My friend Kirsten is a social worker and has spent her whole life dealing with broken and fractured souls, she claims that people can mend, if they want to that is. Once you recongise that you need healing, you can work your way up to reclaiming you life and starting it over.
Life however is subjective, and right or wrong depends solely on the way or direction you look at things. Viewed through the lense of a camera, the same object will look different depending on how you shed light on it, and so differs one’s interpretation of events and people depending on previous experiences and knowledge.
A sceptic by nature, I do question all the time. It took me seven years to realise that the initial failure of my marriage was not my fault. I was trapped into believing that I was not good enough or not working hard enough. It did not occur to me at the time, that outside my limping relationship I am a fully functional human being, who is capable of having friends, taking responsibility and working for a goal.
In the space of seven years I carved myself an existence that is separate from my spouse, I became a person in my own right, I started to see that I was getting lost, being swallowed in the demands of a relationship and one man’s ego.
Having been through all that, I am very reluctant to go through this over again.
I have struggled with the choice between restarting the old relationship on new grounds, or severing it to look for happiness somewhere else. I have swung between the two extremes a few times.
In the end I realised that severing my marriage might be the more practical choice, is a finality that I could not live with. It would simply mean that I have given up, and chose to turn my back on the element of goodness present in my husband.
So I chose to continue on in the balancing act called marriage, it is much more difficult since the success depends equally on both people. Sometimes it is much easier to dance solo.
Still, there are moments when the effort is worth it. It is nice to have someone you care for to come home to, and to be the recipient of simple yet subtle expressions of love and caring.
All around me I see couples working on this balancing act, and whoever is solo are constantly looking for someone to complete them, so maybe there is general consensus that living as a couple is better than facing the world solo.
The Loskop Diaries 