me.
For years it ate away at me but I didn’t know what to do, a quandary that intensified when ‘Niles’ arrived and began consuming more of her life away from work and made her dangerously miserable. Several times I tried to extend her the benefit of the doubt and convince myself she’d never pull similar stunts again, but at the end of the day, even now, I don’t entirely believe it: she’s too comfortable taking my fragile trust for granted. During that difficult conversation about whether we were genuinely in love, I told Crankenstein that if she needed or wanted more than I could give her — I knew I’d become less forgiving and emotionally generous — I would step aside so she could pursue it.
It only seems fair to share this before I rip into Tom for her shitty shenanigans, something I plan to do here sooner than later. Unlike Tom, neither of us pulled any narcissistic, coercive “I’m not sure I’m monogamous” bullshit — that’s already an exceptionally tired trope among navel-gazing Millennials and older Zoomers; our generations’ version of having a baby to save a relationship. Crankenstein and I are both one-woman women, and maybe that’s part of the problem. Maybe she really is married to herself, as I’d vented to Best Friend, and maybe I’m more committed to the relationship I wanted — which evaporated around the time Surprise, Surprise was exposed — than the one we’re actually in.
Had Crankenstein decided to date, something I wasn’t interested in doing myself, we would’ve divorced and gone our separate ways. But she didn’t entertain the notion for a second, believing I only thought I had nothing more to give her due to the stress of ‘Niles’ and feelings of hopelessness about worsening health issues that were later diagnosed as Parkinson’s. Just as I’d been there to keep our relationship going during the times her eating disorder (or ‘Niles,’ or depression) caused her to emotionally check out, she stepped up to sustain it when YOPD did the same to me.
We have more problems than those, of course, and she has more faith in our ability to overcome them than I do. Our parents know a bit about our broader challenges, like her anxiety struggles and my disappointment that we haven’t adopted, but I’ve never discussed Surprise, Surprise with them or anyone else in my family. Best Friend is my primary sounding board and has offered contradictory advice at times about how I should proceed, agreeing once or twice that it was over and otherwise moralizing about marriage, an institution he respects enough to have personally avoided it.**
I have no more idea now than I did eight months ago whether my marriage will go the distance, or whether I should want it to given everything that was sprung on me after we’d tied the knot. It still feels like a ‘gotcha!’ way for Crankenstein to secure what she wanted and deal with the consequences later, once I was less likely to leave. It’s also in stark contrast to the unimpeachable integrity with which she otherwise conducts herself. Why did she give the best of herself to everyone but me? Why haven’t I already left if this is something I can’t get past? It’s not fair or healthy to hold it over her head for the rest of her life, or to waste time she could spend reshaping her life if we don’t have a romantic future.
These things and others — like the effects of a YOPD diagnosis on a young marriage, a subject worthy of its own post — are never far from my mind when I write about relationships, and I wanted this on the record so it’s understood that when I criticize the way that other people take their partners or relationships for granted, it’s from a position of rueful recognition, not righteousness.
* I’d link to examples but Google’s showing me general memes and hers are profession-specific.
** A few years ago I thought about seeking my ex’s opinion on some of it, since she should know me better than anyone in the world — even better than Crankenstein herself, who tends to forget the most personal things I divulge to her within just a few days. Last I’d heard, she wanted us to be friends, and there’s no chance we’d reunite. But I waffled on whether she was capable of seeing me or anything else clearly through the dirt and debris of all the emotional hand grenades she’d lobbed at our relationship all those years ago. I’m not a superior being but I’m not an uncommonly shitty one, either, and it would’ve hurt too much to be open with her about my painful, peculiar marital problems only to be flattened by the same seething hostility and irrational projection that I remembered too well from the past.