The Crisis

‘I'M sleeping with Kimberly.’

These aren't the words a wife wants to hear from her husband. It was three days after Christmas, early in the morning. I was almost 31 and we had been married for five years. My husband had again been out all night, his phone switched off. I had spent yet another sleepless night, wondering where he was, if he was all right, and why he had chosen not to be with me. It was a relief to find out the truth.

I first met Michael the summer before I turned eighteen. He was the friend of a friend. Three years older than me, he was studying for a degree in applied science at the local university. I didn't see him again until summer was over and I started my business degree at the same university. He found me crying in the library one day, heartbroken and confused. I'd been involved with his friend and it hadn't worked out. I really needed a shoulder to cry on, and Michael offered his. We spent hours together, talking until late in the night. Full of infatuation and possibility, I was drawn to his emotional nature. Here was someone who understood me in a way no one ever had. Inevitably, we fell in love.

Soon, it became apparent that Michael had his demons. They were significant enough to ensure that our relationship was never an unwavering one. A dysfunctional childhood, moving from place to place, and his parents' subsequent divorce had left its mark; his mind was a constant battlefield, pulled one way by his fear of commitment and the other by his fear of abandonment.

Our relationship wasn't exactly what you would call healthy: Michael would smother me with attention, then distance himself. Feeling rejected, I'd withdraw. He'd then feel scared of being alone and come back. It was traumatic, especially as Michael offered no explanation for his cyclical detachment. Some nights I would cry myself to sleep. Cosseted in the stability of my steady upbringing, I didn't appreciate the depth of his mental anguish. The constant ups and downs fed my insecurities.

Despite what some would call an idyllic childhood in the country, full of climbing trees, flying kites, chasing butterflies and catching tadpoles, I grew into a shy, closed and introverted teenager. I was a sensitive only child, used to spending time by myself among nature and absorbed in books. As a result, I didn't find it easy to relate to people. I found being at a large school uncomfortable. I was scared of what to say, so I chose not to say anything at all. The usual teenage growing pains of crooked teeth, braces and bad hair didn't help. Later, at university and during my twenties, I was determined to reject that unpopular person, and outwardly became the opposite. On the inside, I remained scared that people would still see the old me. I cared too much about what they thought, and feared their judgement and rejection, not believing they would find me attractive or amiable. I'd always been a conscientious student who did very well. My parents had devoted a great deal of time to helping me learn when I was young, and had been generous with my education. They sent me to a private school and encouraged me to get a degree – the first person in my family to do so. I started to develop control-freak tendencies towards the end of secondary school, when it felt like my whole future rested upon my grades. I had very high expectations of myself, and thought that I had to complete everything to perfection. I felt as though I had to do everything myself for it to be good enough, and was terrified of failure or anything going wrong. The sheer magnitude of life ahead overwhelmed me, and made me to want to control all aspects of it. It didn't work out, of course.

After we graduated from university in 1995, Michael and I moved to Melbourne together. I wanted to spread my wings and experience the freedom of the city. He agreed. We started work on our respective careers, mine as a financial auditor. It was the first job that I was interviewed for, and I got it. Never mind that auditing had been one of my least favourite subjects at university; I was gainfully employed.

Like many women, all I wanted was a big wedding and to look like a princess in a billowing white dress, long flowing veil, a huge bunch of long-stemmed red roses to match my red lipstick and a sparkling tiara. I desperately wanted to belong to someone, to have the security and the status of being a ‘Mrs’.

Michael didn't want to get married at all. To him it was a constraint, and could go wrong like his parents' marriage had. He became restless and wanted to travel the world. I found the idea daunting and at first dismissed it. Then one morning, tired of the daily work routine, I agreed. We left for a six-month overseas trip. Tears trickled down my face at the airport as I waved goodbye to my parents. It felt like I would be away for an eternity.

