It was a decade ago, after a nameless malaise slithered from our backyard woods to the center of our lives, that my relationship with my husband, Mark, threatened to break apart. In the first grips of that illness, we were weary and disoriented. Later, diagnosed with tick-borne Lyme disease (easily curable early, but often devastating later on), we found ourselves in ruin: Mark was so cognitively scrambled he had trouble reading a sentence, threatening his work as an editor. My headaches were relentless, the fatigue profound. Our two sons seemed finished: The oldest, then 16, was bent as if hit by a Mack truck and in so much pain he could barely crawl across a room. The youngest slept 15 hours a day.
This is not a doomsday tale: The heart-stopping fear that our children would stay sick; the nightmare of skeptical schools; the near-bankrupting cost of all those wrong diagnoses and treatment for what we had; all this is behind us.
Mark and I survived the crucible, but it transformed each of us so completely—and in such opposite ways—that our relationship was put at risk. From illness to lost jobs to the deaths of loved ones, from drug addiction to wars, partners are altered by experience; and the more profound, unusual, or shattering that experience, the bigger the change. "Every couple constitutes a system," says Susan Pease Gadoua, executive director of the Transition Institute of Marin, based in San Rafael, California. "And a system requires a balance, a homeostasis. Often, you will find couples with seemingly opposite traits, for instance, a spender with a saver, but when an event disrupts the balance, one or both can change. The precipitating event is like a rock thrown into a pond, causing waves."
Marriage can be challenging under the best of circumstances. Even anticipated changes like having children or getting promotions at work can throw relationships off track. But unanticipated stresses, the ones we never signed up for, can be especially rough. In the face of calamity, partners can "get into polarized positions that become rigid and intense," says
Harriet Lerner, author of The Dance of Anger. In the aftermath of such upheaval, some will strike a new balance and continue the relationship. Others will find that impossible, and move on.
How do relationships survive tumult? The odds are improved by a feeling of mutual purpose, shared struggle, and the sheer commitment to work it out. It also helps to remember that getting through adversity requires a different set of skills than those used to coast. We all change over the course of a lifetime and every relationship has its highs and lows. When the road is rocky and the inner landscape turbulent, you can protect your relationship by accepting small annoyances and just moving past them. But when the change in your partner is profound, you may be forced to leave the relationship or meet the transformation with a complementary shift of your own.
Find Yourself, Lose Your Partner?
Carren Strock was a wife whose radical change surprised even herself. "I was married for 25 years when I was having coffee with my best friend. I looked across the table at her and suddenly realized I was in love with this woman," she relates. "Our friendship was based on honesty and I told her what I was feeling. She didn't reciprocate my feelings and so I went on a journey to find out if it was just her I was in love with or was I a lesbian. I realized that I was."
It took a while, but Strock finally came out to her husband, whom she'd been with since age 16. "Long story short," she says, "we are still together 20 years later. My husband and I have redefined our relationship and our marriage and we have made our life together work for us. My daughter recently said, 'You and Dad have one of the best marriages, because you really talk to and know each other.' And we do."
The author of Married Women Who Love Women, Strock says that "being a lesbian is just another dimension to who I am. My husband and I have different needs, but we also have a connection. If sex was the only reason for marriage, our marriage would no longer exist."
Whether a marriage sinks or survives such profound turbulence in one partner, the other endures whiplash of the most jarring kind. Initial feelings include anger, fear, disorientation, and profound self-doubt. The straight spouse feels "stupid and duped," says Amity Buxton, founder of the Straight Spouse Network and author of The Other Side of the Closet: The Coming Out Crisis for Straight Spouses and Families. "Your assumptions about marriage and gender are called into question. Your entire worldview is shaken."
Indeed, the partner out of the limelight—the stalwart who didn't have the breakdown, or announce herself as gay—often suffers alone, without much attention or support. Before you can let go of the past, you grieve for it, says Buxton. "When I learned my husband was gay after 25 years of marriage, I was near-suicidal." Yet she lived to tell the tale. "Once you reconfigure your identity you can journey from trauma to transmutation, and you are stronger than you were before. You become who you really are, who you were always supposed to be." In Buxton's case, she founded the straight spouse movement and developed great empathy for gay people forced by society to live a lie.
