wife doesn’t always mean, woman

i read a great article in the july issue of the advocate.

the author, evan fallenberg, painted a picture with words that i (wrongly) believed the male mind incapable of painting. i wrote evan to get permission to write a post about his article, and found him to be a kind soul. who granted me permission.  i plan on purchasing his novel, light fell which can be purchased here.

the title of the article is “reversal of fortune”, i cannot link the article but i can include some of the excerpts.   if this sort of thing is of interest to you, you might want to pick up a copy of the advocate for july.

evan’s story starts with this,

i was a husband for nearly 19 years. then suddenly two septembers ago i became a wife.

you can imagine that i was anxious to understand how it was that a man that was married to a woman, aptly called “husband” could have changed his role to “wife”.

evan writes that he’d been in love with a man named yariv for more than a decade. he briefly goes into the times they spent together, as often as their “weirdly intersecting lives allow”. the sentence, the one that would serve to be the magical sentence that we all have experienced. the very sentence that would serve as the reason behind me not ever wanting to legally bind myself to another human being for life.

but living with him is something entirely different.

evan goes into the bliss of finally living with his love, yariv.

it was clear from the start that because of our personalities and our jobs, i–a work-from-home writer, translator, and teacher–would be the principal home manager while he would spend most of his day outside the house, running his plant nursery. this suited me just fine, and indeed, at first it was all bliss.

i loved washing our laundry and pulling his clothes and mine from the line just a few hours later, sweet-smelling and stiff in the dry israeli heat.  i loved the clean, open spaces of our rented house; the paintings i chose for the walls; the linens for our bed.  i loved having a nice dinner on the table when he rolled in after dark, his fingernails caked with earth, twigs and leaves hidden in the most impossible places:  behind his ears, in the hair on his chest, in his trouser cuffs.  it seemed to be the life i’d always wanted to live.

sound familiar anyone?  those early days of riding the pink cloud of finally living with the one we love.

but after only a few weeks of conjugal life i was craving solitude, dreaming of a tiny spartan flat with no man in residence but me.

holy heck, could this man be renting a room in my brain? how does he so completely understand the way of a female brain?

everything in the article from that point on was something that clearly could have been written by a wife. except, evan isn’t your typical “wife”. had i been wrong to believe that it was only the hormones that kept the opposite sex from figuring out how to be married and living in the same house?

evan goes on,

i was stunned into misery. was this what i had overturned my life for, and the lives of the people that i loved most in the world? for an answer, i turned to the person who had been my source of wisdom and sanity for nearly two decades. “did i fail to appreciate your efforts?” i asked my ex-wife over the phone, not quite sure if this conversation would lead to an i-told-you-so. “a lot of times, yes,” she said.

how many women have only had dreams of something such as this happening? how many men have risked revealing their truth on this kind of level, before it’s too late?

evan writes more on his ex-wife,

these days my ex-wife is blossoming.  her career has taken off, and she is busy with things that interest her nearly every night of the week.  she has steadfastly refused offers to be fixed up with some very nice men. men, she tells me, are far too needy. i’m not sure i want to go through all that again. i’m enjoying my independence too much.

the words of jack nicholson spoken in the movie, “witches of eastwick” pounded through my mind, once again. could it be true that being married is not always healthy for women or men?

towards the end of evan’s story, he goes through the process of making peace with his new position in his relationship with yariv. he points out two things that were perfectly clear to him.

and yes, through it all, two thing were perfectly clear:  first, this new life i had stepped into, flaws and all, was the right one for me, a life in which i finally felt, for the first time ever, completely at home in my own skin. and second, the pain and anguish i was feeling came from a single source–my love for this man.

the second point that evan wrote, reached out of the magazine and poked me on the nose. something that i recently came to understand (on a gut level) during my last therapy appointment, that is our tears of joy are reflective of our tears of pain.

how many years have been wasted and crap heaped upon the label of “wife” and “husband” that were simply the dynamics of living with another human being in a committed relationship? is it any wonder why divorces are so popular, spouses having affairs, and the need for large pharmaceutical companies?

i sent evan an email directly thanking him for such a beautifully written story, spun from his own life experience. his experience was helpful, enlightening, and something that i believe others can gain insight from.

this is the good that comes from one person sharing their own life experience, which should hammer in the need for others to share their own stories with honesty b/c inevitably it serves to heal us all.

i want to thank evan for his response, his honesty in the story, and mostly for sharing his craft.