Michael and I spent a month in America, three months working in London, and the remainder of the time travelling around Scotland, Ireland and western Europe. On the way home, we stopped over in Bangkok. We both enjoyed visiting new places and sharing new experiences, but it was overshadowed by my unsettling feelings about wanting to get married. I wasn't satisfied with our relationship. I wanted more commitment and didn't see much point in staying together if I wasn't going to get it. Even during the trip, I complained bitterly about not being married, while my friends from school and university all experienced that joy. In the end my persistence and Michael's fear of abandonment won. He proposed to me in Munich, despite his concern about the impact marriage would have on his life.

‘It doesn't have to change anything,’ I reassured him. ‘We can still keep having fun and going out.’

Secretly, I hoped it would bring more stability into our lives.

Seven years after we met, with me at 25 and Michael 28, I had the wedding I wanted, in the same church my parents were married almost 30 years earlier. I was elated.

If I thought marriage would solve all of Michael's problems, I was wrong. An injurious cloud of nightclubs, parties, drugs and alcohol constantly intruded on our life. My initial curious participation gradually gave away to resentment, and I struggled to keep my emotions and life in order. There was no place for such a lifestyle in the accounting office I worked in. Neither could I share it with my conservative friends and family. I felt torn. Who was the real me? Where did I fit in?

Surprisingly, Michael and I continued to do well at work. Another of his fears was not having enough money, which drove him to great lengths to succeed. He was constantly stressed about work, and pushed himself very hard. We had a classic double-income-no-kids lifestyle to match: outwardly, we were successful and on track to achieving the conventional Australian dream. We travelled and dined out frequently. We moved into a brand-new townhouse in Melbourne, and accumulated two investment properties in sought-after coastal towns in Queensland. We talked about moving into the property near Noosa and living a simple life. I dreamed of our two kids and carefree, sun-drenched weekends spent at the beach.

It was hardly reality, though. A couple of years after we were married, major cracks began to appear. I spent Friday nights at home alone while Michael partied with his single friends. He went straight from work and didn't come home until late on Saturday morning. Then he spent the rest of the weekend recovering.

‘Why do you keep doing this?’ I begged him.

‘I just don't know,’ was his usual reply.

After six months, I decided I had no choice but to join him if I was to share his life. I made new friends and spent nights and days with them, mostly in clubs. I also discovered shopping. Until then, I'd had little interest in fashion or expensive clothes, the legacy of growing up in rural Australia. I soon discovered that new clothes and expensive haircuts did wonders for my self-esteem. I could mould myself into someone else. Without these material thrills, my life seemed bland and stale. I was paying the price for pressuring my husband to marry me, but I loved him and dreamed of a better future together.

My job suited the control freak in me but totally quashed the creative person I'd been when I was younger. Unfulfilled and unmotivated by it, I nevertheless put up with it because it paid well and I didn't have the courage to try anything different. Change made me uneasy. Besides, my job had other benefits. I was home in time to prepare dinner, and was never stressed. I dreaded people asking me how work was, because I never had anything positive to say. I was hardly doing my life's passion.

On the weekends, our partying reached a peak. The more wretched I felt inside, the more compensation I required outside. I constantly sought attention from others, hoping they'd see me as different and worthy of approval. This me was bold, daring and pushed boundaries. I hardly recognised myself anymore, and I didn't like this new person I'd become very much.

I first met Kimberly (not her real name) at drinks with Michael's colleagues. Michael used to work with her and they became friends. She started to party with us, and even came to our house. Like Michael, she'd had a dysfunctional childhood, and this drew them to each other.

‘I think I'm developing feelings for Kimberly,’ Michael confessed one night.

I felt besieged and yet powerless to do anything about it.

‘Those feelings don't have to progress,’ I naïvely replied. ‘You obviously understand each other, but it doesn't mean you're meant to have a relationship with each other.’ I'd also sought emotional support and closeness from other people, so had some idea of how he was feeling.

We had divested ourselves of the responsibilities of marriage, and were living separate lives, yet I never really thought it would end. When he finally told me about their affair a couple of months later my stomach felt heavy and hollow, my heart pounded and my head spun. It was a strange feeling of knowing that my life had irrevocably been altered in that one moment. While I'd been searching for reasons for Michael's distance from me, I hadn't been particularly suspicious of an affair due to the ever-present state of flux of our relationship. Now that I had tangible evidence of what was wrong, I wasn't sure what to do with it. Neither was Michael. Our pain over the situation strangely united us. We wanted to cling to the remnants of our marriage, but at the same time we couldn't. Underlying issues prevented it.

