"Committed to the Marriage"

Jake was in the process of buying a new home. His wife and he hadn't gotten along very well for years--like they had not had "relations" for 4 1/2 years. If there weren't the kids, he would be gone--but there were the kids. So, he and his wife were "trying to make it work"--whatever the hell that meant. They had been married for 17 years, and "trying" for about 10 of them. To date, about 6 marriage counselors had not helped.

So, Jake asked his wife a few weeks ago if it was really wise to be getting a new house? The response he got was basically that they needed a bigger house and could be just as miserable in a big house as a small, so why not get the bigger house they needed? Ok, except for Jake was the one who pays all the bills. The responsibility was on his back, not hers.

So then last week Jake asked again. She assured him that she was "committed to the marriage". Well, Jake had heard that a long time, but he really didn't know what that means. "The marriage" was for all intents and purposes now just a legal entity. He had heard for years and years that she was committed to the marriage, but what he really yearned to hear was that she was committed to him. Being committed to a person is way different than being committed to "the marriage". Being "comitted to the marriage" can be code for being committed to "not getting a divorce"--which is to say it really isn't being committed to marriage. In marriage vows you make commitments to "love, honor, cherish", etc. But in being committed to not getting a divorce, you're just saying that you won't be calling the lawyer.

That is a big difference, and it makes all the difference in the world.

It's Time to Ramble On

Leaves are falling all around,
It's time I was on my way.
Thanks to you, I'm much obliged
For such a pleasant stay.
But now it's time for me to go,
The autumn moon lights my way.
For now I smell the rain,
And with it pain,
And it's headed my way.
Ah, sometimes I grow so tired,
But I know I've got one thing I got to do,

*Ramble On,
And now's the time, the time is now
To sing my song.
I'm goin' 'round the world,
I got to find my girl, on my way.
I've been this way ten years to the day, Ramble On,
Gotta find the queen of all my dreams.

Jake, on occasion, liked to write. During college he had a professor encourage him to go in that direction, but Jake was foremost an engineer and felt more at ease with a career in engineering than the uncertainty of writing. Lately, Jake had been trying to write, but he seemed to be blocked. He could get a few sentences down, but after that he couldn't carry anything to completion--he just had a few incoherent thoughts. Banging out a few pages had always been sort of easy. His preference in writing was for quasi-gritty, gut grinding reality instead of fiction. He would cloak his writing in the guise of fiction, but mostly his writing reflected his life experiences with the names changed to protect the innocent (or guilty).

Jake found it hard to determine where the block was coming. One of the things he had suspected was that his medication was somehow interfering. In the past few months his doctor had prescribed several different anti-depressants to try and help quell his dark thoughts. One of the medications, Trumpeta, had screwed with Jake's head so much that he felt much better with taking absolutely nothing than taking the medication. With the Trumpeta, he felt like a giant ball of fury, ready to explode in just a flash. With his old medication he never felt so much anger. With his current medication, he felt like he was somewhere in between on the rage scale--definitely edgier than with his original script and definitely less explosive than with the Trumpeta. The reason he had switched from his original script was that he was having trouble concentrating at work--however, he was having second thoughts about the new medication.

Jake suffered from depression. There are theories and theories about the source/cause/root of depression. The theories run the gamut from "it's a spiritual problem" to "it's a medical condition". One of the theores is that depression is just repressed anger that comes out sideways. On one of his older prescriptions, Jake's anger level was much lower, however, Jake wondered, "Is the medication just masking my anger?" In other words, he wondered whether the anger was the root cause and whether the medications helped him or just covered over the problem.

The fear that he might not ever get better gave Jake lots of anxiety. In fact, Jake had more anxiety than what he knew what to do with. He grew up anxious, afraid of his father's outbursts and afraid of almost any form of rejection. It was no wonder that Jake was depressed--in that he felt his life had been one big abject rejection. He had tons of baggage from his childhood, burdens that were dragging and crushing him down.

Growing up, Jake had been the smart kid with all the answers. School came pretty easy to him, but adolescence did not. As round as Jake was now, it was hard to believe that at one time he was a skinny kid. Junior High and High School are no fun for the quiet, brainy non-athlete types. Those times are the bane of kids like Jake. Those societies (JH, HS) put a premium on looks, clothes, athletics, personality, and popularity. Sometimes it seems as if adult life is not that much different, but at least in adult life you weren't forced to be in the same room with the shallow people putting you down. For the most part, you could stay away from the country club where Skip, Buffy, and all the other beautiful people gathered and made fun of the help.

