Navel Gazing

Leaving

For years I had thought about leaving, but didn't go as far as to plan out the detail. I became adept at suppressing those feelings. I didn't pursue love elsewhere, lessons learned from the affair with Pippa, though, I often fantasized about being in a different relationship.

I suppose that's how it happened again. I'd meet someone, feel an attraction, and eventually find myself daydreaming about her. It was innocent, at least that's what I pretended to believe—nothing wrong with entertaining thoughts. I pacified the loneliness as I relished those thoughts. Eventually, the fantasy faded; it always did, until Nina.

What might appear as thin justification of an unforgivable practice for a married man to follow,
I mention only to describe the long period of passive behavior that preceded my second affair.
I was undoubtedly primed to love Nina before we had ever met.

The stories we tell—

So, what kept me there with Samantha over the decades, nearly 20 years married? Some of the best moments of my life were with her and the boys. The last five years, though, were, to say the least, progressively worse. Was I just biding my time, waiting for the right person to come along? I don't know that I believed she would. Without a doubt, the biggest deterrent to leaving was the children.

Our lives consist of the story we tell ourselves. Who we are, who we love, how we react to and treat other people, the choices we make... all wrapped up in this character defined by you, as you. The story may change with age, but one consistency that remained throughout my own, since childhood, was the focus on marriage and family—attributable, in no small part, to my mom and how we were raised.

At some point, though, I lost the ability to reconcile our story with our reality. I imagined the future us as empty-nesters and visualized an existence of isolation and emptiness. I saw what our life had become and believed it would continue to be: a life where two people pretended to be okay and waited for the next performance motivated by a family event or a child's visit. As a result, my thinking changed from "together forever" to "at least until the youngest turns 18," and then that changed too, aided by abstract thoughts of future conversations where grown children divulged wishes for an earlier divorce, declaring we had made their lives miserable.

Again, it's all in the story we tell ourselves.

Regardless, I did not foresee the extent of Samantha's reaction after sharing my desire to divorce.