“I’ve always loved our relationship. I just want more. I never wanted to hurt you. But I felt like I needed to be honest with you.”
I want you to lie.
But she couldn’t say that.
You couldn’t say that. You couldn’t wish that your husband would keep on lying and keep pretending to be happy so that you could keep things just the way you wanted them, could you?
You were supposed to value and prize honesty.
But his honesty was making her frantically scroll through her every memory of them. Every moment. Every time she’d thought they were on the same page when they were clearly reading different books.
She wanted to jump out of the car and run away and…
That was the problem.
“How long have you wanted to tell me this? How long have you felt this way?”
He turned his head and looked at her. “A while. But there’s not an easy way to do it, because hearing you say that…that I want to fuck other women makes it sound like something I didn’t think of it as. It feels like something bigger to me. Like letting each other have freedom we haven’t had while we were giving our kids structure. While we were trying to be responsible and…to not be judged by everyone in town. What if we hadn’t felt like we had to get married? Maybe you could have gone to school like you wanted to.”
“But I’ve always been happy I married you.”
“Let’s go inside,” he said.
They did, and they sat on their couch—was their couch too much like the neighbors’ couch?—and talked. And talked until their voices were hoarse.
He tried to explain it was about having the opportunity to experience new things without limitations.
She yelled about him seeing her as a limitation.
“Is this just about sex? Is it more blow jobs? Did you need me to get on my knees and show you that I love you? That I want you and this?” She was embarrassed that she was asking that of her husband, bargaining with her body, but shit, what did he want from her?
“Is there something you want to try? Is there…”
“No.” He put his head in his hands. “Because it’s about me. It isn’t just about sex. It’s about… I want to feel like a whole person on my own. Someone who can go out and see where the evening goes sometimes.”
“And still come home to your wife who made you dinner?”
“No. I want to come home to you because I love you, and you’re my partner. But there’s a way we look at marriage in society that’s…like we’re one.”
“Again,” she said, “I seem to recall that actually came up in our marriage ceremony.”
“I don’t believe in some of it. Not anymore.” He sat up straighter. “A lot of what we did was to make this…traditional family for the kids. Now we don’t have to consider them first. We can consider ourselves first.”
I considered us first.
But she wouldn’t say that out loud because it was even sadder than offering a blow job right now.
She kept making accusations. He kept telling her it was abouthim.
No matter how mean she got, he took it, and he never yelled. Which made her angrier, because he was making her feel like she was the one who was unhinged, and she wasn’t the one who had changed everything. By the time she was done, she felt exhausted and horrible and like she was a stranger too.
“We don’t have to do this,” he said. “We can go on the road trip you wanted. We can put a pin in this.”
Except now she knew. That his smiles weren’t all the way real.
That when he kissed her good-night, he was going to sleep in a bed, in a life, that didn’t satisfy him, and it made her want to light herself on fire to escape the burn of that humiliation.
She’d thought she was living in a happy marriage, and her husband wasn’t happy.
