Three Years

Saturday morning, I was sitting on my couch doing absolutely nothing productive, which is apparently when my brain prefers to open investigations no one asked it to conduct. I was watching television, scrolling through the news and reading an article about two people I barely knew existed until the internet informed me their marriage was over. I knew enough to recognize one of the names. The husband works in music. There were photographs of the house, old quotes about their future and all this melancholy language about the home that had once represented the life they dreamed of building together.

It was sad. Very poetic. A future lost. A home sitting empty where two people once imagined a lifetime. Then I got to the bottom and realized they had been married for three years, and I actually looked up from my phone because, excuse me, three years? We are writing an obituary for forever and the marriage did not survive a standard automobile loan? I do not know why that number bothered me so much, but it did.

Maybe it was the timing. Friday, something had crossed my desk involving a marriage that had lasted only a couple of years. I cannot and will not say anything else about the people or the circumstances. The details do not matter. I remember seeing the length of the marriage and thinking, Lord, that was fast. Then Saturday morning the internet handed me three years, and apparently my brain decided two short marriages in twenty-four hours constituted probable cause to investigate the entire institution.

I should probably disclose that I am not conducting this investigation from a position of expertise. My marital résumé looks like something you would read, pause briefly and then slide back across the interview table with a very polite smile. I have been married twice. My first marriage lasted six years, and I left it believing, with the breathtaking confidence of someone who had apparently learned very little, that next time I would do marriage correctly. I would choose better. I would know more. I would recognize problems sooner. I had already been married once, for God's sake. I was practically board certified.

My second husband and I were together for six years and married for four. I did not leave that marriage. I was left three different times during the relationship, which frankly feels statistically excessive, but here we are. Somewhere recently, I did the math and realized that across approximately twelve years of my adult life spent married to two different men, I cannot identify one uninterrupted two-year period of actual marital stability. There was not one clean twenty-four-month stretch where everybody remained married, lived under the same roof and refrained from emotionally setting the building on fire. That is a humbling piece of arithmetic and a fairly effective way to destroy your confidence before your second cup of coffee.

Once I started mentally inventorying the people I know, the answer to whether this was just me was obviously no. People I grew up with, friends, clients, professional acquaintances, people on second marriages and people on third marriages. People who posted anniversary tributes so sincere they practically required background music and then, six months later, quietly changed their last name online. We have all become exceptionally skilled at noticing that six years of photographs disappeared overnight while maintaining the social courtesy of pretending we saw absolutely nothing.

My first theory was that my generation had simply ruined marriage. I liked this theory because it was quick, judgmental and required very little additional reading. We have no patience. We want instant gratification. We replace phones every two years, order toilet paper from our couches and become personally offended if a website takes four seconds to load. Of course we cannot stay married. It was a wonderfully neat argument until the research had the audacity to interfere with it.

Divorce rates have generally declined from their historic highs. Younger adults are marrying later, and many are more selective about marrying at all. So apparently we are not simply a generation sprinting down the aisle and calling a lawyer eighteen months later because someone chews too loudly. That irritated me because it meant I was going to have to think harder.

Then I found research on what scholars have called low-distress marriages that end in divorce, and that bothered me more. I understand the five-alarm-fire marriage. Affairs, violence, addiction, repeated betrayal and financial destruction are facts my lawyer brain can organize. The house is on fire and everybody sees the flames. What I find much harder to understand is the marriage where the house is still standing but the rooms have gone cold.

Maybe nobody is happy. Maybe two people have stopped touching and started communicating primarily through questions about children, schedules and packages on the front porch. Maybe one person feels lonely and the other feels criticized, and both genuinely believe they are the only person trying. The house is still standing, though, and I keep wondering when exactly we decide it has been condemned.

By the time a marriage reaches a lawyer, everybody has a reason. Usually several. He did this. She stopped doing that. Somebody worked too much. Somebody did not want sex. Somebody wanted sex too much. Somebody spent money. Somebody hid money. Somebody changed. Somebody absolutely refused to change. We love reasons because reasons make clean files, but what a file cannot tell me is the exact Tuesday when a survivable problem became evidence that two people had married the wrong person.

That question was already bothering me when a conversation I had with a friend last week came back to me. I was not in a particularly good place that day, and at some point she looked at me and said, "But Judith, you're independent."

I did not understand what she meant, so I asked her what she was talking about. She told me I do not depend on a spouse. I do not depend on my parents. I get up every morning whether anyone is beside me or not, get myself to work, make my own money and pay for my own life. I do not have to ask another adult for the money I need to survive. Then she told me she could not say the same thing. She was financially dependent on her spouse, and if he were not there, she would depend on her parents. In her words, she expected she would probably be financially dependent on someone for the rest of her life.

