Where Was the Coping? — I think this will be part one of reflecting on my dysregulated marriage. When I look back at my marriage which ended 5 years ago, I realize that both my ex-husband and I had a lot of problems. We had major problems of self-regulation and didn’t have a lot of…

A Manual on Speaking With Love Across the Political-Religious Divide. — It’s hard to be proud to be an American these days; the U.S. looks like a debris field from multiple airplanes crashing into each other and what you see is trauma upon trauma. Trauma from austerity, trauma from some more austerity, and even more trauma from more austerity. The United…

It was creepy while it lasted. — I thoughtlessly got married. There was a huge lack of thinking about marriage when I had got married because the primary thinking around getting married was fear-based and more centered around the newfound thought, “It’s my last chance to get married” when I hadn’t wanted to get married ever before…

It was the last rescue boat of the Titanic. — A couple of years before I got married, my friend went through a situation that really stuck in my mind in a negative way. My friend Guinevere had a boyfriend named Mark at the time. Guinevere had a married friend named Lucia who then cornered Mark and demanded to know…

Turns out it wasn’t road rage. — Writing on Medium sometimes goads a cascade of analyses and memories; which brings new insights. I wrote I Never Loved My Husband a few days ago and I’ve been musing about that since. I had always assumed that I had loved him, but I realized the things I wanted for…

This surprised me. — I had a myth I carried around with me about my marriage and that myth did not help me patch together a reality that I needed to see. The myth that I held in my mind, the narrative myth, was that our dating was great, we got married, and then…

The real threat is not what they think. — When I was married, my husband seemed to be angry all the time about other men looking at me, talking to me, or thinking about me. I’m not talking about having affairs or emotional affairs. I’m talking about talking to my coworkers about getting deadlines done. Or saying hello to…

Tales of perfection according to one person. — So…I just want to let the world know about my ex-husband’s legs. When I was married, my then-husband would point to his legs and exclaim, “Perfection!” Were his legs perfect? To be honest, they were nice. Nice in the way that they were not objectionable, but they were also rather…

Processing meanings in marriage. — It’s been a long time since I’ve written on Medium. When I wrote during the height of the pandemic, I had been given the time and quiet to process what had happened in my marriage that ended in 2018. So much has changed since my divorce and then the pandemic…