Now that the linchpin is out in the open, everything that is held together by that, now needs to be unpacked.
In my life, I have learned that when a wrong is committed, the relational status between the people said wrong has happened, will then exist in one of two states: the first and far less common, is of little to no effect. For whatever reason, be it the nature of the wrong, the strength or age of the relationship, or even the wider context of events and circumstances, the mistake or transgression is easily ignored or forgiven with little to no need for any formal gestures or even acknowledgment.
The second, more common, and possibly more telling, is of some noticeable pause or shift. It is what should provoke some kind of gesture or admittance, which ideally would lead to some effort of restoration. As you can well understand of course, the world is not ideal, not by design, and not in anyway thanks to the people that live in it.
To that end, I have realized that my own failures in my marriage, were due to just a few surprisingly simple mistakes I was late in identifying, despite my constant efforts take responsibility for my mistakes, and my understanding that seeking peace and working at maintaining a dialogue are vital to any healthy relationship. I still to this day am entertained and amused to no end by the responses of others when I say I am sorry or take responsibility for something so quickly, or when I show a willingness to entertain the notion that I am mistaken, illinformed or ignorant about something.
People are always saying that I act like I know everything, or that I think I never fuck up, even when I have never in my life, ever made such claims, as underscored by my previously stated penchant for taking on the burden of responsibility or apology.
Much as I disdain doing so, much as I dislike being wrong or making mistakes, I was taught and exampled from a very young age by my late father, that the fastest and best way to learn and grow, and to gain favor and protect yourself, is to, as some have so eloquently put it; "Own your Shit" which I have also taken to the other extreme and applied to accepting credit when it is due, for excelling at something as well, but without hording or fluffing yourself up.
As my mother, now Ex-Wife, coworkers and so many countless others will likely testify to, one of my more madding traits is to seek out whatever good or positive there is, and contrast it with the bad and the negative in any situation. Maddening because I take a very hardline stance on understanding the context of something, and I demand that the reasoning and intent be acknowledged as well as the effect and the result.
Moreso since my entrance into the Security Field and the concept of "totality of circumstances" has been so brilliantly engraved upon my person. In simple form, this is the idea of finding the balance between the known, and the unknown.
Or as a long since late family friend once put it to my parents (and once to myself at a very young age) "all things being equal, even though they aren't, if you can come to the place where it really does not matter what choice you make, only then can you make an informed and reasonable decision."
All of this being said, I now address the rattlesnake in the living room...
From my own perspective, my marriage was ended by three things, beyond my control to effect, and to which I reacted to both too late, VERY poorly.
A lie (or rather more accurately, a lot of mistaken or malformed information and opinions), and a choice to not only believe said lie, but to abandon a relationship based upon that, and because of an inability to consider the idea that just because someone has a bunch of expensive letters after their name, does not automatically make them smarter than someone without.
In a word, this was a failure of trust.
I say this, with a sack of rock salt in hand, with the understanding that I do not have all of the information I need to make all things equal. But then no one I think ever really does. The question is if I have ENOUGH information to make any kind of decision at all. I honestly don't know if I do one way or the other, but a choice I must make, and thus take a stance, and so here it is.
Kristen, I apologize for my mistakes, my turning inwards in my depression, and my delay in addressing my issues, and your own. I am sorry I was not strong enough in both my moment of crisis as well as your own. And I am repentant in my panicked reactions to things I had inadvertently ignored or did not understand.
I was complacent, distracted, weak, hurt, overwhelmed and scared, and what is more, I hesitated and became passive when what I needed to do was push you, and myself to rise to the challenges that came upon us, instead I stood by until I was smacked in the face with the enormity of the circumstances I had allowed to form and fester in our life together, blaming things I could not effect, and not acting when and how I should have in the things I could.
It is not easy for me to say that, and it hurts, in some ways, more than the divorce does, if only because I think that it is in some central part, what provoked you into removing yourself from my life.
It is the only reason I can also forgive you for your failings of me.
Someday, I might articulate them, if only for the sake of fully fleshing out my acceptance and fully realising my part in them, but for now I will only say this, because I think it is vital you understand:
It was never about my and how I couldn't accept that asexuality is or is not a mental or physical health problem, it is the fact that you refused to exclude the investigation into your own physical or mental health and wellbeing to ensure that it was NOT.
As I said more than once, it was/is hard for me to reconcile our early physical relationship with the end of it. I do not understand how you could so readily accept the notion that because you had such low sex drive before we met and then again had such a low drive at the end of our marriage, it somehow meant you NEVER had a sex drive, which ignores the factors of your always fluctuating physical health and how it affected you in all things, or how you could so fully dismiss out of hand, my observations of this.
Beyond that, I will not say any more, as I have not the energy or will to even consider it right now.
Guess maybe I'm still a bit of a coward. I'll work on that.
~Caleb
No comments:
Post a Comment