The Husbandectomy: My Summer Research Project of Why?

I am a scientist.

When I experience an event that I do not understand, I turn first and foremost to books to explain it. Research is my friend. Look hard enough, and you'll find the Answer. Science is my religion -- I believe in it with all of my heart.

So this summer, when my husband of sixteen years announced abruptly that he was leaving me, with no good reason ("I don't love you and never have" is unacceptable as an answer; furthermore its source proved to be highly unreliable in the weeks and months to come), I hit the books. I worked very hard all summer and I think I am finally ready to wrap it up. Since there is no local campus for the College of Divorce, Infidelity and Abandonment, I have nowhere but here on my blog to present my thesis, gleaned after a summer of research.

I confess, I began my project by polling real live human beings: friends, relatives, therapists, doctors. Any little bit of information that blew my way I gathered up more frantically than a squirrel preparing for an Alaskan winter.  "Is there another woman?" "Who else knows?" "Did he talk to anyone first?" "What am I supposed to do now?" "How could he do this to me?" "What did he know, and when did he know it?"

 And most importantly, "Why?"

Ah yes, that's the big one: "Why?"

But humans, being human, always bring their own experiences and histories to whatever opinion they offer. And so most of my people-opinions were based less on hard scientific data than, say, on something that happened to a friend's sister, or a column they read once in the New York Times. Don't get me wrong, I'm very grateful to these people for listening to my story, drying my tears, refilling my wine glass. But I needed more data. Hard-core data with an "N>1."

Let's hit the books!

In case you've never looked, let me tell you, there are a lot of self-help books out there, and it's very very hard to decide which ones are going to provide any sort of useful information, not to mention writing style, which can be a bugger to bear if it's terrible (as you know from reading my blog -- rimshot!). -- So. Where to start?

I started with an "Idiot's" book because, here I was, suddenly getting a divorce. I didn't know diddley about what papers to file and how lawyers are involved and who gets the house…. If ever I felt like an "Idiot," it was at the very beginning. I was also an Idiot who wasn't eating or sleeping, so I needed a step-by-step handbook to guide me along.

Then it seemed a number of web searches consistently recommended this book, "Getting Past Your Break-Up," by Susan Elliott.

The author also has a website and Facebook page -- even some YouTube videos, but some of those suggest she's kind of a kook, so I stuck to the printed word.

In any case, GPYB (its self-designated moniker) stresses the importance of accepting the cruel hand fate (or your ex) has dealt to you and focusing instead on yourself and your own future. If you've never been through a serious break-up of an intense or longterm relationship, you may not realize this is much harder than it sounds. Everything must have a reason, after all, and it's a cruel trick to have the trauma committed by the one person in the world you most thought had your back. It's easy to think there are ways to reconcile or reason with him/her and change their mind. "If Only"s pollute your thinking and fill your mind from dawn to dusk -- or I should say dusk to dawn, as the midnight hours can be the hardest to bear.

The end project of GPYB is to draw up a Relationship Inventory, in which you take a cold hard look at your relationship, the good and bad, of the relationship itself and then of each of you. You weigh in with the red flags you now think maybe you should've seen way back at the beginning that might've warned you this breakup was, eventually, maybe, in the cards. It's not about blame; it's just about trying to achieve closure with something that maybe ended abruptly and without sensible reason.

I did the homework, I did the Relationship Inventory. I wrote the letter to my ex, which, as per the author's instructions, I did not send. The other mainstay of GPYB is NC, which stands for No Contact. If ever there was a single good idea for getting stuck in breakup hell, it's maintaining the steady trickle of emails and texts and phone message that keep you connected to your Ex.

For me, it wasn't until I committed to NC that I made any progress at all.

The next book I read was "The Grief Recovery Handbook," by John James & Russell Friedman.  Whether it's divorce or death (I have a whole separate post discussing which is worse, but so far I can't make it read as anything less than insulting to one or other or both camps, so let's just say it's a toss-up), the loss of a life partner is just that: a loss. Explicable or not, justified or not, expected or not, that person who was in your home and heart and mind every single day for sixteen years, is gone. Poof. Like a magic trick, but less entertaining.

I am no longer supposed to think about my ex. His life and his thoughts and feelings and problems are none of my business anymore. And that's a lot to deal with. I do have another blogpost about Grief, but suffice it to say it's a process, and a lot of that has to deal with things left unsaid. The Handbook focused on helping resolve those bits of unfinished business to assist the reader in moving along.

Of course, none of this even begins to address the big "Why?"  For those answers, I happened upon a couple of truly amazing resources. The first was "The Wizard of Oz and Other Narcissists," by Eleanor Payson.

