Losing Sleep For The Right Reasons

Sometimes you have to get to the very bottom of things before it gets so desperate that there are no further choices: it’s decide to end it all (your current state of life) or start going up.

We descended to the bottom through layers of increasingly bitter shocks. There was the Venice honeymoon blighted by his ability to walk for any time or any distance before needing to sleep all afternoon while I got disconcertingly good at, and addicted to, playing solo electronic backgammon. There was the first time he said “Fuck You” and didn’t start laughing after a few seconds. Really meant it. Locking myself in the car once, because he scared me. Shocks of all shapes and sizes, constantly surprising, all slaps in the face. That was all him (or ME) shocking me. Waking me up to what this illness is and does. Once I was fully awake, we were miles apart, and he was furious with me. He was a stranger: angry, and resentful, and insecure, and full of rage. I dreamt his ME as a poisonous substance-abusing lodger called Brian, who we'd inadvertently invited in as a friend of a friend, who refused to move out, and now we were stuck with heavy drinking and emotional warfare. After that dream, I woke up to the realisation that my husband had become, was enveloped by, Brian.

But I never stopped wanting my first husband to return. Desperation pushed me to my own edges, until I started to do things that shocked him back. Six months ago I responded to the launch of another verbal assault by throwing a glass of water in his face.
Ever since then, by slow levels, we have been ascending to the light. Shocks from me to him help us surface.

Last week, realising the extent to which I was drowning without his emotional suport, I finally began to feel that if I couldn’t have it, when it came down to it, that I should start making progress, in a very real way, out of the marriage. I didn’t want him to move out; it isn’t that I don’t love him any more, because I do. Painfully so. But I had begun to feel that he treated me so much better when we weren’t married, and since treating me better was what I wanted him to do, I reasoned that maybe the best thing to do was to stop being married to him.

When the woman you love is lying there awake next to you at four o’ clock in the morning, and says, quietly, that she wants to get a divorce, it’s a one of the bigger shocks. What is telling is how a husband reacts, and mine reacted like my real husband. Became, in less than an hour of talking, my original husband, the man who genuinely loves me and is horrified to wake up in the middle of making his wife so very unhappy.

He came in a few hours later while I was reading people's comments on here and I didn't hide it. "It really makes me sad," I said, "that there's a bunch of people you've never even met who knows more about what's going on in my head than you do." We talked. I cried. He held me, and said sorry; he was truly, truly sorry.

This was last Thursday morning. It’ll be a week tomorrow, and things are feeling firmer and safer day by day. We’re getting better at being happy with each other, and enjoying having our connection back. We’re losing sleep for the right reasons instead of the wrong ones. For a long time now, my husband’s insomnia was lodged upstairs on a sofa, watching movies, passing the hours in draining isolation. For the last week we’ve had more positive forms of sleep-loss: long talks in each other’s arms, and kissing. We are lovers again, as we were right back at the beginning.

I’ve been wrong before. But let's hope I'm not.