My mother was not happy — she might have even been a little panicked — when I told her I was planning to study in Mexico for a year. “You’ll meet someone and get married and then never come back,” she said with a worried, pleading look on her face.
“Oh, come on, Mom, no I won’t,” I said, likely with an eye roll.
Really, though, she called it: that’s exactly what I did. Deep down, of course, I’d known there was a possibility that she was right.
I’ve always been a romantic, and especially in my younger days had a terrible habit of imagining a life-long romance with pretty much every boy I came across that I thought was kind of cute.
The characters in my mind might shift, but their role remained the same: they’d be madly in love with me and treat me like a queen forever. Indeed, the reason for my breaking up with pretty much anyone over the years has almost exclusively been for failure to treat me with the reverence I deserve, though not before humiliating myself, usually for much too long, trying to get them in line.
I’m mercifully over that tendency now, having finally arrived at a point in my life (and a partner in my life) where I’ve learned to chill out a bit. Now, I sit down and discuss things like a grown-up instead of just trying to manipulate the other person into “acting right” through crying, mistakingly thinking their love for me will translate into doing whatever they can to cure my sadness/disappointment/upset.
It took me a while to realize that making another person responsible for my own emotions is always a losing game; it takes all of us a while, doesn’t it? But when I arrived to Mexico as a 20-year-old, I was still squarely in that mindset.
A new partner is always fascinating, but a new partner who speaks another language and has a completely different cultural backstory is extra fascinating and interesting…so much so, in fact, that things as basic as general compatibility — that is, sitting down and discussing how both sets of your basic values could possibly play out should you choose to smush your lives together — can get ignored longer than they should.
Add to that the fact that your average Mexican is hands-down about 50 times more romantic than the rest of us bozos, and it’s easy to see how “words love language” people especially can get swept up in the moment for quite a while.
And besides, when you leave your culture and your family behind in order to be with someone, the stakes to make it work are pretty high, as is the potential for co-dependence: when you’re a stranger in a strange land, you cling to your person extra hard, for extra long, accepting things you likely wouldn’t under different circumstances.
My own decision to end things came much later than it should have. I remember telling myself, “Well, this is just what adulthood is; happiness is not a reasonable expectation.”
So the failure to find compromises between our mismatched values, including for things that seemed like they shouldn’t be a big deal (pro tip: the dishes are indeed a Very Big Deal) had taken its toll, and we’d disappointed each other so many times that it was a wonder we were tolerating each other at all. In hindsight, we weren’t really: the time we spent together was fairly minimal.
Of course, it’s still a sociological fact that (heterosexual) marriage tends to benefit men more than women. They might gripe about things, but they still usually get a pretty great deal. My own marriage was no different, which I think at least partially explains what happened later.
When the last ounce of hope had evaporated and I finally got up the nerve to say I didn’t want to be married anymore, I was expecting a response somewhere along the lines of, “Yeah, you’re right…this just isn’t working.”
Much to my surprise, that’s not what happened at all. The care, the effort, the consideration, the attention — it was all magically back, and in some cases, presented itself for the first time; everything I’d asked for all those years, laid out before me.
But the part of my heart able to absorb it had already been permanently dried out, and there was simply no reviving it. I wasn’t trying to be cold, but I mean…dead is dead.
His hurt, at that point, developed an icy, sharp crust over it. This was the point at which I discovered the cultural script for Mexican men unable to prevent their partners from leaving, and it shocked me (I’ve unfortunately seen this exact same script played out among other friends). My own “Hey, wait a minute,”s were always met with a “No, you did this. These are the consequences you must live now with.”
There would be little communication. There would be an iron curtain brought down in my child’s life, her world with her father 100% divided and separated from her world with her mother, complete with suggestions that I was unstable and unsmart in my decisions. There would be painful strikes back at my ignored attempts to make our separation official, in one case involving his girlfriend accusing me of bogus “threats” with the authorities, something I’ve since come to realize is an actual strategy that lawyers here sometimes suggest.
Though things have calmed down slightly, I’m still fairly consistently accused of “crossing the line” when I insist on not allowing him to act as if I did not exist. Things are still not easy.
The cooperation and yes, even friendship I’d envisioned may very well not ever come to pass; for now, we’re finding about as much common ground as old-school feminists and trans activists are finding with each other.
But I no longer sit around thinking, “Well, this is just adulthood, Sarah; you don’t get to be happy.” My life looks very, very different now.
And that’s progress, right?
Enjoyed reading your writing. I believe that all individuals in this world go thru the stages of single, romance , marriage and some couples are not able to work out all the bumps in the road
Then the road of separation and the final stage is Divorce. All we can do is try to agree on all factors of household belongings and the hardest is your children have to learn they are still loved but have two different homes. I been thru these same disappointments of life. But the End your Smiling and able to kick up your heels with Happiness once again.
You just wrote the script for m first marriage, to a Tabasqueña. Don’t regret it and have followed it with 2 good ones but it took its toll. Divorce is the death of a relationship and needs to treated as such.move on as best you can.