For those who don't remember their mythology, Narcissus was a Greek god who was so in love with himself that he fell into his own reflection in a pond and drowned.

Narcissism is a recognized personality disorder by the American Psychiatric Association. It's a complicated condition, but in a nutshell those afflicted are most concerned with their own self-image, and those who cease to be a positive adoring "mirror" are resented and not infrequently rejected and supplanted by a "better mirror," frequently a younger partner or perhaps an employee of the same workplace. -- I'm not diagnosing my ex as a narcissist (though my therapist did imply as much), but there were many uncanny similarities to my own situation, and finally some explanations were becoming evident, illuminating a few of the darker corners of my bewilderment.

Next up on the hit parade was "Runaway Husbands," by Vikki Stark.

Herself a marital counselor, Ms Stark was surprised to find herself on the receiving end of an abrupt departure notice from her own husband of twenty years. "I just can't do this anymore," he told her, as he abruptly left their marital home and moved in with another (younger) woman. (Ms Stark also provides the amusing anecdote that she initially thought he meant the fish she had prepared for dinner that night, that was the "thing" he couldn't "do anymore.") 

In the book, Ms Stark discusses Wife Abandonment Syndrome, and not surprisingly, a fair number of the perpetrators fall under the classification of Narcissist Personality Disorder, but not all of them. Her study is not all-encompassing, but it tells enough stories of other women (and a few men) who were left abruptly and unexpectedly, as I was. The book also addresses peripheral collateral damage, not the least of whom are the children -- a topic I feel utterly unqualified to offer any opinions about, having no children of my own, other than to say the word "heinous" is all I can say about a parent who would abandon his own children.

But beyond the spouse and the children, there are also friends and relatives, a surprising number of whom seem to feel the condition is contagious, and any sympathy directed toward the abandoned partner will "infect" the friends' own marriage. After all, if it truly can happen out of the blue, what's to say it won't happen to them next? And here's the hard truth: the answer is Nothing.

But the book also goes a long way to explain how, though it follows a certain pattern, it was almost always completely unpredictable and once the decision had been made to flee, neither hell nor high water was going to get in the way of that guy leaving!

However. If you're looking for a winner in the Abandoned Spouse's Comfort Resource sweepstakes, you need look no farther than Chumplady.com.

"ChumpLady" is Traci Schorn, a blogger and writer, who discovered her husband had been cheating on her during their eighteen year marriage, thus making her, in her own words, a "chump." Her online blog is not about reconciliation, and it is not for the faint of heart. She uses profanity as liberally as a hypochondriac uses disinfectant, and her biting acerbic wit permeates every line of every post she writes, skewering the adulterous Cheaters and eviscerating their self-aggrandizing justifications for their behavior. Peppered with phrases like "Untanging the Skein of Fuckupedness" and "Narcissist Ego Chow" and "Genuine Imitation Naugahyde Remorse," her blog is a haven for those of us on the receiving end of lies and embellishments and the general morass in which one finds oneself after being abandoned by a cheating spouse. Laughing with the other chumps was some of the earliest laughter (amid tears) I had during the recovery process. I still log on every day to see if sharing my own story will help give some other poor chump the support they need today, and to even take a few pats on the back when I'm having a down day myself.

 

Of course, there are plenty more resources available. Some of them were terrible, either suggesting I just get over it already, or, worse, implying my Ex had no choice but to run for his life because I have a dominant personality, so he had no choice except to cheat! (I confess, even in that book, however, I found some clues as to how he might be feeling, since I think that book was meant for his comfort, not mine.)

And some of the books I still haven't gotten to, though I find I am less and less interested in reading them.

For, you see, I think I'm finally getting where I need to be. I'm glad I had the chance to be married to him, to share a life and do some of the things together I might not have otherwise done on my own. I'm sorry it ended, especially how it ended. But, to channel Yoda for a moment, End it did.

So after a summer spent with my nose buried in every book and website I could find, after charting my Relationship Timeline and Life Inventory Timeline, and smudging the house, and drinking Walnut Extract oil for purity, and infusing my house with Lavender (for calmness) and Lemon (for clarity),...

 … After all that, I think I'm finally putting the "why" to rest. And the answer is: I don't really know and probably never will. There are theories of Narcissism and Sociopathy, genetics and childhood development. But in the end, it doesn't really matter.

Of course, in an actual thesis defense, this would never fly as the final statement. But this is the Thesis Defense of Life. And so, having done the reading, done the research, polled and questioned and queried as many friends and strangers as I could pin down and interrogate, I'm satisfied that I did my due diligence. And I am free.