‘I just don't know who I am,’ Michael said. ‘I need to discover who I am.’

Having been with me since he was 21, he'd never had the freedom or independence to make that discovery. Despite our problems, we'd spent most of our adult lives with each other.

‘I don't know what to do,’ Michael continued. ‘I think I need to move out for a while, but I don't know if I can do it.’

So many different emotions flew through my mind. Anger. Disbelief. Despair. Shock. I cried. I raged. Yet, I never told him not to leave. Deep down, I understood his need to find himself and grow. I didn't want our marriage to end, but neither could I cope with it the way it was. We both needed space to sort ourselves out.

‘You must stop seeing Kimberly – you can't focus on yourself while she's in your life.’

He agreed. I believed him.

We decided to live apart for six months. I helped him look for an apartment. The weekend that he moved out, I fled to a friend's house in the country.

He called me in tears. ‘This is so difficult. I really don't know what I'm doing. This is all so much harder than I thought.’

I consoled him, even though my heart was in tatters.

Michael continued to call me often, usually in an overwrought state. ‘I've lied to you so much and I'm still lying to you, but I can't stop it.’

Our friends knew we were having problems, but we kept up appearances for a while. We went to a stage show together and even a wedding. Once I picked Michael up from his apartment. There were two dirty wine glasses next to the sink in his kitchen. Seeing that confirmed my fears.

I felt raw and tender. I couldn't sleep, and nothing made sense anymore. My life as I knew it was disintegrating, and I was powerless to do anything about it. I became obsessive, trawling the Internet for information on midlife crisis, which I was sure was Michael's problem. My husband was only in his early thirties but he wasn't behaving normally. Only people in pain do such painful things. I had to try and understand what was happening.

While Michael relied on antidepressants, a prescription of sleeping pills and Valium was my only comfort. Some nights, alone in our bed, I was so disturbed that even the strongest of sleeping pills didn't work. I had no appetite. I'd always been slim, but my weight started dropping alarmingly. My clothes began to hang on me, and I had to buy jeans two sizes smaller. Surely, I wasn't that thin? Concerned friends insisted that I eat dinner with them every night.

Michael tried a ten-day Vipassana silent meditation course but had to leave halfway through because it was too intense. A friend recommended a psychotherapist, and we went together to see if there was any hope for our marriage.

It wasn't pleasant. Michael, obviously anguished, had a long list of grievances against me. I was too controlling. I only saw things in black and white. I wasn't passionate. I wasn't spontaneous. I didn't understand him. I didn't share his interests. I was bad tempered. He didn't want to work through our problems together. He didn't think it was possible for me to change anyway. He couldn't even have coffee with me in the morning because I didn't drink it!

There was an upside. While some people turn to drugs and alcohol to drown their sorrows, I'd already been there. I stopped partying. I also stopped shopping. I wanted to do away with everything that reminded me of my past. I became very reflective and introspective. My agony slapped me in the face and forced me to look in the mirror, introducing me to my real self. I immersed myself in spiritual and self-development books. I wrote down all the issues Michael had with me and evaluated them. Which were legitimate and which was he using to justify his behaviour?

No doubt, I was controlling at times and very rarely spontaneous. Our life ran to a strict schedule, with every social event planned weeks in advance. While partying gave me confidence to be someone else, it came at the expense of who I really was – someone genuine, emotional, trustworthy and who needed solitude to regroup. The outrageous party person I'd been had destroyed my soul. With the ground ripped out from underneath me, I realised that I no longer wanted to impress people or prove anything to them. All I wanted was to stop doubting myself and finally accept me for who I was. To be more independent and confident. To make myself a better person.

What is a crisis but an opportunity for change? If I embraced the pain, maybe it would lead me to a new path in life that I could paint a new canvas with.

