The 52 Week Project
I’d always wanted to get married
In an extract from The 52 Week Project, Lauren Keenan explains the impact of separating from her husband.
I’d always wanted to get married. Of all the parts of the script, getting married was the scene I wanted the most. Of all life’s variables, it was also the one thing that I assumed would definitely happen. It wasn’t a case of ‘‘if’’, it was a matter of ‘‘who’’ and ‘‘when’’.
When I was a little girl, my sisters and I used to play ‘‘weddings’’. We took turns to prance around in Mum’s old wedding dress, while the others swayed, doe-eyed, to terrible music.
At the age of 10, I asked Mum what the happiest day of her life was. She said she didn’t know. I was confused. How could the answer be anything other than her wedding?
At 13, I wrote in my diary what I wanted my future husband to be like. He had to be handsome, I said. He had to be musical. Most importantly, I wrote, he had to have ‘‘done IT’’ before, for I would most certainly be a virgin, and wouldn’t know what to do on my wedding night. Not ‘‘it’’; 13-year-old me was clear on that point. IT. My 13-year-old self would have been shocked at the version of me that got married ... Let’s just say Alan isn’t musical and leave it at that.
I loved movies with happy endings: romantic comedies and sweeping love stories. The part in Titanic that made me cry the hardest was the touching scene with the elderly couple cuddling in bed. When I was single at 24, someone at work was playing with a Magic 8-Ball. ‘‘Will Lauren be married in the next two years?’’ she asked, shaking the ball. ‘‘Yes,’’ the ball said, and I wished upon wish that it would be true.
There were a few frogs to be kissed first but I was always sure I’d find my prince and have my happily ever after. That was the way things worked, after all. It was implicit in all the self-help breakup manuals my friends and I quoted at each other. It was explicit in our favourite such book, the single girl’s Bible, He’s Just Not That Into You. We shouldn’t waste time on the losers who aren’t that into us, the book says, for ‘‘there’s a guy out there who wants to marry you’’. Those words brought me comfort after a date went badly, or when someone I felt a spark with turned out to be a bit off.
Indeed, I was sure that I’d meet my soulmate. It was just a matter of time.
[But] even though separation and divorce is a statistical reality for so many who get married, there’s no script for when you do. Advice on getting married is everywhere. There are magazines you can buy and online forums to read.
On the subject of weddings and marriage (for, to many people, they are one and the same), it seems everyone has something to say: who should pay for a hen’s night; whether guests can wear white to the wedding; the etiquette for inviting children; who should pay for the alcohol; whether or not a bridesmaid ought to be sacked for dying her hair bright blue.
Not so with separation. People don’t know how to react. Especially if nothing bad has happened.
When Alan and I first separated, I was asked if he had ever hit me. No. Someone asked whether one of us had been ‘‘sleazy’’. Again, no.
What about financial problems? According to finance expert Mary Holm, Relationship Services has reported that differing views on finances is the most common reason for relationships ending. That makes sense. But was this a problem for Alan and me? No, not really. Apart from one dark day in which the need for a four-slice toaster was debated at length and with much vigour, we’d always been on much the same page with finances.
Four-slice-toaster-gate was no Hurt Locker. For us, separation was nothing like that – nothing so black and white. It was simple and complicated all at once, in that the thing that made Alan and me Alan and me was gone, and we didn’t know how to get it back.
Of course, the question of why it happened is one I’ve asked myself a lot. A chronic over-thinker at the best of times, this is something that literally kept me up at night.
After having children, Alan and I started socialising apart, because going out together was impossible without babysitters. Of course, if we had a magic time-machine and could go back, we would have used babysitters more. My aunt, mum and sisters have been fabulous babysitters over the years but, at that time, we’d used them so much for things that really mattered that it felt like taking the piss to ask them to sit so we could go to the pub for a burger. And we didn’t pay anyone to do it either, for a mixture of financial reasons and pure inertia.
I didn’t realise it at the time, though, so we did very little together. Alan and I had both made new friends, me through work and parenting groups, and him through his hobbies. We didn’t know each other’s friends any more. You can be different versions of yourself with different people, and the version of me I was with the friends I’d made in recent years was different from the person I was with Alan.
I think I liked my friendversion more than my Alanversion. Not because of Alan but because the version of me Alan saw had so much housework to do and slouched around the house in old, stained clothes. We had a party not long before our separation, a house-warming with so many guests you could hardly move. It was an amazing evening – I laughed and chatted and went into town afterward and danced the night away.
I didn’t notice anything amiss until someone pointed out to me later that it felt very much like my friends and Alan’s friends were in separate groups. Because my new friends didn’t really know Alan, as soon as we hit troubled waters and I started talking to the people around me about it, I was talking to people who weren’t what Shirley Glass calls ‘‘friends of the marriage’’. Not because they were a........ who wanted us to separate. It was simply that they didn’t know Alan so couldn’t call my bulls... if I lost perspective about the state of our relationship or who Alan and I were as people.
This compounded the other issue we had: the good, old-fashioned, parenting-killing-the-romance gig. When you’ve got kids, however hard you and your partner try to be on the same team, there are times when you’re running towards separate goals. Not only are the chores endless but you end up having to constantly negotiate with each other. Who gets to lie in? Who will get up to clean the urine-soaked sheets at 3am? Whose invitation to a Great Fun Event on a Saturday evening is more important, and who will have to stay at home?
Who will call in sick to look after a child when the vomiting bug of doom comes knocking? This last one is particularly difficult, because it requires a conversation with a hidden subtext. Who is busier at work? Whose job is more important? Who earns more? At this moment in time, whose career comes first?
In all my tossing and turning, though, I decided that our separation was about how we had changed as people, and how our 2017 versions weren’t as well-matched as our 2005 versions had been. The dynamic we shared when we were 20-somethings didn’t work as well in our late 30s.
We had both changed. Motherhood grounded me. I discovered writing – a hobby very solitary by nature and difficult to share.
Alan had always needed cave time but, whenever he stepped out of his cave, I’d be there, waiting. When I became more introverted, he’d step out of his cave but I wouldn’t be there like I used to be. I’d be in my own cave. And when I decided to come out of mine, he’d be back in his. We didn’t realise this was a problem until it was too late.
We didn’t realise that we needed some sort of phone line between our two caves until weeks would pass, and we hadn’t had a single conversation that wasn’t about groceries, the children or chores.
We’d both changed individually, so the definition of who we were together had also changed. By simply growing up and flourishing as individuals, our railway tracks had started to veer in opposite directions.