Honestly, there are lies in your marriage
Now, how can you find this path to self-realization in everyday life? How can you find God and your ‘It’ll be OK’ feeling? How can you really be your true self and rediscover the all-embracing, loveable presence in yourself? How can your life come alive again? How can the frog by your side turn into a prince or princess? How can your marriage become an adventure again?
Just stop and stand still – right where you are. You don’t have to do anything, you don’t have to change anything – just be in the Here and Now of your life right now. Sit down and look at everything as if you’d never seen it before. Be as curious as a stranger who has no idea what your life is like. The most difficult part of this is being honest. This is not about concepts, approaches, ideas or images of your life – this is about how you really feel inside.
So what is your life like? Aren’t you very keen on it any more? Do you find your wife boring? Are you afraid your husband might be having an affair? Do you yearn for your lover while you are surrounded by your family? Has anybody any idea of how lonely you are? Do you sometimes think, ‘If only people knew…’? Are you carrying out your duties, including your marital duties, like a robot? Are you escaping into all sorts of wild and hyperactive distractions? Are you withdrawing emotionally and only going through the motions? Are you the best and most successful person around but still empty inside? Have you achieved nearly everything but found it has no meaning for you? Has anybody any idea about how you feel?
I once spent a terrible evening with a friend of mine who had invited us over. Everything was perfect – the other guests, the food, the table decorations – but the atmosphere was wrong. Something was in the air. That evening, when all the other guests had left and my friend’s husband and children had gone to bed, she and I stayed up talking for ages. She was desperate; she felt hollow inside. She felt bitter, helpless and utterly neglected by her husband. She confessed that her marriage was unbearable. As the hours passed she spoke more and more openly of her loneliness, her fear and her depression. In the end she said that she suspected her husband of having an affair and that she often thought about taking her own life. She couldn’t go on like this – no way.
When we finally went to bed I couldn’t sleep at all. I felt numbed by the idea that her life was such a sham. I knew her as a person who was always active, always planning holidays, parties or visits. She was the sort of person whose notice-board was covered with invitations. When I had met her, more than 20 years ago, she had been a confident and popular girl, with men falling at her feet. Now she was beautiful, talented, had several children, was a pillar of society…
I couldn’t sleep for worrying about what I should do. I knew her well enough to know how resilient and strong she could be when she had to. And she had wanted this life, after all. She had had a clear picture of her ideal life and, over the years, bit by bit, had put it together like a jigsaw puzzle. And now, as it was taking shape and had become exactly the way she had wanted it to be, she was finding that it didn’t make her feel the way she had expected it to. But I knew that she would not simply let go of it all.
When I came down the next morning, her husband was sitting at the kitchen table and the children were larking about. I felt exhausted from lack of sleep and worrying about my friend, and greeted her sadly and with pity. She was whizzing around, sent the children into the garden to play and chirped, ‘Good morning, honey! Did you sleep OK? It’s a wonderful day!’ It was as if I had had a nightmare – as if I had been with another person the previous night, as if those desperate hours had never happened.
That morning all my attempts at honesty failed. My friend served breakfast for her husband, organized the children’s day and their upcoming schedule and pretended that nothing had happened. She had a clear concept of her life and she would not give it up easily. But truth is the only thing that really heals. The biggest problem my friend had was not that her marriage was on the rocks but that she had not been able to acknowledge that sad truth to herself and others.
Do you know the kind of state where your inner world and your external life are so far apart that it feels like doing the splits untrained, all the sinews stretched close to breaking point? I believe that most people in long-term relationships experience such a strong emotional split time and again. We have an image of our life, with the people around us as the parameters, and everything that doesn’t fit into the framework we hide from ourselves, from our partner and our friends. Our need to feel connected to others is so strong that we are unconsciously prepared to sacrifice our very life for it. My friend preferred to accept her inner death and to torture herself with suicidal thoughts rather than voice her real needs to her family and her surroundings.
Sometimes things are really boring. We don’t feel like chatting to our neighbour and make the excuse that we have to take the children to gymnastics now. Sometimes it is more difficult: we build houses, drive cars and arrange to see people that are important for our status or our career but who don’t mean that much to us. Sometimes it becomes downright existential. We earn a lot of money, but we can’t sleep. Sometimes it robs us of our mind. Sometimes we only make love to our partner out of duty and afterwards feel empty and used.
The bad thing is not that we do all this – it’s only human. The tragic thing is that we try to hide our inner fears from ourselves and everybody else. We do it to stay in our relationship, of course, to go on being loved and avoid being deserted. But we achieve exactly the opposite. Since we are afraid of not being loved for ourselves, we present a false front, but in return we only receive a fake response. With every role we play, every friendly lie we tell, we become even more unhappy. We don’t show how we feel; we don’t say what we think. We turn our whole life into a lie, and sometimes it can become so unbearable that we actually want to take our own life.
