ThinkingSkull.com

I haven’t posted here in a while and I need to fix that. It’s this time of year that most people are making their New Year’s resolutions, and this will be one of mine: more posts. I’ll heap that on top of the usual lose weight, eat better, and be more productive.

Some of my friends and family know my marriage of five years is ending and some don’t. Interestingly, just as I’m finally feeling like my old self again, there are a few people who are convinced I’m clinically depressed and in need of drugs. And to what do they offer as proof? My “morbid fascination with cemeteries and death.” I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that those particular individuals have sorely lost touch with any connection they’ve had with me in the past, because I’ve been parading around as the Grim Reaper and running a website with a predisposition for the supernatural in films for, oh, ten years now. Seriously, folks, death may always be on my mind (insert mandatory Willie Nelson tune here), but I have no intent of initiating my own departure any time soon.

Which brings me to the next thing I need to clean out of my life: my previous relationship. A wise man (well, the man who married us) told my wife and I that there were five things that usually brought down a marriage, and the top two were money (financial expectations) and sex (expectations in the bedroom). This was also a first marriage for both of us, so neither of us had a manual on how to take care of the other or hold a marriage together. We were, however, left with an open invitation to discuss any problems as they arose should help have been needed.

So what happened? Without pointing any fingers, our marriage slowly degraded due primarily to a lack of communication and an unwillingness to really say what was on our minds to save the feelings of the other. We both heaped quiet frustration onto that wall until we couldn’t see each other anymore. To that end however, there were also a few additional factors that contributed to that walls foundation.

One of us was ready to be married, one of us wasn’t. One of us wanted to seek counseling early and later on, one of us didn’t want to air our business to anyone outside the marriage. One of us sought to hold the marriage together no matter what, one of us pulled away when the other held on too tight. One of us kept asking the other to do all the things we used to (movies & visiting friends), while the other wanted to stay at home and watch the same DVDs night after night. One of us wound up giving up almost everything to make ends meet, while the other kept taking until there almost nothing left. One kept desperately hoping that the other would see that everything they did was for love of the other and a commitment to their relationship, while the other saw it as a weakness and lost all respect for the other.

Mistakes were made, but nothing unfixable. Unfortunately, it takes two people to want to be in a relationship to HAVE a relationship, and when one wants out, the other can either keep holding on (and truly consume themselves) or can start moving on and give the former love of their life one last thing: exactly what they asked for.

Cryptic enough for everyone? I remember seeing my own parents divorced, with one who moved on and the other pining away in depression (again, not pointing any fingers). It’s easy to assign a bad guy and a good guy to the whole thing, but why? No relationship is black and white, and integrating lives, goals, and finances changes the dynamic of every relationship no matter how “good it was” in the beginning. To that end, she and I are mutually separated but can actually hold a conversation without sniping the other (always a good thing). She got a rabbit and half the DVDs, I got a cat and the other half. No kids (no little lives to ruin), no real property that we couldn’t split down the middle, but I think both of us have grown as a result of it all. I also took one extra thing from it, and that’s the knowledge that I did survive the relationship’s end and it wasn’t the end of my world, and that has had an unbelievably positive effect me that I’m still in awe of.

Have a Happy New Year, all of you, because I intend to have one myself. If you need any additional details, please send an email by clicking on “contact” in the upper right-hand corner.