At work, I became very withdrawn. I didn't want to see or talk to anyone. It was a struggle just to be in the office. I couldn't pretend to be cheery. Neither could I explain what was going on in my personal life. My problem came to light under shameful circumstances one day. The boss was away. It was a colleague's birthday and we all went out to lunch. We were a festive group, and there was the usual generous consumption of alcohol, including tequila. I had earned myself a reputation in the past as a force to be reckoned with when it came to drinking tequila. That wasn't the case this time.

Back in the office, I started feeling sick, really sick. I crawled under my desk to try and sleep it off. Around 45 minutes later I woke up in a daze. I couldn't move but the tequila insisted on coming up. I vomited all over the floor under my desk. Not knowing what else to do, I called Michael on my mobile to come and rescue me. He came and carried me away. The saga didn't end there. In the lobby, hysteria welled up inside me and boiled over. I was panic stricken and incoherent. An ambulance was called and I was taken to hospital. They were concerned about my mental health and didn't want me to do anything harmful.

My recollections of the hours spent in the hospital are hazy. I remember bright lights and chattering voices. One of those voices told me to pull down my dress, which was crumpled and immodestly heading towards my waist as I lay on the stretcher. At the time, it struck me as an absurd thing to say. Wasn't nudity an everyday occurrence in hospitals? Besides, unlike other patients, I was wearing underpants and opaque tights.

As midnight approached, I remembered I was supposed to be a bridesmaid at my best friend's wedding the next day. I needed to get out of hospital as soon as possible. The doctor who attended me shared my same offbeat sense of humour, so I encouraged him to regale me with hospital emergency-room stories. Seeing that I was laughing, he pronounced me sane enough to go home.

Michael was extremely concerned about my wellbeing, and his remorse prompted him to suggest that we move to Queensland together. I felt a flicker of relief and hope. He did still love me and wanted to be with me after all.

A day later he called and said he couldn't do it.

The months passed. Michael couldn't let go of either me or Kimberly. He alternated between blaming me and himself. On the days he felt vulnerable he was tearful, said he missed me, saw many positive changes in me and wanted to work things out. On the days his barrier was up he was tense, said that in his heart he had moved on, didn't have what it would take to fix things between us and was driven a lot by guilt over what he did to me. His oscillations were tearing me apart emotionally, but I was powerless to turn him away when he phoned. I had little experience in dealing with relationship break-ups, and my life seemed incomplete without him. I wanted to beg him to sort himself out and make everything better but I didn't. It would only pressure him, and he seemed incapable of change anyway.

My task was to remain detached and to keep the focus on improving myself. Then he'd see the difference and want to come back of his own accord. I craved for the opportunity to confront Kimberly and to get closure so I could move on. Miraculously, the universe conspired to grant me my wish.

I met a couple of good friends for dinner after work one evening. They had missed their train home to Geelong, so we headed to the pub opposite Flinders Street station to pass the time until the next train came. I noticed her soon after we walked in. She was in a corner surrounded by colleagues and had no way of escaping.

Like a puppet, I walked over to her. ‘Hello Kimberly, what a surprise to see you after so long. How are you?’

She squirmed.

As I turned to leave, I addressed her colleagues, ‘By the way, did you know she's having an affair with my husband?’

That was enough for me, but not for my feisty friend. While I stood there trembling, she ran out of the pub and across Swanston Street yelling abuse at Kimberly as she fled. It felt like an outlandish scene from a movie, not my life.

I was living an unending nightmare. I had no idea of the direction my life was going in. I felt like I was treading water, but barely at that.

Michael talked about divorce. ‘I want to know what it feels like to be truly free.’

He wanted to sell both of the houses we had bought in Queensland. ‘I never wanted to live in the Noosa house anyway,’ he claimed.

That said, I didn't oppose him. I was thoroughly confused by his confusion, how he sometimes wanted to be with me and not at other times. Along with the houses went my dream for the future. Nothing that was left in my life inspired me. I felt uncertain, hollow and directionless.

At work, I arranged to take long-service leave. My boss was very understanding, but I felt that I couldn't continue to be there. I needed time away to regain my health and to heal. I needed to rediscover myself. After ten years, I was entitled to three months' leave at full pay or six months at half-pay. I took the six months.

