I assumed couples therapy would be something like high school debate club. We’d each defend our position, and then the therapist would tell us who was wrong （him） and who was right （me） and what was to be done about it. I was looking forward, in a way, to hearing Jon’s perspective. I imagined him squirming and stuttering as he tried to explain his radio silence for almost seven full months, the realization spreading across his face in real time that he had behaved badly. Maybe he would beg for forgiveness. At the very least, he would apologize. After five more minutes, Helen offered to make us some tea.
Two cups of Earl Grey between us, she moved on to ask the usual things: how I’d been sleeping, if I was making an effort to eat well and move my body, how else I was spending my time. She asked if I’d been to therapy before, and I told her I’d tried, many millions of times, to convince Jon to go, but couldn’t interest him in the idea. She adjusted the little chain that dangled from her glasses. “But you’ve never been yourself?”
I said I hadn’t, but only because I hadn’t needed to. My childhood had been more or less emotionally stable. I had a small but supportive social circle in high school and got along well with Hannah. My parents’ split had been relatively amicable. My friends were great, my work was fine, a moderate level of fear and ennui crept in during moments of boredom or change, but that was normal, surely, especially these days.
“And why did you want Jon to seek therapy?”
I told her about Jon’s weed habit, his changeability, the way he got agitated when things weren’t how he wanted them, yet was capable of leaving something rotting in the crisper drawer for weeks. His furious response to losing at video games, the oddly close relationship with that girl from his office, the sneering superiority about the practical and financial value of his work compared to mine. I mentioned one of my favorite wrongs: how, after that girl had been rude to me at a work party, I’d tried to complain to him about it on the streetcar home. He’d brushed my concern aside, telling me it was “unfeminist to tear other women down.” When we got back to our apartment, I slept on the couch.
Telling this story to myself or others gave me a painful twinge, like snapping my feelings with a rubber band. Yet I repeated it often, loving how clearly it cast our roles: him the asshole, me the long-suffering wife. Not all our arguments were so clear-cut.
“Jon was a difficult man,” I said. “But I honestly wanted to love him forever.”
Helen paused meaningfully. All her gestures felt obnoxiously potent.
“And have you ever had any feedback, from Jon or anyone else, that you might be difficult yourself?”
I laughed, hard. A funny therapist! What an unexpected turn of events. I explained that I was not difficult; although I had been a slightly dramatic child and teenager, my feelings were now more or less under control. I was sometimes, maybe, circumstantially difficult, around big deadlines or stressful events like moving, travel, or unexpected changes in plan. I had been known to need extra time to process thornier emotions—grief, say, or hunger—but I understood this to be normal, and in fact I had been told just the other day that I was holding up nicely amid all the recent turmoil in my life.
Actually, Jiro had said I was “holding up okay,” “considering,” then declined to join me at Emily’s wedding, but I did not need to tell Helen everything. I silently congratulated myself on having some of those boundaries everyone was always talking about. Helen was sitting serenely, her hands folded in her lap, trying to bait me into revealing something terrible about myself. Not today.
I told her it was a shame that Jon had not arrived yet, because I had really organized all of this for his benefit. Truthfully, I had found processing the divorce very easy. I was saving money on my new apartment. And I was dating—if anything, I needed to relax a little bit on the dating, because it had been too successful. I had fallen in love already! I was more active than I had ever been, and a new friend had shown me how to move a piece of green stone around my face in a way that meant I would never age. “So, yeah, things are pretty good,” I said. “But I worry about Jon, you know, he doesn’t have as many people to talk to. Men’s support networks are not as strong.”
Helen wrote some things down. “You say you’ve fallen in love?”
I laughed again. “I said I fell in love, but you know how it goes . . . Not great!” I laughed more, but it didn’t sound how I wanted. “I met this guy, and he was lovely. He had some stuff to work on, though—commitment issues, you know how it is.”
“How is it.”
“We don’t really talk anymore. It’s only been . . . eight, nine days maybe? Nine and a half days. Ten tomorrow. Or something. So, you never know, we might rev it back up.”
We sat in unbearable stillness for what felt like forty minutes. （Per the clock, it was three.）
“Look,” I said. “Do I have to pay for the full hour if I don’t use it?”
Helen indicated that I did.
“Right, of course. I’m sorry if that question was offensive.”
Helen assured me it wasn’t.
I told her I was also sorry I didn’t have better stuff to say.
“Better stuff?”
“You know, divorce is supposed to, like, rip through someone’s life, but I’m mostly okay. What do people usually talk about in here, like, mania and eating disorders and stuff?”
“Sometimes.”
“Yeah, I’m alright there. Honestly, I could use some of the discipline I had during my eating disorder!” Why was my laughter coming out like that? I sounded like a haunted doll.
“You had an eating disorder?”
“That was a joke. I mean, I did have one, sort of, in high school. I think everyone did. Do you remember that show where women would get liposuction and nose jobs and stuff before their weddings, and then reveal their new bodies and faces to their husbands for the first time as they walked down the aisle?”
Helen cocked her head to one side. “I think so . . .”
“An eating disorder was basically a rational response to the world at the time,” I said. “But I’m alright now. I’m almost thirty. I feel like you can’t be trying to save for retirement and still focusing on how you thought cellulite was going to be a thighs-only thing.”
It was hard to be looked at this intently. It reminded me of Simon, except worse, because I could not stop it from happening by having sex with Helen. It was not pleasant to think about Simon, so I tried to imagine the sincere faces he would make in therapy, how actively he would engage with the soft, probing questions, loving this chance to dig deeper into any somehow-uncovered childhood trauma. Everything was trauma with that guy.
“It’s not uncommon to fall back on old coping mechanisms during a life change, and divorce is a major life change,” said Helen, adjusting positions. “I’m not a big fan of the word ‘normal,’ but I want to assure you, it’s very normal to have a hard time during a transition like this.”
“It’s been almost a year, though,” I said. “The first few weeks were tricky, but now I just feel, like, nothing, about it. It’s almost as if we were never together. When I try to imagine it, there’s nothing there.”