Love is not a Business Deal
If love doesn’t endure when the going gets tough then it likely wasn’t love.
There’s a reason wedding vows often feature the lines “In sickness and in health, for richer, for poorer.” Those are vows I took, twice. The first time, I was a 19 year-old student still wet behind the ear and entered into a short-lived union with a man to whom I was little more than a live sex toy.
I got married again in 2013, by then a full-fledged adult fully conversant with the vagaries of human relationships.
Or so I thought, because nothing could have prepared me for what happened next and I still don’t understand it.
As I rebuild a life that works, word by word, after major depressive disorder incapacitated me for five years, some questions need asking.
Depression felled me shortly after I got married. But because, on the surface, I had everything going for me, I didn’t identify it right away. All I knew is that there was a persistent malaise that seemed to intensify with time as I became more and more paralyzed.
When I realized what it was it had contaminated everything, including my marriage.
Like a ray of sunshine, true love is or it isn’t.
You feel its warmth on your skin and it makes you blink when you look up. There’s no faking true love even though many people see it when it isn’t there because it is what most of us yearn for.
Few of us dream of going through life solo, without anyone to share our daily reality with. To most of us, loneliness is reductive and even stunting. When there’s no one around to encourage or support you, you may never achieve your full potential, no matter how driven you may be.
Or if you manage to get going against all odds, you’ll eventually crash and burn when you realize no one cares.
To us humans, there’s nothing more life-affirming than to love and be loved. And we’ll make innumerable sacrifices for this to happen, including sacrificing what makes us who we are.
But I did just that then went on to spend five years believing depression had disappeared me. Self-delusion is a hard drug.
As I seek to understand the genesis of my illness, I can no longer ignore that its advent coincides with my getting married and immigrating to the US.
While America kept me sick as I could never afford therapy co-pays despite having insurance, why was I left to hold my own hand throughout?
Some answers may forever elude me.
Understanding the unraveling of a relationship requires all parties to get involved. I can’t do all the excavating and digging alone, only my side. In this particular case, I may well be the only one aware that there is an issue, which baffles me even more.
If you saw your partner decline and lose the will to live, what would you do? Would you just let them be and fight for their life alone?
During the years I was so incapacitated my writing voice went missing and I couldn’t function, I did break down physically a few times. Although most of that period is a blur, I recall collapsing onto the floor in violent sobbing fits, terrified I’d die without ever seeing my family again.
Back then, I devoted an inordinate amount of time to figuring out how I could expedite the process because there was nothing to live for anymore.
What I don’t recall was being comforted, because I was not. Instead, my breaking down was just one more embarrassment, one more thing to deal with.
From vocation to languages, love and curiosity made me who I was but none of that registered or mattered anymore.
As a result, I lost myself for over five years.
My being unable to earn because I was so unwell soon became a source of resentment in my household as my husband saw me as lazy, not sick. Even when I recovered my writing voice, my efforts did not count as efforts and my work didn’t count as real work either.
In America, human worth is often measured in dollars so a freelancer setting out and earning cents remains a zero in capitalistic terms.
Love is as love does.
How do you explain apathy within the context of a marriage? Without self-combusting with shame, how do you explain to anyone that the one person who is supposed to love you did not love you enough to comfort you?
Granted, I wasn’t thrown out on the street nor forced into a divorce. There was always a roof over my head and some food in the pantry, somehow, even though power and internet would get cut off on occasion.
Whether this was love or duty, I do not know and I still don’t. I can only speak for myself and try to parse how I experienced those years under the yoke of major depressive disorder.
Is it my illness that made me feel unlovable and worthless, or my marriage? And what if they were one and the same thing?
My illness and the last few years are a burden that still has the power to crush me if I dwell on the past so I seldom do. I cannot afford to because Stage IV cancer keeps trying to kill my stepmom and my parents need me by their side in Europe.
This is my one job and I told my husband as much. I’m prepared to go it alone, which leaves no room for surprise, disappointment, or abandonment.
Then again, perhaps I am being too harsh on someone who did his best under very trying circumstances for years, I have no idea but I have to allow for that.
All I know is that two lonelinesses in parallel do not a fulfilling relationship make.
If love doesn’t empower you when the going gets tough then it likely wasn’t love.
I’m a French-American writer and journalist living out of a suitcase in transit between North America and Europe. To continue the conversation, follow the bird. For email and everything else, deets in bio.
Love is not a Business Deal
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