BEST FRIENDS, MARRIED, LIVE APART
We agreed to disagree, at least about what it took to be a happily married couple. When we moved apart we became friends, maybe best friends, rather than typical divorced married people On occasion during our marriage we had sex, pretty good sex, but life together was contentious and combative and not at all satisfactory. The separation freed us up to be more honest and not competitive, and to accept the other person as they really were, and not try to fit them into the mold of who we thought they should be.
I guess we became more natural, more who we really were. Amazing that being apart brought us closer together. The high point probably came when she started a relationship and called to ask for my advice. For some reason that made us even better friends. I told her what I thought without equivocation or hesitating, being completely honest and as a concerned friend, as opposed to a spouse with an agenda or a stake in the matter. Remarkably, it was a very liberating moment in our lives.
We had met during our freshman year in college. She was a marine biology major, and I was majoring in English. I wanted to teach, and she wanted to study tide pool animals. She was excited by wading in low-tide puddles along the shore looking for creatures, and I wanted to inspire young minds. She wanted a species named after her, and I wanted a wing in the locale college to bear my name.
We had sex on our first date. It was like a mating ritual between young animals in heat. We couldn't undress fast enough. It happened in a boat house on the beach just fifty yards from her parents' home where her mother polished the silver, and her father repaired the hole in the side of their family boat. I had made the hole when I ran it aground on the rocks the previous summer.
I need not say I was not too popular around there for about ten years, and if they had known I was at the time deflowering their daughter there would have been blood spilled.
For the first year of our marriage we were rutting like zebras, going at it every morning and each night dedicated and with passion. But when our sex life began to cool in our second year, it went to Arctic levels so quickly it shocked us both. We could not believe how quickly we lost the urge.
We both got so involved in the every day business of life, it just kind of slipped away from us like a stranger in the night. Before we knew it we were not having sex. Not that we were fighting all the time, but we weren't having sex. We weren't fighting often, but we weren't fucking either.
When it became clear to both of us that it wasn't working out, we sat down at the dining room table to talk it out.
"We're not doing well, are we," she said.
"I wouldn't say so," I said. "I don't think you're suppose to be this unhappy. It just seems like we are on that treadmill and like hamsters we just are making the wheel go round and not getting anyplace. Are you liking where we are?"
"Not much," she said. "You?"
"Probably less than not much," I said.
"I like you," she said.
"Me too," I said. "I just don't... "
"I know," she said guessing what I was about to say.
The next night we decided to move apart. There was no fight, no anger, only sadness. It had been an experiment that did not workout. We decided against divorce, and just called it a parting. I owned a small house I had inherited from my family and I moved there. She kept the house we had purchased together.
A funny thing happened after we separated. First there were calls. Everyday one of us would call the other, then it turned into emails. At first it was an email in the morning, then another at night, then they got to be a few each day. Eventually, it got so there were more emails between us during the day than we had ever talked when we lived together.
From, "How are you feeling?" to questions about recipes, ideas for reading material, or comments about news events. Donald Trump was running for president, and there were thoughts about that incredulous idea. It occurred to me that we were talking more through emails than we ever had as cohabitating married people.
One Sunday morning one message came that just said, "How are you feeling?"
"Fine," I wrote back. "A little tired. Haven't been sleeping much lately."
"Have you tried melatonin?" she wrote.
"Considering it," I replied.
Then came the email that changed everything. "I have been seeing Glen Osborn," she wrote.
"Good man," I replied, feeling good about the honesty, the comfort she displayed in telling me. "I like him."
"I have been considering romance," she wrote using a euphemism for sex.
