"I can’t possibly tell you whether to stay in your marriage or leave it. (I can tell you I’ve done both, and regret neither.) What I know, though, is that there’s a quiet courage in staying, even if it’s invisible. Leaving is a louder kind of celebration. That makes sense to me. People love the story of leaving because it ends in motion: headlights on a wet road, dawn through open trees. But staying has its own kind of motion. A circular one, slower, harder to see. It’s the turning of soil in a garden that’s gone fallow, the internal rearrangement that happens long before anything breaks ground.”
–Jeanine from Writing in the Dark
How many hours, days, and most certainly nights have I spent asking myself a single question: Should I stay in my marriage or leave? I ask myself far less often these days, two decades after I first learned of my husband’s infidelity.
I stayed.
At first because, with three small children, I wanted to be sure any plans to leave ensured the least amount of disruption in their lives. I grew up with alcoholic parents (and grandparents, and aunts and uncles. Addiction was a family tradition). I had vowed to myself that my children’s lives would not be marked by the same sort of chaos and instability that had defined my own.
But then I stayed because I wanted to. Because my husband had become the man I had always thought he was. He took responsibility for the pain he’d caused. He interrogated himself — through a 12-step group, through therapy, through books — until he understood what he’d been seeking outside of our marriage, until he understood what stories he told himself that allowed him to violate his own professed values.
A few weeks ago, I met up with a friend, one of the first I’d told about my husband’s affair. A few years after my D-Day, she’d had her own. Her husband, returning home a tour in Afghanistan, had cheated with a co-worker. She, too, stayed. She and her husband worked hard to rebuild their marriage. And, from the outside, it seemed wonderful.
But that day, my friend looked at me over our mugs of tea. “Do you think we ever really get over it?” she asked.
I will state here for the record what I said to her. “I don’t know.”
Everything we go through changes us in one way or another and we emerge, each day, slightly different than the day before.
I don’t know if I will ever get over it because my life isn’t yet over. I do know that I feel like a different person than I was then. I have endured so much. I have enjoyed so much. My children, so young when I was first navigating the heartbreak of infidelity, are all now in their 20s — brilliant and beautiful and open-hearted. But my eldest has been hospitalized with serious mental health issues, though she’s doing well now. My youngest works hard to keep her obsessive-compulsive disorder under control. Just months after D-Day, I lost my mother, who’d been my rock during those terrible, crushing early weeks. I’d made the choice to have my husband beside me during all of that. And for all the good stuff, too, and there’s been plenty.
Am I over it? I don’t think I’m over any of it. I am changed by it. All of it. The betrayal, the deaths, the mental health crises, the friends and family with their own messy, beautiful lives. There has been “an internal rearrangement” that is the consequence of living and loving. Everything we go through changes us in one way or another and we emerge, each day, slightly different than the day before.
“Should I stay or go” used to torment me at night, as I tried to map out the consequences of each choice, so afraid of making the wrong one. What I know now that I couldn’t quite conceive of then is that there wasn’t a wrong choice, nor a right one. Not for me. Not then. Not now.
Instead, we have options, each with a zillion possible outcomes attached to the zillion new options that emerge any time we make a choice.
I chose to stay. And I agree with Janine, whose words open this post. There is a quiet courage in choosing to rebuild, in turning over fallow soil to see what new growth we can coax from it.
Stay. Go. It all requires nerves of steel, the heart of a fighter. Nobody gets to decide what form your courage takes except you.