Jake found that an exception was made for marriage. In marriage Jake felt as despised, outcast, and helpless as he did in adolescence. Jake didn't even feel like a person anymore. Sometimes he wondered if he even had feelings at all--he knew he did, they just happened to all be negative ones. Jake felt like he was just a big wallet. He and his wife had a 50-50 relationship--Jake went and made the money and his wife went and spent it. Other than money, the only thing they had to talk about was the kids. When Jake converted to the catholic faith, he knew that the marriage would be over, but he could no longer stomach being a Baptist, going to yuppified Sunday school classes, and seeker sensitive "worship" services. Jake's wife could not stomach him being anything other than a Baptist. The religious differences were one of the reasons they lived nearly separate lives. Jake's wife and her friends thought Jake had joined some cult. One of the wife's friends even went so far as to say Jake had went over to the "Whore of Babylon".

His wife's attitude had been revealed in one recent incident. Jake's wife went on a weekend retreat for some of the women at her church. The retreat was Friday through Sunday, and on Friday afternoon as she was driving out of town, Jake received a call from his wife informing him that on Saturday night he was to drop off the children at a friend's house where they would spend the night and go to church with them. Jake was to pick them up Sunday afternoon. This was discussed beforehand with the children and with the friends, but not with Jake. It was obvious that the schedule had been carefully planned and scripted to ensure that the children didn't go to church with Jake. For his part, Jake did not have a set plan on what to do on Sunday morning yet. He had planned on asking the kids if they wanted to attend with their Dad (Jake) or whether they wanted to attend their church by themselves. Jake was willing to let them decide because a) they were old enough to have a preference, and b) he believed in freedom of choice when it came to religion. The way he was treated in the situation just infuriated and depressed Jake all the more.

I'm not OK, You're not OK--We're Just Liars

Jake knew why people drank or used themselves into a stupor. It was to kill the pain--the pain of feeling all alone in this world, the pain of no one understanding, that deep existential pain that all the poets and philosophers wrote about. Marriage and religion were supposed to be the cure for this. After all, it was religion that said, "It is not good for the man to be alone." However, Jake never felt so alone as during marriage--going off to work alone; being made to feel like an intruder when calling home to talk to his wife; his wife never calling him back to ask how he was doing; hearing the complaints and unhappiness when coming home from work; going to church unaccompanied by his family; going to his high school reunion while his wife did her own thing. Yeah, that was lonely.

Maybe a stronger man than Jake could have tolerated all these things, but Jake was no longer that man. He was now in his early forties and he felt like a used and spent man. Once, he had high hopes for the future, but now he just looked forward to the graduation of his youngest child, still nine years away, when he wouldn't have to worry about taking care of a family or even of himself.

That day. Jake looked forward to that day. In that day, he would just walk away from it all. He wouldn't have to answer to anyone, but could just disappear. His friends and family would want explanations, but there would be none. If they had been paying attention, the explanation would have been clear to them. But as so often happens, his few friends and family had been caught up in their own worlds, much as Jake had been, too caught up to see how Jake was really doing.

"How are you doing Jake?" some of them would ask. Sometimes Jake wanted to answer them, almost to "let 'em have it with both barrels"--to let the asker know how he, Jake, was really doing. In fact, that was one of Jake's fantasies: to really tell the asker how he was doing. During his more testy moments, he wanted to blurt and vomit it all out. "I'll tell you how I'm doing. I'm doing really, really shitty. I'm 41, and I haven't had any sex since I've been 37. It's been four years since the last time and in five years it only happened once. And to top it all off, I think my parts don't even work anymore. How the fuck do you think I'm doing? How do you think any man would feel in these circumstances? Do you even really care? Why do you even ask such a question?"

But, Jake knew that the asker was really just being polite. To explain how Jake was really doing would have taken up too much time.

Jake was deeply angry. He had a brewing cistern of raging disappointment and molten bitterness that would, like a Death Star, vaporize an entire world if it ever was mistakenly released. Marriage and especially the marriage bed were his biggest disappointments. Sometimes the disappointments were all he could think of.

"How are you doing Jake?" "I'm doing alright," or "I'm OK", or "I'm surviving" were his pat responses. Stuff it and pretend--that was Jake's standard operating procedure.