Chapter 7 - THE COUNSELOR NAMED WHAT DESTROYED THEIR MARRIAGE
We attended one counseling session before I filed.
Not because I intended to save the marriage.
Because eleven years deserved at least one room where neither of us could change the subject.
Our counselor, Dr. Marianne Bell, was a fifty-something woman with silver-framed glasses and a dying fern in her window.
She asked Owen one question.
“When your wife looked at you before you agreed to the photograph, what did you believe she was feeling?”
Owen shifted in his chair.
“She didn’t say anything.”
Dr. Bell waited.
Finally she said, “That tells me what she did. I asked what you believed she felt.”
He stared at the carpet.
“I knew she probably didn’t like it.”
“Then why proceed?”
“Everybody was watching.”
“Your wife was also watching.”
Silence.
Owen rubbed his palms together.
“I guess it was easier to decide she’d be okay.”
Dr. Bell nodded.
“That’s useful.”
I looked at her.
“Useful?”
“Honesty usually is.”
She turned toward Owen.
“You converted your wife’s history of patience into permission.”
Something about that sentence took the air from me.
Then she looked at me.
“And Rebecca, your silence belongs in this room too.”
I stiffened.
She noticed.
“I am not saying you caused his choices.”
“Okay.”
“But silence can protect us from a painful answer until we receive an even more painful one.”
I swallowed.
She continued.
“You wanted Owen to choose correctly without being instructed because you needed proof that his values matched yours.”
“Yes.”
“That makes sense. But I suspect you also stayed silent many times before the wedding.”
I looked at my hands.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Because I was tired.
Because confrontation created another task.
Because being reasonable had become part of my identity.
Because somewhere along the way, I had begun measuring the health of my marriage by how rarely I demanded anything from it.
“I thought being easy to love would keep me loved,” I said.
Owen made a sound beside me.
I didn’t look at him.
Dr. Bell nodded.
“Both things can be true. He failed to respect boundaries he understood. And you can decide that your next life will include saying those boundaries aloud sooner.”
May you like
That sentence stayed with me.
Both things can be true.
