Page 67 of Woman on the Verge

“I didn’t say you were crazy,” he says, slow and measured. It’s how I talk with the girls when they are, in fact, crazy.

“Don’t patronize me,” I say, abandoning my post in the doorway and going toward him.

He puts up his hands again and says those maddening words:

“Nic, calm down.”

I break out in a sweat as I get right in his face and say, “Don’t say that to me.”

He leans back against the headboard of the bed, away from me. It is the only time in our twenty-year relationship that I’ve seen him afraid of me.

“I don’t know what you want from me,” he says, shaking his head.

I want to feel loved when you hug me,I think.

I collapse onto the bed, face first. I wait for him to put a hand on me, to stroke my back like I stroke the girls’ backs when they lose their shit. He does not put a hand on me.

“Nic, tell me how to help,” he says. “If you need alone time tonight, have some alone time.”

I want your company to soothe me, but it doesn’t,I think.

I lift my face from the bed and stand.

“What if this doesn’t get better?” I ask him.

I am already thinking ahead to filing for divorce. Now is not the time. I’ll have to wait until after my dad dies.

I can’t believe my dad is going to die.

“It will get better,” he says. Then again: “It will.”

That’s the thing with Kyle—he cannot sit in the darkness with me. He insists on only tilting his head to the light.

In the past couple of years of resentment building, I’ve been questioning the institution of marriage as a whole, thinking it unreasonable that we’re meant to choose a person when we are only a quarter of the waythrough our lives and remain bonded to that personforever—eating the same meals, watching the same TV shows, listening to the same music, sharing the same bed and sleep habits, aligning on financial values and sex drives and energy levels. To top it all off, there are the children, little grenades, each of them. Each baby is an explosion in a marriage, but you are supposed to carry on as usual, holding hands as you navigate the ruins and rebuild.

Some months ago, I tried talking to my work friend Jill about it:

“Think about your best friend in high school, or your college roommate. Could you live with them forever? It’s normal to grow out of relationships, is it not?”

“What are you saying, exactly?” she asked. “Do you want to get divorced?”

“I don’t know. It seems like that should be the norm, doesn’t it?”

I went on to declare that “till death do us part” really only benefits husbands, citing an article that said women’s health and well-being improves after divorce while men’s tanks. I ranted and raved about how our society praises relationship masochism, applauding couples who stay together for decades, calling women’s self-sacrifice “commitment” and their suffering “loyalty.”

Jill just listened. When she was sure I was done, when I allowed for a second of silence, she said, “Nic, a lot of couples go through hard times.”

“Right,” I said. “Because marriage is fucking hard.”

She was silent, so I returned to my rant: “If we have to do marriage, we should have to renew the contract annually, like home insurance.”

“Would you renew your contract with Kyle?” she asked me.

“I don’t know. I can’t commit to any contracts right now. I have two small children,” I said. “Would you renew your contract with Matt?”

“I would.”

I groaned. “That’s because you don’t have kids. It’s easy to like your spouse when you don’t create humans with them.”