When Is It Worth It?

The messiness of recovery and growth

Photo by Yogas Design on Unsplash

Above: my fear.

It had been 17 years since I’d been naked in front of a man who wasn’t my husband and well over seven years since I’d last had sex.

My marriage had ended quietly, in a flash of understanding that saw a hundred tiny puzzle pieces suddenly fall into place. I’d married young, barely 24, and waited until age 33 before having my first and only child. I hadn’t wanted to have a baby before I’d made headway on a career; I hadn’t wanted to play out my mother’s marriage to a man who despised her for not making money even as she singlehandedly raised their children. I was afraid that if I had a child too soon, I’d resent the security it would pre-empt me from developing, the sacrifices it would demand.

But nine years is a long time for two people to share a space with little in between to strengthen their connection. In my early 30s, I started to suspect my marriage wouldn’t last and determined that I would make my husband a father before it ended. I’d married him because I knew he’d be a good father, because I wanted to give my future children the father I’d never had.

For 12 months after my son was born, his father cried every few days. I’d never seen him so emotional. “I just love him so much,” he said. “It’s physical, I can feel it.” I know, I thought. I know love is physical. I felt that for you. And then I realized he’d never felt it for me. He’d never really felt it at all, which is why it was such a surprise. A while later, we had an old argument and I was done: resolution wasn’t worth it. I knew the real problem couldn’t be fixed and we never should’ve gotten married. We’d been too young to know ourselves, too inexperienced to have a sense of what makes a good match and how vital a spark is for longevity.

So we quietly separated, communicating only about logistics and co-parenting. And I carried on, thoroughly overwhelmed by full-time work and parenting with inadequate childcare. It was all I could do to apply for jobs and fill out immigration paperwork and try to gather up the loose tangle of threads holding my life together.

By the time I finally settled somewhere permanent with my son and his father, by the time I finally had actual time on my hands, years had passed. I could hardly remember what it’d been like to have any sort of intimacy with anyone.

The upheavals accompanying each move from place to place came at a substantial emotional cost: I now felt invisible. I felt disconnected, like there was nothing to ground me in this place. A gap yawned between me and locals – I looked like them and spoke their languages, but we had no shared experiences. My social anxiety kicked into overdrive and I stopped being able to look people in the eye. Something about it felt too intimate, too revealing. I hadn’t been seen in so long, the feeling was overwhelming.

It took a burning refusal to accept a full decade without sex, without any physical touch at all, to force myself onto Tinder. I’d been a late bloomer and the act of turning 40 with barely 10 years of sporadic sexual activity under my belt stoked a sort of rage within. I’d be damned if the sum total of my life amounted to little more than work and parenting. I’d be damned if I sat back and passively accepted what was starting to seem like a life sentence of chastity foisted on me first by religion and then by emotional immaturity, by military deployments and circumstance, by everything else that got in the way.

“Don’t think I’m weird if I can’t make eye contact,” I texted my Tinder match.

“I won’t,” he promised. And when I showed up in the parking lot of a fast food restaurant, one of the few places that remained open during early Covid lockdowns, he was kind.

“Hey, you,” he said with measured interest, giving me a friendly hug hello.

I’d replaced the American-style hug greeting with kisses for Europeans and abbreviated hand waves for East Asians years ago. “Hey,” I replied in surprise, nervously staring at his chest and grateful for his height.

I could feel his eyes on me as we walked into the restaurant, discreetly running over my face when he thought I wasn’t looking. I knew he liked what he saw.

We took our cups of tea and he sprawled on a couch by the fire. Later, he told me he’d been on so many first dates that he’d run out of steam and wasn’t trying to impress me at all. He made conversation easily, moving from one topic to another with a natural curiosity. We talked for three hours and then relocated to his car, where we talked some more. Around midnight, I said I had to leave and although he made no attempt to touch me, I sensed he was happy with me. He liked me. I didn’t fit in, and he connected with that.

The first time I spent the night in his bed, I could sense how attuned he was to me. That attention, the thing that had sparked when I’d first felt his gaze, was almost tangible and it only strengthened over time. He loved my eyes, he said. He loved my cheekbones, my long body, everything about me. I could have a conversation about anything, he said. I always had something interesting to say.

He brought me countless cups of tea and wrapped me in blankets on the couch. He handed me plates of fried eggs on buttered toast with a side of sliced tomatoes, bowls of homemade pierogis and noodles in winter or barbecue in summer. We talked and talked and talked. He got emotional once when I had to go, saying he wished I could stay.

“I didn’t get filled up with enough love as a child,” I explained through my son’s tears after I told him I was moving out. “Daddy got filled up with a lot of love from his parents, so it doesn’t matter to him if he just has dates and no real girlfriend until you’re grown up. But I didn’t and I can’t wait that long. I need a boyfriend now and no one is going to stay with me unless I have my own place.”

In a relationship, love is a touchstone. It’s what you reach for when your anger swells, the emotion that softens your response. I remembered the feeling of falling in love with my ex-husband, how I’d wanted him so much, and that memory was enough to take the edge off my words and weaken my stamina for conflict. He’d had no such physical memory of me and his anger had grown sharper as the years passed, his words more cutting.

This time, I had someone whose love for me came easily, steadily filling the space between us. And I reached for this love, holding on when strands of hurt and anger began to weave around it like a rope.

