The Empty Intimacy Department

On marriage, chronic illness, and their unfortunate collision

My view for most of the past year (the tape, not the trees).

While on our honeymoon in Hawai’i, my husband, Cory, and I went to a “traditional” luau with hula dancers and a pig roast. We’d been married for about a week, the words “husband” and “wife” still zinging like Sweet Tarts on our tongues. Though there was a pig in a smoking pit just past the parking lot, our pork was shredded, seasoned, and served to us buffet-style in heated catering trays. 

We shared a table with two other married couples, one of which was celebrating their 25th wedding anniversary.

“Twenty-five years?! We haven’t even been married twenty-five days!” Cory said in amazement. “What’s your secret?”

“It’s simple,” the man, who was unbelievably tan, said with a smile, “just remember: Happy Wife, Happy Life!” 

“And travel to Hawai’i every five years,” added his (assumedly happy) wife, “that’s what we do.”

After dinner, the luau guests danced to the sounds of steel drums. As I draped my arms over Cory’s shoulders and swayed back and forth against the sinking sun, we agreed: in five years, we’d return to Hawai’i.

“In the meantime,” Cory said, “Happy Wife, Happy Life!” 

Four years and two hundred nineteen days later, I got my first migraine. That migraine ended up sending me to the hospital, then out of work, and eventually into the ranks of card-carrying Medicare recipients (by the way, I HATE Medicare, but that is a topic for another time). When our fifth wedding anniversary rolled around, Hawai’i was the last thing on either of our minds. We were too busy trying to figure out how to stop my pain and, secondarily, how to keep a marriage going when one person is constantly ill. What is love when all of life is hollow and dark? Meanwhile, other couples our age traveled to exotic destinations, had kids, or both.

Though I have married friends my age, most of them are Christians (marriage being sacred in Christianity). The few that aren’t have kids. It’s much easier to postpone this sizable commitment than it was in the past. One friend of mine has been dating the same guy for years, but decided to freeze her eggs because they weren’t ready to tie the knot. Egg freezing really is a great way to have your kids and eat them, too. Though you’d need to move to Ireland to do this. (TO ALL OF IRELAND: This is a joke. Please don’t cancel me.)

The last time I saw this friend, we talked about her relationship, and their uncertainty about marriage.

“I just don’t know how you know, you know?” she said. She was concerned about if she and her partner would still be compatible in five, ten years. Would they still love each other after so much time had passed? Would they even be the same people?

When Cory asked his dating coworkers why they aren’t interested in marriage, he discovered another common concern: finances. How is a couple supposed to afford an engagement ring, a memorable wedding, and a down payment on a house? One notable detail Cory’s coworkers agreed upon (both male and female) is that a “good” engagement ring costs at least $15,000. 

Wow, I have so many questions. Like, how big is a $15,000 ring? Is it so heavy it makes your finger hurt? Does it have special features? I’m thinking along the lines of the Men in Black flashy thing. Can it be used as a weapon? And, most importantly, does such an expensive ring make for a better marriage relationship than the twelve-buck silicone band I wear on my finger? Does the additional financial investment somehow equate to longer-lasting love?

Also, how much would a $15K engagement ring reflect the sun? I can’t imagine the glare. My eyes are rendered constantly light-sensitive by my chronic migraine disorder, so anything that reflects sunlight, even in my peripheral vision, drives me absolutely bonkers. Perhaps this is why I prefer wearing a plain silicone wedding band. 

Last year, one unavoidable source of glare, and our most glaring source of marital strife, was the car windshield. It got hit by a rock sometime in January, and the tiny spiderweb quickly grew into a crack that stretched across the entire windshield, exactly at eye level. This crack had the unique and terrible ability of catching the sunlight at any time of day, meaning that whenever I was in the car, I was accosted by an evil sneer of intolerable glare. 

I asked Cory to get the windshield replaced. Cory absolutely hates dealing with cars, because he knows nothing about them. But after a month of my nagging, he took it into a glass place. The glass place ended up being a dead end because our car had cameras that needed to be reconfigured and something wonky with the onboard computer made this quite difficult. The Subaru dealership would need to get involved. Unfortunately, the glass guy at the dealership only comes to work once in a blue moon, and the computer-fixer guy whenever Pluto crosses paths with Venus. 