I have thought about that conversation repeatedly because she was right. I am independent, and I am proud of that. I hope I am never financially dependent on a man. I do not say that with bitterness. I say it because I like knowing that whether someone loves me on Monday, leaves me on Tuesday or changes his mind again by Friday, the lights at my house remain on. There is freedom in that, there is dignity in it, and for women there is an entire history behind the fact that I can say it so casually.

In 1950, women's participation in the American labor force was about 34 percent. By 2000, it had risen to about 60 percent. Congress did not enact the Equal Credit Opportunity Act until 1974, and before those protections some creditors refused to lend to married women without their husbands' signatures. When I read that, I thought about my friend and me because the difference between our conversation and a similar conversation between two women fifty or seventy years ago is enormous.

I can leave if I need to. I can make enough money to feed my children. I can get a mortgage. I can apply for credit in my own name. I can hire a lawyer, although that would admittedly be an unusual day at my office. I can move furniture, change utility accounts and build another life without first locating a man willing to fund the operation. Many women who came before me did not have all of those choices in any practical sense.

We should be very careful before romanticizing what their lack of choices did to divorce statistics. When divorce laws expanded to allow one spouse to end a marriage without proving traditional fault, researchers found declines in female suicide and domestic violence. Giving people, particularly women, a realistic exit saved lives. I am not interested in returning the key or pretending women were happier because they were trapped more effectively.

But somewhere after my friend told me I was independent, I started wondering whether there is a question hiding on the other side of all that progress that we are scared to ask because it sounds ungrateful. At what point does independence become incompatible with the kind of interdependence a marriage requires?

I do not mean financial dependence. You can pry my checking account from my cold, dead hands. I mean the much less fashionable idea of needing another person at all. We have spent decades teaching women like me how not to need anyone. Get educated. Build the career. Make your own money. Protect yourself. Have your own account. Know your worth. Do not rely on a man. Do not make yourself smaller. Never stay because you cannot afford to leave. Good. Thank God. I mean that sincerely.

Still, I am thirty-eight years old, twice married and heading into my second divorce, and a friend recently had to explain my own independence to me like she was pointing out a superpower I had forgotten I possessed. My immediate reaction was pride. My second reaction, several days later, was considerably less comfortable because I started wondering whether being very good at surviving alone can make it harder to build a life that depends on another person being there.

I know how to need help in an emergency. I know how to be grateful when someone shows up. What I do not do particularly well is build my life around the assumption that another adult will continue showing up. My brain always keeps a spare key under the mat and an exit strategy in the glove box. I know I can pay the bill. I know I can manage the children. I know I can get myself to work. I know, because life has tested the theory repeatedly, that if everybody leaves, I will still get up the next morning and figure out what needs to be done.

That sounds strong as hell until you ask whether a marriage can survive between two people who are both constantly proving they do not need the other one. Maybe the strongest marriage is not two halves becoming whole. I have always hated that idea because I am a complete person all by myself. My friend was right about that. But maybe two completely independent people cannot simply live parallel lives, occasionally have sex and call the arrangement a marriage either. At some point, does another person's existence have to meaningfully change the way I arrange my own?

That question made me think about the whole job description we have created for a modern spouse. We want one person to be our best friend, romantic partner, safe place, sexual partner, parenting partner, financial partner, emotional support system and biggest cheerleader. We want them to understand our trauma without being wounded by the way our trauma sometimes makes us behave. We want them to support our growth but, dear God, please grow in a direction compatible with ours.

We want security without boredom, passion without instability, honesty without cruelty and space without distance. I need you to make me feel safe, desired, understood, encouraged and free. I also need you to recognize when I need space without requiring me to explain it, and could you please put the clothes in the dryer because I have asked you three times.

Then we add children and act shocked when nobody feels sexy. We take jobs that consume us, care for aging parents, fight about money, lose people we love, get depressed, get sick and occasionally become versions of ourselves that would have scared the absolute hell out of the people standing beside us on our wedding day. I know something about that last part.

I am not the same woman either of my husbands married. I can see that now with a clarity I did not possess while I was actually changing, and neither one of them remained the men I married either. Maybe that is the part of the dog and pony show nobody explains while we are choosing flowers and repeating vows. You are not marrying one person. You are agreeing to encounter every version of that person who may show up over the next fifty years.

You are going to meet the exhausted parent, the grieving child, the burned-out employee and the person who suddenly hates a life they once begged God to give them. You may meet the sick version, the depressed version, the manic version, the successful version who discovers success changed them in ways neither of you expected and the version who fails and changes because of that. Some of those people are harder to love, and some are almost impossible to recognize.