At first, the broken promises were few and far between. “I won’t drink again,” he’d say, and he wouldn’t. Six months could pass without any sign of the alcohol that created tension in the air, that soured moods, stoked resentments, and scrambled logic. But then a beer or two would appear. Soon, an empty bottle. Words sweet on their face – “of course I’ll choose you over alcohol” – followed by a trip to the bar. My anxiety triggered his stress and we wound each other up, up, and up, our capacities to withstand both dropping lower and lower as mistrust and uncertainty solidified.

“I can’t,” I tell him. “I can’t have this in my life. My mother used up all my tolerance for drunks and I don’t have any left.”

The first year of sobriety is anything but calm. Moods swing, words tangle, emotions surge and recede, swirling in a blotchy stew. Messes normally ignored or swept away splatter across your shared life as if retaliating against the attempt to attain lasting change. Fissures multiply and deepen until a relationship cracks at the seams and breaks in half.

I find myself Googling PsychologyToday listicles. “When do you know a relationship is over?” “Should you get back together after a breakup?” “What are the stages of recovery from alcohol use disorder?” My desperation for someone or something to tell me what to do is embarrassing. I am a researcher who knows better than to reach for generic Internet advice, but I am consuming woo-woo self-development podcasts like an addict over a spoon and a flame – me, the person who’d always been turned off by the privilege inherent to the self-help industry, the ubiquity of pop psychology, the way we’re all told to “speak our truth” and drop our toxic relationships with narcissists. “Thank u, next,” sings Ariana Grande. Sure, except if you have children you can’t support and no good choices available. Except if you live in real life.

That’s the thing about the Internet: it speaks to a certain general experience, then amplifies the volume. There’s a chorus of voices saying “end it!”, “drop him, girl", “move on!” Half of me gets it, relates, recalls witnessing so many marriages involving wives who do twice as much and husbands who refuse to grow. But another half is cautious, too familiar with complexity, too close to degradation and failure to not see it as possible for myself. I have a family history littered with bottles and pills, pulpits and PhDs. I see my mother’s struggle to date and retire and I wonder if she really was better off without my unmedicated father, a man whose faults were often matched by hers. Both might’ve remained more stable with a marriage to tend to and there are always trade-offs in life.

“Might” is the operative word. “Might” isn’t possible if the people in question aren’t willing to change, to learn without being cajoled or coerced. I decide this is what will shape my decision-making along with a healthy dose of self-awareness: I will not resent hurtful behaviour if I’ve ever found myself doing the very same thing. I will ask only that his pathway to growth involve a level of commitment that mirrors my own to mine, and I will let the cards of the future fall where they may.

Unravelling the ropes of hurt and anger happens at a glacial pace. Couples therapy takes forever to get off the ground, coming to a halt several times with a sudden breakup. The couples therapist begins to lose patience with appointments that are first cancelled, then rebooked. I’m single again for weeks, time blocking to focus on myself and repeating my Al-Anon mantras.

Slowly, the dynamic begins to shift. Twelve-step groups create support and reinforce ideas raised in individual therapy. An array of other resources begins to shore up and the more time passes, the more indecision fades. Picking away at the strands of conflict in therapy brings emotions to the surface at unexpected times. A few nights of poor sleep is all it takes for an eruption to come, a venting of frustration and pain. But the impasse that follows becomes shorter and shorter, and small impulses to repair become stronger.

I find a definition for a word on the Internet that gives me an answer to why I felt invisible for so long, for why I didn’t seem to see men’s faces and they didn’t seem to see me. A demisexual is someone who can’t feel sexual attraction without an emotional bond to the person in question. I think about how that bond had formed so readily, so strongly between us. It had brought his face into focus and even now, it stretches across the gaps filled with miscommunication and frustration and exasperation.

This connection had made me unafraid of intimacy, cured me of my inability to make eye contact. It had opened me up to receiving more from life, to finding more within myself. It had strengthened me before it weakened me and even then, its crushing weight had pushed me forward.

Maybe it’s only after you embrace your fear – of regret and loss, of hurting others, of not living fully or not knowing, of addiction and whatever else – that you can begin to be brave. Maybe it’s only after you empathize with someone else that you can better understand yourself, after you reject absolutes that you can navigate complexity. Maybe the more aware you are that life disappoints, people are flawed, and things can fall apart profoundly, the more willing you are to hold out for recovery. After all, it’s the depth of disconnect that strengthens the desire to bond.

And somewhere in there lies acceptance that love is both everything and not enough. A lack of love creates a desperate need for it, an internal void that begs to be filled – but even love can’t replace our needs. It leads us to make promises we mean to keep even as we can’t stop ourselves from breaking them. We tell our children we’ll never hurt them even as we make choices that crush their hearts. Love joins us together even as it also brings despair and distress.

So maybe love makes us daring, willing to act fearlessly, because in a sense we have nothing to lose. I cry in therapy, parsing whether I must have an apology or whether actions matter most. I feel hesitant and hopeful, moody and depressed. I am grateful for small changes yet impatient for more, only begrudgingly accepting that someone else’s progress unfolds to its own rhythm instead of in response to my needs. Sometimes, I hold my breath waiting for things to crumble again. Other times, I exhale with the faith that I am doing this, I am okay, I will be okay no matter what.

It’s messy and rewarding. And maybe all of it, the whole journey, was meant to lead up to now, to a process of change that seems both authentic and ephemeral, fragile and strong. I have been stripped bare – this time emotionally instead of physically – and forced to confront and articulate and forgive and let go and reveal and receive. It feels like love and growth, loss and pain, like wounding and healing all at once.

Wherever it leads, I know it is worth it.