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I was walking past a Dublin theatre that finally flipped the switch. We had been seeing a marriage guidance counsellor every week for just over a year, painfully dissecting the communication failures on many levels that permeated our fractured relationship.
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There was no one else involved. I was admittedly overcommitted to my work but then I was building up a company. I had started to provide financial stability and the comforts that come from success. Children were part of the life plan but two arrived, through a pretty major breach of trust, outside the agreed timescale for building up the business. Despite that, they are and will always be my absolute pride and joy.
Our counsellor could not see this as a major issue, together with other less important but irritating non-communication between us. And it was that night, when she felt she had walked us through all the issues we had and probably discussed them ad nauseam without any real resolution, that she felt we were ready to be dispatched back into the world.
“What you need to do is wrap up all these issues in little brown paper parcels and store them in the attic of your mind, out of sight and out of your day to day thoughts,” she suggested, “and when you do that I am sure you will both be fine”
Walking back together to the car to go home, the pantomime posters were brightly shining outside the theatre, and I suddenly realised that what we had in effect been asked to do was put our marriage on the stage as a play and be the star actors in it for the rest of our lives.
Marriage is not and cannot be an act or a performance and when we got home that evening I told my wife the marriage was over. The subsequent pain, bitterness and financial morass that enveloped us as we ended up in the grip of legal infighting, were not foreseen but the attic was never filled with poison.
The writer’s name has been changed.