So, to continue from the last post, why did the lovely, exuberant, enjoyable restless, replete-with-sensory-feasting memoir Eat, Pray, Love sit on my shelf for months during 2008/2009?  And why did it finally come off the shelf and get another look-through?  And why was that an exquisitely painful look-through?  And how does all of that tie in to a visit to the National Cathedral, my friend Virginia’s 70th birthday party, a table at Chef Geoff’s with women ranging in age from 40 to 75?

Yes, I know…I’m heading off into the outer realms of white-upper-middle-class-female angsty navel-gazing myself here.  But…it’s my blog (well, half my blog)–and my fine linty navel.    And (gulp-and-sigh) it’s probably just time to tell a little bit of my story.  Hope I can do it without being maudlin.  

I have heard it said that there is a loneliness that can exist within marriage that dwarfs the loneliness of being alone.  I had been married for two decades, and I felt that aching loneliness.  I was married to a good, conscientious, and honorable man…and I have no desire to trace the process of how this loneliness evolved.  It just did–despite some fairly heroic attempts on both our parts to save the marriage, work at the marriage, be better friends to one another.  The loneliness stabs and thuds were increasing, and I had adopted a number of strategies to muffle them, ignore them, calm them, distract myself from them.  Rich friendships, big family, teaching others, learning from others, exercising, socializing, drinking, reading, entertaining…nothing much new there…Line up the usual methods.

In short, I was immersed in my ways of coping with an unsatisfying and increasingly fragile marriage.  Since I am a high-energy person, my ways of coping often had pretty cool results.  But coping is, by its very nature, a reactive–not an innovative–lifestyle.  So, much of my energy was taken up with pushing down the loneliness and disappointment that there really was not much left for constructing a great future. 

Travel?  That would only mean more one-on-one time–in closer quarters.  And the unavailability of my tried-and-true anti-loneliness mechanisms.

New hobbies or interests?  A new hobby, if it excluded my husband, would exacerbate his feelings of disappointment over being left out of my life.  Which would, of course, result in the spotlight being turned once again upon the architecture of the marriage.  And how we really needed to work harder at it and not adopt new hobbies that would exclude the other.  Which would, in turn, remind me of how much of it really felt like work.  Which would leave me feeling, once again, lonely.  And guilty about that new interest that had seemed so tantalizing when I first considered it.

Well, you get the idea.  Coping means you control carefully what new things you allow to come into your life.  Eat, Pray, Love was all about a woman leaving a coping-within-a-marriage lifestyle and actively, deliberately beginning to welcome new people, places, and experiences into her life.  Her post-marriage life.  To dwell on that was too threatening, too painful, too big.

But then my friend Christina and I realized that Virginia’s 70th birthday was approaching.  And wouldn’t it be great to do something special to celebrate?  Something in DC (which is just far enough away to be a delightful treat)?  Something that involved books and an interesting venue and an excellent meal.  And, lo and behold, when I checked around a bit, I realized that Elizabeth Gilbert was coming to speak at the National Cathedral right around the time of Virginia’s birthday.  Why not get a bunch of tickets and include a few other women?  Christina agreed, Virginia gave it the thumbs-up, and the three of us each invited one other kindred spirit along.

And over dinner the six of us talked and laughed.  Compared notes on our marriages and some of the different chapters of our lives.  Joys and regrets, children and husbands, friendships and lonely journeys, influential books and hard-earned truths.  Times of starting over–and times of just pressing on.  Each of us was either married or widowed after a long marriage.  None of us had ever experienced divorce.  But here we all were going to listen to a younger woman tell us about life after her (relatively) short-lived marriage.  I suppose, whatever our levels of marital satisfaction, there was for each of us a certain luminous attraction to the idea of a smart, vibrant woman documenting all the exciting things she did with her free-agent status.  

And we went to hear Elizabeth.  And the Cathedral was majestic.  And the talk was down-to-earth and warm and funny.  There was nothing oh-so solemn or wisdom-imparting or even particularly memorable about it.  But knowing that the women I’d been with that night–even the ones I’d only just met–sorta "got" me in ways that my husband never would….well, it just made my throat ache and burn.  And–as if if that weren’t uncomfortable enough–here was this successful author with the same quirky, self-effacing style as most of my closer girlfriends–talking about embracing life (and her own individual voice) in ways that she could not have done from within her marriage. 

Enough said, right? 

(And you thought you were going to have to sit through another weeping-on-the-bathroom floor moment.  Nope.  Better just to leave this one at the cathedral door–with just the short postscript that my husband of 20 years and I did separate just a few months after that event.  And that my divorce will be final in June.   And that I am delving into Committed with an overwhelming need to engage in dialogue.  To try with all my might to understand just what this amorphous, consuming, stabilizing, socially productive, ache-inducing, sometimes-comforting, individuality-swallowing, confusing  THING called marriage really is.)

(She pauses for breath and a big swig of Diet Coke.)

part 1

part 3