I stayed home the first month. Time flew by, but none of the days was easy. I was mentally exhausted and struggled to keep it together. I wanted to sit down and cry and yell and run to someone – anyone – and ask them to take away the pain.

Then an old friend from university needed somewhere to live and moved into the downstairs bedroom. It felt incredibly good to have someone in the house. We cooked together, listened to music, danced, drank red wine late into the night and went on road trips.

My spirits lifted. I grew stronger. Gradually, with the distraction, my anxiety started receding, as did my need for the pills. My friend's presence was exactly what I needed, not just for the company, but because his personality forced me to confront a lot of the issues I had about myself. He was very independent, decisive, accepting of himself and stubborn. He had little patience with my wallowing, and often got annoyed with me for constantly comparing myself with him and others, and for thinking I was inferior. He just wanted me to give myself a break. He also wanted me to develop my own strength, and had the knack of disappearing every time I started becoming too reliant on him. I knew he was right, but it was tough all the same.

Michael resurfaced again, and so began another cycle of blame and recrimination. And as quickly as he reappeared, he disappeared again. Tired of being buffeted by these emotional waves, I decided I needed a complete change of environment. To move forward, I needed to throw myself totally out of my comfort zone and open myself up to new possibilities. It couldn't happen here, with constant reminders of the life I had once led. Besides, another Christmas was approaching, and I couldn't face the harrowing memories of the previous year.

I'd never been anywhere by myself before. A trip alone would help me grow, help me discover the blessings and purpose that seemed hidden in my life. I chose India for its unrivalled ability to challenge me, but looking back I think it was India that chose me. I'd been there twice before with Michael. We visited both the north and the south. I found it infectious. The contrasting crumble of Old Delhi and the orderly New Delhi, the regal splendour of Rajasthan, sacred Varanasi with its mystical rituals revealed openly along the Ganges riverside, the luminous Taj Mahal, extreme Mumbai, the spiritual merging of three seas at Kanyakumari and the hedonistic beaches of Goa. Everywhere, India teemed with life and paradoxes.

Like everything else I did, I had been meticulous when planning our trips. Daily itineraries were prepared, hotels and train tickets booked in advance. It was quite a contrast to how most backpackers saw India, but I didn't want to leave anything to chance.

Of course, India made sure that despite my extensive arrangements, things still went awry. Taxi drivers took us to the wrong hotels, trains were late and people gave us incorrect directions. We were lied to, cheated and sometimes even found ourselves stranded. Yet, it was during some of these moments that I discovered a wonderful sense of liberation.

Unable to get a taxi from the Ellora Caves to Aurangabad one day, the only option had been to pile into a local jeep. Our backpacks were thrown onto the roof. Inside, twice as many people than seats were crammed together, the smell of sweat masked by sticks of burning incense jammed into a little holder on the dashboard that sat next to a Ganesh idol. Hindi music blared from the speakers. The driver dodged other vehicles, people and cows.

I was mesmerised. India pushed me to let go and adapt, while the country's cultural clichés sucked me in and enveloped me. Ancient scriptures. Reincarnation. Snake charmers. Gods with multiple heads and arms. Curry. Chaos. Smiling people with few possessions. And all those holy cows.

To me, India felt like an old but unpredictable friend; one whose behaviour I could never be sure of, but liked anyway. Its allure was nebulous, but had a lot to do with the sense of possibility the country offered. While I felt that life was too immense and I needed to control it, in India it was the opposite. In a country addicted to religion, people put themselves in God's hands. They had faith in a higher power and believed that it could turn their fortunes at any time. I didn't – but that would change. As a result they spent a great deal of time engaging in rituals to please the gods. They even believed that man could become god, self-realised, through the practice of yoga and meditation.

For this trip, I decided to spend five weeks in Kolkata – chosen because I was yet to visit that city – doing volunteer work and giving something back. It would take my mind off my woes and it wouldn't hurt for me to be truly humbled by those less fortunate than me.

Michael didn't react well to my plans.

‘I've made a mistake, please let's try again,’ he begged. He even phoned my parents.

‘We'll talk when I get back,’ I told him.

I left my friend in charge of the house, packed my bag and boarded a flight into the unknown.