Going to Therapy Wrecked My Marriage

I had begged my Was-band to go to couples counseling with me for several years. While we were polite to one another, there was little warmth or connection. We had separate hobbies with no overlap (unless you count watching certain tv shows) and we were beginning to have mostly separate social circles (by which I mean I had friends that he made no effort to know, and he talked to 3 people over his headset that he gamed with). We were roommates that got along decently well—unless we talked about our relationship. Those conversations spiraled like a corkscrew in a too-soft corked bottle of wine: Bits of debris floating everywhere, ruining the contents.

When I’d met him, Was-band liked to rock climb, surf, practice yoga, trail run, and hike. Some of these were hobbies I also enjoyed, and some were things just for him. As someone who always prided herself on being independent, I thought it was attractive that he had his own hobbies and friends and interests. But slowly, over the next three or four years, he became sick with a mystery illness and relegated to the couch. In the decade that followed it felt like he had given up—on hobbies, our relationship, and his happiness. We had stopped talking about anything other than his health; I knew more about his bowel movement patterns than I did his innermost thoughts or desires. And it wasn’t for lack of trying. I was frustrated by his invisible sickness; I couldn’t see it (and his descriptions constantly changed) so I couldn’t fully understand it. And while I tried to have empathy and care for him, it was a lot of pressure to be his “one link to the outside world” as he sometimes called me. He changed his diet but refused to go to the doctor, instead claiming there was nothing they could tell him that would help. “What about a diagnosis?” I asked. “What about treatment plans?”

He (justifiably) seemed depressed by his condition and disappointed in our marriage. When I once asked him if he was happy—because I certainly was not—he replied that he didn’t think he was even capable of being happy. It felt like a ghost was haunting our marriage, rattling chains every chance it got, and standing in the corner of the kitchen watching with piercing eyes. Health conversations made up 95% of the words that came out of Was-band’s mouth, even when he was talking to strangers who would back away as soon as they could exit the conversation.

He began lamenting that no one wanted to interact with him, but then would blow up at me when I’d gently signal to him that he was on a health diatribe again. Even a friend’s breast cancer diagnosis became a vehicle for talking about his health journey. I finally suggested that he might benefit from talking to a counselor about the grief that follows a radically altered life as he’d experienced. His response? “I don’t need help. I’m not depressed, I’m just empty. But I think you need help, so if you want to go to counseling, I think you should. I did my inner work when I was in college, so I’m done.”

I bit my tongue and found a counselor the next day. I began to unravel traumas I’d carried since childhood and my sticky feelings regarding marriage. At one point my counselor asked me what words I associated with friendship versus marriage (friendship: support, love, connection, shared adventures; marriage: endless, restriction, withering, slogging). She challenged my beliefs and made me realize I needed a change. After months of individual counseling, I begged Was-band to go to couples therapy with me as a last-ditch effort. He reluctantly agreed. I waited for weeks, but he made no motion to find a therapist so I found three that looked good and sent him their bios so he could choose.

Our first appointment had us meeting the therapist together, and then each of us got a turn alone with her to share what was on our mind before she brought us back together in the room. We established that he talks more than I do; I tend to select my words carefully before I say them since I know words have power, whereas he shares aloud whatever pops into his head unfiltered. I’m okay sitting with my thoughts and letting them percolate before sharing. He prefers to fill the space with words, even if he’s just said the same thing twice before. He talks with the assumption that I’d eventually interrupt and talk over him, but that isn’t my way of processing.

For the next few sessions, the counselor acted as the interrupter on my behalf, so that I would have an opportunity to speak. She encouraged him to repeat back what he’d heard me say as a mechanism for promoting understanding and slowing down his rejoinders. But Was-band became frustrated and felt like her interjections stifled him. He was affronted by her interruptions and thought she didn’t like him. He railed that I was pretending in front of her and that I was different at home. He wasn’t wrong: In the therapist’s office, I finally felt like I could share what was on my mind without him interrupting and diverting the conversation, whereas, at home, I would mostly shut down after repeatedly-broken attempts to communicate.

After our fifth session, he adamantly refused to go back because he “didn’t want to pay someone who was only on my side.” He didn’t like that idea that counseling stirred up the sediment on the riverbed of our relationship, and muddied the waters. I tried to soothe his concerns. Certainly, therapy agitates what’s already below the surface so that it can be rise to our attention to get filtered out and cleared. I hoped it would mean better communication and a stronger relationship between us, but, like most people who finally go to therapy, but the time we began the deep dive, it was almost too late to swing the boat around.

“Because you heal doesn't mean they will heal, and if you heal and they don’t, you remove what y’all had in common: Compatibility is season-based. Let’s go a little bit deeper: Two caterpillars. They are compatible until they both get cocooned. Because one could come out a butterfly and the other could come out a moth…A butterfly is diurnal, a moth is nocturnal. So you thought y’all were compatible when y’all were crawling. But it took for the cocoon oppression, it took for a season of pandemic…for you to discover that this wasn’t a butterfly: This was a moth.” -Pastor Jerry Flowers

I had suspected for the past several years that my ex and I were very different, but therapy kicked off the cocoon season. I was proud of the emotional work I was doing, the processing and healing; he was frustrated by the way therapy stirred up latent memories and emotions and brought them to the surface to be healed.

Our marriage ended shortly after, for a whole host of reasons. And while I understand that therapy didn’t directly ruin my marriage, it forced me to open my eyes and see what was before me: I was married to a butterfly, while I was a moth. I was pledged to someone I had a hard time communicating with, who seemed more dedicated to the idea of being “right” than in the strength of the connection between us; Who expected me to mirror his communication styles, and wade through the flurry of words he spoke to delve into the intention behind those words; Who was frustrated by my silence, selective wording, and unintentional stonewalling but wasn’t able to allow space for me to share my thoughts; Who needed someone to be there, but didn’t need me to be there. I could have been anybody, as far as he was concerned.

Therapy illuminated the rift between us. It made me realize that while I still want to have adventures and explore the world and try new things and embrace a sense of playfulness, he felt like he’d put all that behind him. I still felt twenty years younger than I am; he felt forty years older than he was. Whatever the circumstances that first brought us together, we were no longer compatible, and therapy allowed me to finally accept that.