Nobody tells you how long you are supposed to wait for a version you loved to come back or whether they ever will. Nobody tells you whether you are abandoning someone during the worst season of their life or finally accepting that this is simply who they are now. This is where our neat little phrases fail me because "protect your peace" sounds wonderful until you have to identify exactly what you are protecting yourself from.

Abuse? Absolutely. A dangerous marriage? Leave. A person going through the worst two years of his life and being an absolute nightmare while he does it? I do not know. A wife whose entire personality seems to disappear under depression, illness, grief or rage? How long is grace supposed to last? Six months? Two years? Seven? At what point is staying commitment, and at what point is it simply refusing to accept reality?

I have been on both sides of that line and I still cannot tell you where it is. I left my first marriage. I fought desperately for my second. I know what it feels like to decide there is nothing left to save, and I know what it feels like to stand there insisting something can still be saved while the other person has already made his decision. I have been certain from almost every possible direction, and one thing I have learned is that certainty is not the same thing as accuracy.

That thought bothers me more than it did even two months ago because I am different than I was two months ago. My life is different. I can look at people from my past and honestly say I do not know them anymore, and they do not know me. I do not mean that dramatically. I mean the versions of us who made certain decisions no longer fully exist. That leaves me with a question I do not enjoy asking: what does it mean when life-altering decisions are made by temporary versions of ourselves who may not remain?

Maybe that is why three years bothered me. It was not because strangers owe me a minimum contractual marriage term before filing for divorce. It was because I read all that language about their home, dreams and future and realized they probably meant every word when they said it. So did I. Most of us probably did.

The research on modern marriage suggests we now ask far more from a spouse than stability and companionship. We also expect marriage to help us become our fullest, most authentic selves. That sounds beautiful until you realize we have somehow made another flawed human being partially responsible for whether we feel sufficiently fulfilled by our own existence.

My grandparents were married for fifty years. My parents have been married for decades. I am old enough now to know those marriages were not magically spared the things that destroy people. They experienced sickness, money problems, death, disappointment and versions of each other I am sure were not particularly delightful.

They also lived in a different world. For women especially, marriage once carried economic necessity in a way mine does not. Divorce carried greater social stigma. Women had fewer opportunities in the labor market and faced discrimination obtaining credit. Until no-fault divorce laws spread, leaving could also require proving legally recognized misconduct. Those are not sentimental little differences between generations. Those are structural reasons people stayed married even when love, happiness or basic peace had left the building.

Some marriages lasted because people knew how to stay. Others lasted because somebody could not afford to leave, because the law made leaving harder, or because the church, family and entire damn town would have treated divorce like a public moral autopsy. The problem is that I cannot tell which marriage was which by looking at a fiftieth-anniversary photograph.

That is why I do not want to turn my grandparents' marriage into evidence that they were morally superior to me. I loved them too much to flatten fifty years of their actual lives into a Facebook quote about commitment. At the same time, I also refuse to believe we learned nothing valuable from people who stayed.

Maybe my friend's dependence is not why her marriage lasts, and maybe my independence has absolutely nothing to do with why mine did not. Correlation is not causation, and I am a lawyer who knows better than to manufacture evidence because I like my theory. Still, I keep returning to the conversation because she meant "you're independent" as reassurance and I received it as a compliment. Now I am treating it like a question.

I know how to live without a husband. I know how to earn the money, pay the bills, raise my children and get myself to court whether my personal life is peaceful or actively exploding in the parking lot. I do not need a spouse to survive, and I am deeply grateful to live in a time when that is true.

What I am questioning is whether marriage asks something more difficult than survival. Maybe it asks two people who are fully capable of living alone to deliberately build a life in which the other person matters enough to create real dependence, not because either one is trapped, but because both have chosen to become responsible to and for each other.

That is the part I am not sure my generation knows how to talk about. We know the language of independence. We know boundaries, self-respect and exit plans. We know how to tell a woman she will be okay if he leaves, and thank God we do. I am not sure we have an equally strong language for explaining why two people who could leave might still choose to rearrange their lives, surrender some freedom and make themselves genuinely vulnerable to the possibility that another person matters.

Maybe previous generations had too much dependence and not enough freedom. Maybe we corrected that exactly the way we needed to, and I am not interested in undoing any of it. However, I am questioning whether maybe we have overcorrected and, somewhere along the way, started confusing the ability to survive without each other with evidence that we should never need each other at all.

That is a very different thing, and maybe that is why I cannot stop thinking about three years.

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Judith L. Hampton

Attorney-at-Law

Hampton Law Firm