The "happily married" couple seems like a myth these days. Even a self-proclaimed happily married friend once told me that Michael and I get along better than she and her husband do. Their relationships with their exes are strained, often existing solely for the children. My divorced friends tell me they can't imagine having a sustained, civil conversation with their ex-husbands, much less having fun with them. For now, there is security in the knowledge that neither of us is going anywhere. Surely by then we'll be living with other people, which we intend once the kids move out. I picture us winding up old together, sharing a bottle of wine in our rocking chairs. The time we were stuck together in lockdown during the pandemic highlighted how much Michael can feel like a sibling - someone I love, someone I would defend, whom I would show up for without question, but who also often annoys the crap out of me. Michael has a girlfriend, and I have a boyfriend. We aren't attracted to each other sexually, which simplifies our expectations. We care for each other, but we don't have to be careful. "Surely it sometimes happens by mistake." Few of them believed me when I told them that he and I don't have sex. My life with Michael was even harder to describe to potential lovers. I missed his friendship, his humor, his kindness. I had told close friends more than once I wished I could just live with Michael again. The truth was, it didn't take a lot of deciding, and we doubted it would take a lot of trying. He needed a place to live just as my second ex-husband was moving out, so we decided to try living together again. Michael tried living with another woman, but it lasted all of three weeks. I met someone new, remarried, and made a spectacularly unsuccessful blended family that ended in divorce, too. We socialized, too, laughing easily with one another and supporting each other through whatever struggles or heartbreak came our way. We parented our two children, communicating often. So we agreed to separate, and I moved into another house. All of our expectations - for us, for the children we would have - had failed us. We had been sleeping in separate rooms for years at that point, and we hadn't had sex in ages. Our love and respect for one another were intact. By the time we emerged, we were too far gone. I took refuge in an emotional affair, succumbing to my old vice. Michael and I couldn't have known how this would send us both into grief strong enough to pull us far away from each other. Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.īy the time our first baby was two, we understood that he was on the autism spectrum. And before long, sex had become about trying to make a baby. Of course we did eventually, but not very often. Yet we didn't make love the following night, or the night after that. We didn't make love that night, because we were tired, naturally. Below, windsurfers dotted the Columbia River. We were married on a cliff at a beautiful hotel in Oregon's Columbia Gorge. We married when we were 30, both of us believing - as all soon-to-be married people believe - that it was forever, that we had found our life partners, that we would always be happy together. Of that, I was sure.Īfter years of mistakes and loss and heartbreak, I found love with Michael. I was sure that if a man loved me, I would finally be worth something. I turned to boys to get the attention I desperately craved and, later on, I turned to men. Her abandonment, and my father's detachment, left me not just motherless, but also certain that I was unlovable and unworthy in most ways. The day my mother left, something big shifted inside me. My father wasn't interested in my sister's or my grief, so we were left to negotiate it alone. We lived in a nice apartment across the George Washington Bridge from Manhattan, but we weren't much of a family. When I was 12, my mother moved to another country to pursue a medical career, and left my sister and me with our father. Their self-involvement during that time left me feeling adrift. My childhood was marred by my parents' ugly divorce. In our current living arrangement, I have found something that eluded me for much of my childhood and my entire adult life. And for the last two years, he has been my roommate. He has been one of my best friends for almost 20 years. I don't like to call him my ex-husband, because that implies that our relationship is over, which is far from true. I live with my two children and my ex-husband, Michael.
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