Things you only know if… you’ve thought about leaving your husband – but stayed
Ten years after her wedding, Anna Whitehouse recalls a time she contemplated walking away from her marriage…
on the day I said ‘I do,’ I never imagined I’d consider walking out 10 years later. As you’d expect, my wedding was filled with all the glorious frippery of a day that absolutely does not represent marriage. The coat-hanger smiles, the ethereal dress, the unending joy and the hordes of people telling you, ‘It’s the best day of your life!’ are all well and good, but when the party dies down, you’re staring down the barrel of a lifetime with the same person.
I love my husband, Matt, very much.
I said ‘I do’ with the gusto of an X Factor hopeful and it was undeniably a Very Good Day. But somewhere between signing the marriage registry and losing five pregnancies – and a little bit of ourselves along the way – we started to lose each other.
You get so distracted ticking off the big milestones: job! Marriage! Babies! (If you’re lucky and you want them, of course.) The ‘till death do us part’ bit creeps up on you. I didn’t expect marriage to be a bed of roses and I certainly didn’t buy into Disney’s warped ‘happily ever after’ narrative. But, a few years into parenthood with our two daughters, who are now six and two, I didn’t expect our only physical time together to be slumped in front of Netflix wearing onesies, close perhaps in sheer proximity but feeling very much apart.
I also didn’t expect it to feel so normal for there to be a cold patch in the middle of our bed, signalling another night slept on opposite sides. Gradually, we grew snarkier and huffier over mundane things we never cared about before. It felt like we’d been going in the same vague direction for years but on parallel paths. And suddenly he’d turned into someone I simply sobbed at for not doing, saying or mending enough.
Most of all, I didn’t expect that would lead to my wanting to leave, and yet, in the dark depths of post-natal depression in 2017, I did. The night I told Matt I’d had enough started with an argument about something banal and ended with a screaming match. I was angry but mainly I felt lonely. I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to leave or I wanted a hug, but I marched upstairs, a disappointing halfway house of actually walking out.
Upstairs is purgatory. It’s a place where you huffily wait, tear-stained and confused about why your relationship doesn’t look like a Jackie Collins novel. I sat in this temporary hole of self-punishment and sobbed into one of my child’s toys.
It wasn’t the first time I’d thought about leaving; it came after a phase of feeling uncertain about our marriage, at a time where it felt like weeks would go by without a cuddle or a hand-hold. It was also around the time a friend who had recently divorced sent me a link to her new flat. That made me start to picture a life without Matt. I’m not sure I ever thought I’d follow through with it, but I did wonder what my own flat would look like – even what my Tinder profile would look like. I thought about the sex and if it would feel weird with a stranger after doing it with the same person for years.
It made me feel free, perhaps, and like I would be seen as ‘Anna’ and not as someone’s wife. But then I thought about the heartbreak of telling the kids and not getting to see them every day. With kids involved, it can often feel like you can’t just leave. First there’s the logistics and admin: the packing, the managing of childcare pick-ups and drop-offs, timetabling, a snack inventory and actually having somewhere else to go. Getting out of the door in time for the school drop-off is hard enough – without having to do it alone. Most importantly, however, I realised it didn’t matter how much we huffed and puffed, I knew I didn’t want to blow our house down.
Our children were too important and, though it took me a while to realise it, so are me and Matt to each other. When you think about leaving your husband it makes you feel terrified and lonely: about to enter a new world you’re not sure you want. My thoughts scared me and made me feel guilty – especially when I realised Matt had never felt the same.
Two hours after I marched upstairs that night, Matt came up and said he’d never want me to go. It didn’t solve everything but, right then, that was all I needed to hear. I said it back and, well, we haven’t lived happily ever after but we’re still together and our arguments are less anger-fuelled. Since then, we’ve written a book together that explores marriage and what it takes to make it work. Writing it helped to bring us back together; it made us listen to each other, write down our own rules and think about what works for us. We’ve found it’s about taking each other’s needs into account, making time for each other and not letting little issues bubble over.
Life still feels mired in admin and passive aggressiveness at times – something I fantasise about leaving behind. But I recently spoke to the octogenarian sex blogger Joyce Williams about this, and she made me realise how many couples in their thirties and forties are in this quagmire of parenting, exhaustion and financial strain. But, she filled me with hope when she said, ‘Cling on my lovelies, like a mollusc to a rock because, yes, it’s so very hard. But it is also so very lovely on the other side.’ So like many married couples, we’re just going to keep on trying.
‘Where’s My Happy Ending?’ by Anna Whitehouse and Matt Farquharson is available to buy 6 Feb (£14.99, Bluebird)