My friend’s life and marriage matched her idea of what she wanted but not what her heart really desired. Our ideas are always shaped by outside expectations, by our families, our conditioning, our inadequacies and our society, but only our heart knows our real needs. To express hers, my friend would have had to let go of a lot of control, draw firmer boundaries and show helplessness and weakness… But it would have been better for her if she had. She should have entered into an honest uncompromising dialogue with her husband and her surroundings about her heart and her true nature. She should have turned the night she shared with me into her own day.
Initially, this process is never pleasant. Once we dare to start it by stepping out of our cosy comfort zone, it often feels as though we are overwhelmed by a deluge that rips everything apart – regardless.
I have experienced such a deluge in my life. My husband was due to celebrate a milestone birthday and having a party was important to him. It was to be a real reunion: he had invited friends from all over the place. Everything was to be particularly special for the occasion – tasty food, lovely surroundings – but eventually those exaggerated expectations only made my own dismal state look even more dismal.
When the day came, he was at work and I was in the kitchen, busy with the preparations, when I suddenly felt as though I was being choked. Yet again he was away, as he had been so often during the last few months. Yet again I had been left alone to run our entire domestic life. Yet again I had to put on a good show in front of his friends while nobody had any idea of how I really felt. Yet again I had to be the perfect hostess, while all I wanted to do was run away.
I put the food out, lit the candles, prepared the drinks and forced myself into a dress, all the while close to tears. Only moments before my husband and the guests were due to arrive, I felt a feeling of helplessness rising in me, coupled with an almighty wrath. Then my husband and the first guests arrived. ‘Hello!’ Kiss, kiss. ‘Long time no see!’ I tried to function as I had so many times before, tried to play the gracious hostess. But it didn’t work. I had to escape to the kitchen to calm the bursting volcano inside me. At one point a friend came in and said, ‘Hey, what’s the matter?’ Then it was as if a hole had been blasted in a dam. I burst into tears and sobbed words that I wasn’t even conscious of: ‘I have to get a divorce! I have to get a divorce! I can’t go on like this!’
Everybody remembers that birthday party. Some guests we never saw again. Others still share a laugh with us. My eruption in the kitchen, my withdrawal to the bedroom, the rumours of a divorce – all that spread like a thunder cloud over the party. My husband could only save himself from my deluge by drowning his sorrows. The next day, when he had sobered up and all the guests had left, nothing in our marriage was the same.
I said everything I had to say – things I had long ceased to have the courage for. He told me that he was seeing another woman. I told him I had wanted to leave him for a long time. We were both empty and resigned to the situation, but at the same time afraid to actually make the break. So often I had thought it all over in my head and had found hundreds of reasons why things couldn’t go on as they were. But I couldn’t see any way out.
There were always two alternatives. Either I stayed and slowly shrivelled up like a plant without water or I destroyed my family and gave up on my dream of trying to achieve something with my husband that I had never managed with anyone else. I felt that I was slowly being ripped apart – and finally I could not bear the tension any longer. I was forced to let go. I could do no more analyzing, blaming, understanding and rationalizing. I sat down in front of my husband and everything simply flooded out – all my feelings, my fears, my secrets, my desires and my wish to divorce. I talked and talked until the stream dried up – and all at once I could look at him openly, dry-eyed. And then something completely absurd happened. For the first time in an eternity I felt in touch with myself and in touch with my husband. There was a deep silence between us and then a strange, calm feeling of truthfulness and belonging – a feeling that neither of us had experienced for years, a hint that maybe things could work out after all…
What a nightmare we had had to go through before we had managed to regain this feeling! But neither of us had voluntarily made the move before. It had taken an enormous build-up of pressure to get us started. We had had to talk about divorce first. It’s often only when we are in crisis that we are really willing to listen to our soul. When people come to me at the height of a personal crisis I often hear them say; ‘I can’t go on. I don’t see any way out. Sometimes all I want to do is die.’ They see their crisis as a disaster without a solution. In their mind, though, such a breakdown is a relief – a liberation of the true self from the prison of demands and concepts. At last there is space for truth and for our true feelings to flow.
