Scott had informed her that he didn’t love her anymore. He was sorry but he couldn’t help it. He didn’t have much hope for the marriage; he thought it might be best if they broke up. He wanted to cash out. She was holding him back, expecting too much from him.
She was completely caught off guard. She had been asking him to apply himself a little more to what she thought had been a pretty satisfactory partnership. Their relationship was hardly perfect, but then whose was?
They’d been seeing a marriage counselor for three months, and she had no grasp of how that was working out. Some days Scott would say, I think we’re making progress here—I know I’m feeling better about things. Other days he’d grumble that she wasn’t really involved in the marriage, or their family life for that matter. He told her she was “emotionally unavailable” too often. “When was the last time you watched me play ball?” he asked. “When was the last time we went to a movie?”
Her work was very difficult and demanding, what more could she say? If she wanted to keep her job, she had to be on top of it. She worked sixty hours a week and brought work home, as well.
It was when he started saying things like, “I feel like I have a hole in my heart,” and “I’m not really living, just existing,” she began to suspect there was another woman. Those were women’s words. Scott didn’t say things like that. In fact, he had trouble sitting through a chick flick with dialogue like that. It made him roll his eyes. Now he was saying those things to her with a straight face.
In their thirty years together, two dating and twenty-eight married, she had suspected there were other women now and then, but there was never any clear evidence. Just a name that came up too frequently, that faraway look in his eye, a very unreliable schedule. He’d go MIA for a while. During their first decade of marriage, he traveled all the time while he was in sales. She’d had trouble getting pregnant and blamed his travel schedule. When she passed the bar, he was more than happy to take a less demanding, less lucrative job to improve their odds at reproduction. Seventeen years ago she had Amber and eleven months later, Olivia. He was a stay-at-home dad and she was so happy; her baby daughters were everything to her. She was a successful businesswoman with a supportive husband and two beautiful daughters. She didn’t have a jealous bone in her body.
But she had to work. She was the bread and butter of the family. Getting home to her husband and babies was her reward for every hard penny she earned. She was successful, Scott urging her on every day while he stayed home and planned their vacations. In more recent years when he had so much time on his hands because the girls were self-sufficient and he only worked part-time, she never wondered where he was—he was busy every minute. They texted and spoke several times every day.
Maybe she should have worried sooner. Now she didn’t know what to do. She had asked him about other women and he’d said, “Don’t be ridiculous.” That wasn’t a real answer, was it? Should she get a detective? It was a thought. She didn’t know what she would do, how she would live. What would the girls say? Do? Would Scott try to take them from her? They adored him. Would they want to be with her, when she worked sixty-hour weeks?
At first she thought she couldn’t let him leave. She didn’t know how she’d get by. It never once occurred to her that her life might be slightly less tense without him constantly keeping score on her hours and familial contributions.
Now that she thought about it, Scott had always been a lot of emotional work. It wasn’t easy trying to get a law degree while making sure she was always a good wife. True, she couldn’t do all the wifely chores and work as an attorney, but a good balance was that she made enough money for a weekly cleaning lady. What she did do was never mention she was the breadwinner, never minimize his contributions. She took time to praise his every effort, compliment his mind and frequently mention how stimulating she found him, scream with joy during mediocre sex. It wasn’t until he said he no longer loved her that she realized the enormous emotional weight of that effort.
Scott ran the house and made sure the girls got to school and every extracurricular activity, lesson or practice. Now that Amber was driving, he had even more free time. It took him roughly two hours a day to do his chores—she still did the laundry, stopped for groceries on the way home, cleaned the kitchen after dinner. The hours left over—some six or more a day—he could devote to biking, kayaking, working out, running, hiking, swimming or various sports training. He was a member of two bowling leagues and one baseball team. He watched hours of sports on TV, most of it recorded for later. He worked part-time at the sporting goods outlet off and on, never more than twenty hours in a week.