Published: September 20, 2008 10:16 pm            

The mystery of marriage

I’m not an expert on marriage, but I should be. I’ve been married three times, after all. Unfortunately, I’ve also been divorced three times. So maybe I should claim to be an expert on how not to be married.

I was married the first time at the age of 20 — much too young and stupid to know how to choose a life-mate. He was a creative, upstanding person with a generous nature. I was a self-absorbed, naïve little girl. We were wildly incompatible. We managed to produce a baby girl, but that was the only positive thing to come out of the relationship. Remarkably, we remained friends, and now occasionally talk on the phone.

I’m sure I wasn’t the easiest person to get along with, but he had his moments. He had a gajillion black socks, no pair of which exactly matched any other pair. It was nearly impossible to match them up but I tried. He complained to me one day that that I didn’t match his socks properly. So I just stopped trying. I simply threw them all in a drawer, unmatched, and told him that, since I was no good at it, he’d be better off doing it himself. Looking back on it, that was very passive-aggressive of me.

After our divorce, I eventually remarried. He was smart and funny, and a delight to be around – until he got hooked on alcohol and drugs. I loved him with all my heart, but didn’t actually like him when he was under the influence, which was increasingly more frequent. He developed a habit of accusing me of “never” doing things. One time he said I never cooked supper. So I stopped. Oh, I made sandwiches for the kids and myself, but he was on his own. Another time he said I never cleaned house. My reaction was to say, “OK.” And I stopped. He never caught on. I was being passive-aggressive again. Apparently I was too subtle for his befogged mind to comprehend.

He should have gotten a clue when we were first married. We were both working and came home, exhausted, at the end of the day. He plopped himself down at the kitchen table and demanded, “Make me a sandwich!”

I wiggled my fingers at him, said, “Poof! You’re a sandwich!” and sat down across the table from him. After giving me a stunned look, he started laughing. But he didn’t get it. I finally left him because he was dragging the entire family down with him, and I couldn’t allow the children to be hurt. But we had produced a wonderful baby boy, and I’ll always be grateful for that.

I thought I was more grown up when I married for the third time. This marriage is harder to write about because it still hurts. We were married for nearly 20 years. I’m not really sure what went wrong with our marriage, but he fell in love with someone else and decided he’d rather be with her. We never actually talked about the reason. He just announced one day that he didn’t want to live with me anymore. It was, not so coincidentally, the day I found out about the other woman. But we had adopted my granddaughter, Lyra, who is the light of my life and I could never regret doing that. She makes everything else worthwhile.

So if you want advice on how not to choose a mate, or how to end a marriage, I’m your girl. The rest of having a successful marriage is a mystery to me and, at this point, not one I plan to delve into again. I’m getting used to my own company, and that’s enough for now.

E-mail Kay W. Thompson at kaywt@suddenlink.net

        

• Click to discuss this story with other readers on our forums.