Even though society doesn’t tell us so, our body and mind are simply servants of our soul. Our soul wants to express itself through them, because this is how it can show its true self. The soul’s little voice is easily overlooked, but it is our true leader. Unfortunately our body and mind are often buried under the concrete slab of our goals and targets so there is no room left for the tender trickle of our soul. It is like choking from inside, being blinded and deafened to our own calls. We cannot feel our soul any more. We are absorbed by everyday demands and are rarely able or willing to listen to its voice or to even follow it. We have a plan, we have an image and we have demands. But our soul is always seeking the realization of our true self, our full potential and our personal growth. Its only aim is the unfolding of our complete and divine being. And it does not matter to our soul how successful, intelligent or socially acknowledged we are.
Sometimes we get ourselves into situations that seem catastrophic, but they force our soul to develop and push it towards an unfolding of our perfect inner being. When we lose a loved one, our job, our home or our health, we experience fear and frustration. But from the viewpoint of our soul we are experiencing a healing crisis, an opportunity for growth.
After that disastrous but truthful birthday party my husband and I had to admit to each other that there was no way our relationship could carry on. We decided to go our own way for a while and live our own lives. It was a wordless, painful and lonely phase, but at the same time extremely honest and healing. We were faced with a heap of rubble that we had stumbled over countless times before without acknowledging its existence. For ages we had unconsciously been aware of it, but we had kept silent about it and tried to act out our marriage right next to it. Now that the wounds were ripped open we both began to start clearing up the rubble from our respective corners, the parts we felt responsible for. We only realized much later that the birthday party had been a new beginning for our marriage.
Life is so much cleverer than we are. If we hold back, if we avoid looking at what’s right in front of us, if we don’t listen to our heart even though every day we sense more and more clearly that we are off-track, then life just takes over. Usually in a way that we don’t like at all. We might do our best to avoid it but eventually we are forced to the edge of the abyss, and sometimes even beyond. Life forces us to jump – but only so that we can trust that we will land safely at the bottom. It leads us to exactly those circumstances in which we are most able to grow.
All of us realize in one way or the other when something is changing in our life, when something we wanted isn’t bringing us the fulfilment we hoped for. Then it is time to do our homework and to learn something new. This means we have to stop and take a brave and honest look at our life. In most cases, the only way is to seek honest and uncompromising communication with other people. We have to be willing to open up our heart and really follow through on our feelings. If we avoid this, if we repress our inner impulses and our pain or distract ourselves by keeping busy, then often something else happens that sets this process of reorganization in motion. A fateful event, a problem, an illness or the people close to us can all propel us – sometimes against our will – towards self-development.
This path is often much more painful than the responsible way that we avoided earlier. My friend, for example, was later overcome by her own truth in a way that resembled the biblical Deluge rather than a simple flood. She had sensed that things couldn’t go on the way they were, that her marriage was empty, that her soul and that of her husband had both been buried under concrete. But she had been afraid to confront her husband. Instead of challenging him with her truth, with all her fears and doubts, she decided to have another baby. Then, in the last term of her pregnancy her husband told her that he was leaving her for another woman.
Even though at the moment everything may seem hopeless to you, even though there may be no solution in sight, be brave and look at your life honestly. Face up to the reality of your situation. The reality is that your relationship probably does not match your dreams. The reality is that your partner doesn’t have a clue about how you are feeling. The reality is that you aren’t in love any more. The reality is that you know that your partner has distasteful and hurtful qualities. The reality is that you feel jealous or dependent. The reality is that sometimes you would like to get rid of your partner. The reality is that you despise them. The reality is that you have cheated on your partner several times. The reality is that your partner might have cheated on you too. The reality is that you probably got together with your partner for all the wrong reasons.
The reality is that all this is normal in the course of a relationship and presents us with enormous opportunities for healing, as long as we consider our relationship as a place for such healing. The reality is that facing the truth takes courage and continuous work. But often we don’t want to bother with that kind of work. We would rather cling to an idealized image of ourselves and our relationship. We would rather go to the Jones’s for dinner and invite the Roberts’s for tea. We would rather play tennis or collect garden gnomes, go bowling or play golf. We would rather leave our unconscious fears alone. We avoid the work on our deeper feelings because of the risk of even less pleasant sensations turning up.
Of course, relationships are there to provide us with happiness, joy, sensual pleasure and love. Whenever we are not experiencing this state of bliss, they are supposed to heal us so we can experience it again. Whenever a relationship brings us pain, whenever we feel low or unfulfilled, we can use those unpleasant situations as an opportunity for healing.
Another few words of wisdom by Chuck Spezzano:
Find your strength through the gate of weakness.
Find lust and pleasure through the gate of your pain.
Find safety and protection through the gate of your
fears. Find your ability for fulfilment, love and
mutuality through the gate of your loneliness. Find
real and true hope through the gate of your
hopelessness. Find fulfilment through the gate of
what was lacking in your childhood.