I am receiving regular email from
Match.com about my new account. I have been married for seven years and things are going well... so why am I signed up with a dating service?
I'm not. Another person in the world with my name signed up using my email address. The web service does not verify email addresses before associating them with a dater's profile. It's an eponymous email address with a well known public web-email service, easy to see how someone with my same name would invent it if they wanted to toss out a fictitious identity.
A little bit of research reveals a plausible explanation for the invalid email address: This other handsomely named fellow is married and has two children.
No surprise. That's the way marriages go.
Two close friends of the family who have been through all kinds of ups and downs together are culminating a decade of improbable survival and success by splitting up, leaving four young children to float between them in the gap of confusion.
An old coworker of mine nursed their spouse through a serious illness only to discover the betrayal of infidelity on the bright side of convalescence. No talk of divorce yet, just a bizarre, uneasy mystery: How can they recover from this? What will happen to their many children whose ages range from two to teens?
Another friend recently announced the surprisingly amiable separation they are arranging with their spouse. Things are so agreeable between the two of them that they are having no problems finalizing the arrangements: Who takes care of the kids during what times; who lives where; who works; who pays bills -- after the divorce.
A guy I know came home from a business trip to an empty house. His wife had planned to leave him a month or two before but took ill with some nasty upper respiratory knock-out. He took care of the kids and nursed her back to health so that she was all better, healthy, and ready to wipe him out in his absence. She took the kids, the pets, the furniture, the bank account, and every artifact in the house -- including the refrigerator [
1][
2]. All this to venture a grand new experiment with a secret internet boyfriend. The experiment failed and she's a single mom who can't keep entry-level retail positions anymore. She took the kids out of state which constitutes illegal abduction; but he didn't press charges, just transitioned his job to be closer to the kids.
Another coworker came home one day to find his front door wide open. The kids were wandering around unsupervised, including the toddler. He could find his wife nowhere so he called her cellphone. "Leave me alone," was her only goodbye to her children and husband. He operates as a single father of four. She's migrating around from one experiment to another. Identity is a hard thing to figure out.
Another couple who was very close to us has split up and moved back near their respective parents due to infidelity and illegitimate pregnancy. Their mutual children get to bounce between them, in a latent, unintended contest with half siblings.
One of my wife's closest friends was abandoned by her husband without warning one night. They had a great week together and their older sons were growing closer to him as they approached the teen years. Their younger children were confused. "Where's daddy?" "Will he come back?" No. He won't.
Most of these stories sound one-sided because it is hard to capture two conflicting stories in a short summary. Try to picture the stories and then swap the two spouses for each other: As an anecdote, they are interchangeable (it takes two to tango). Sometimes fault and blame are clear; other times more vague. What good is it to judge my friends for their complicated lives?
Marriage is hard. Monogamy is hard. Raising children is hard. Real life is full of these dangerous disasters that hit close to home. We're at the age where some of our friends are single and want to be married but many of our married friends are wishing they were single -- or behaving single. Relatives who have been married for decades and newlyweds who survived the first few years and one child by the skin of their teeth agree: This is scary, heavy stuff.
I'm not a very good person but I love my wife and children. I am grateful for them and their presence in my life. Who knows: We might all come through this life together.
