How to Tell When Your Marriage is REALLY Over - Part ONE

Several weeks into our separation, my husband asked me if I would be willing to speak with his therapist on his behalf because, “You know me better than I know myself.”

I agreed and figured it was a good opportunity to vent, at the very least.

During that meeting, his therapist told me something I have since found to be true: “There will come a day when you will know, without a doubt, that your marriage is well and truly over.”

At the time, I remember thinking it can’t be that simple! I was so filled with confusion about the future that the thought of ever having any clarity about “us” seemed farfetched and unlikely.

My husband and I had been married for just over 10 years. Our marriage began its slow but relentless nosedive shortly after the birth of our first child.

It wasn’t like you see on TV or in the movies. There were few bitter fights, and even fewer whispered shouting matches behind closed doors. We got along pretty well, for the most part, and when we made the time to go out together, we seemed to enjoy one another’s company. We even agreed on a number of things: politics, parenting styles, food, movies, travel… But our physical intimacy hit rock bottom (as in zero sex) after child number two, and we seemed to drift in and out of one another’s lives from that point on, like amicable roommates rather than husband and wife. 

Yet for many years, due to his work schedule, I was in an enviable position: yes, I was doing the majority of the child rearing and running of the household, but I had a fantastic budget—courtesy of said husband—and once the kids were in school, I had tons of free time during the mornings and afternoons to do with as I pleased. I was able to rediscover myself, make new friends, and crawl out of that place all mothers go to when they are deeply immersed in caring for their young children.

Yet I also felt incredibly lonely and bitter. So, apparently, did my husband.

See, my husband suffers from debilitating anxiety and depression. He’s had it for as long as he can remember and worked tirelessly for years to try and manage the symptoms, with mixed results.

Marriage to someone with depression (and a side of anxiety) is a lot like living with a giant but invisible skunk in the middle of your house. It stinks to high heaven and is hard to ignore but just when you think you’ve located it, it’s gone. And just when you let down your guard and think it might not return, it’s back again, smelly as hell, but in a different location.

His mood swings and uncertainty weren’t easy to deal with early on in our marriage, but adding two children to the mix took the situation from moderately challenging to DefCon 5. In fact, during the last several months prior to our separation, he’d been in the throes of yet another “dark” period; his darkest yet. This typically entailed long stretches of silence, extreme irritability, detachment, tiredness, and overall loss of interest in pretty much everything.

Which is why, the night I walked into his home office and discovered him Skyping with the woman he’d been cheating on me with for the last several months, my first thought was, “How on earth was he able to find the mental, emotional, and physical stamina to meet and have sex with someone? Not to mention, hide it from me?”

My second thought was, “You f-cking asshole!”