Determined to keep my eyes open while in the car, especially while driving, I covered the crack with masking tape. This did stop the glare, but had the unexpected side effect of marking our car, which we parked on the street, with a thick, squiggly white line visible from a block away. We might as well have put a sign in the window saying, WE FAIL AT LIFE. Maybe if we had, neighbors would have delivered casseroles. On the plus side, there were a bunch of car break-ins on our block shortly after I taped the windshield, and ours was miraculously spared. I guess the tape functioned as a sort of scarlet letter.

The car was not the most nurturing place for our relationship during this time. Whenever we drove somewhere together, I got mad at Cory for not getting the windshield replaced, and Cory got mad at me for not being sensitive to how busy he was. And it’s true, he was: he had a full-time job that he worked hard to keep through company layoffs, so that I could have health insurance (I was not yet on STUPID MEDICARE). He had to do most of the chores and all of the errands. He was coming with me to appointments at the infusion center, because I was afraid of needles, and he’d recently taken time off to get me through a hospital stay. I also made him do all the research for new migraine treatments because I didn’t want to read rants from sick people on Reddit. And then there was the daily grind of bringing me ice packs, pouring me water, fetching pills, staying awake with me when I didn’t want to be alone in the dark, and tending to my frequent emotional outbursts. 

I was (quite unhelpfully) blind to Cory’s struggles because I had so many pressures of my own to manage. Namely, after four-plus years of fighting my Migraine disease (chronic migraine disorder being a flavor of Migraine disease), my treatment options were drying up. By November of last year, I had officially tried every migraine medication on the market. So the crack in the windshield wasn’t really worth worrying about; it was the crack running down the middle of our lives that needed attention. I took a photo of the taped windshield and considered posting it on Instagram. But it wasn’t a very attractive photo, and was perhaps too direct of a cry for help. I decided against it.

A more attractive photo that has recently graced my Insta feed was of two friends who used to live down the street from us. They’d lived together for a while before eventually getting married somewhere in the redwoods, and they always made a rather cute couple. Before the pandemic, they moved out of state to be closer to family. In the selfie they posted they both smiled wide, and in the description was an announcement: they were consciously uncoupling. Conscious uncoupling is a practice first popularized by Gwenyth Paltrow which posits that the modern human isn’t built for a single, lifelong romantic relationship. So, when a marriage stops being mutually satisfying, Paltrow says on her website that spouses should split amicably, with gratefulness for how their relationship helped them both along on the road to self-discovery and, hopefully, to more “fulfilling, sustainable, long-term” relationships down the line.

Fulfilling. Sustainable. Relationship.

“The truth is,” says Paltrow, “the only thing any of us have is today. Beyond that, there are no guarantees. The idea of being married to one person for life…is too much pressure for anyone.”

When I think about my now-uncoupled friends, I wonder how they made this decision. Was it a sudden realization, or a gradual process? Did one have the idea before the other and if so, what was that first conversation like? I wonder, too, what would have happened if one of them was swiftly and severely disabled early on in their marriage, as I was. Would the one partner’s need have kept them together despite how unfulfilling and unsustainable caretaking can be? Should it have?

What if my husband had decided to uncouple with me after the pressures of my illness took hold? Would he be the hero of his own story, bravely living his truth, or would he be the villain in mine?

Speaking of splitting up…who’s been to a divorce party? I’m fascinated/flabbergasted by this approach.

Cory got the windshield replaced just in time for our tenth wedding anniversary, which we celebrated this past month. It’s our second set of five years, so we should be taking our third trip to Hawai’i, but we haven’t been back to the islands since our honeymoon. Happy wife, happy life. Unhappy wife, start collecting dogs.

Cory’s hair is mostly gray now, though he just turned thirty-one. (Yes, he was barely twenty-one when we got married. He couldn’t drink at his own bachelor party!) A friend who is a doctor explained, helpfully, that the gray hair was a result of stress. Though some things are less bad than they were at the height of the windshield debacle, our day-to-day relationship remains rather unfulfilling for Cory (and for me, too, in other ways). He chooses instead to fulfill a promise he made on our wedding day to stick around, come hell or high water. The choice to fulfill—instead of to be fulfilled—is the essence of love.

The costs of that choice are not always small. Sometimes, they feel impossibly huge. Cory has sacrificed the vast majority of his social life and hobbies. He’s also passed up opportunities to advance in his career. And as for sustainability? Our relationship is anything but sustainable. We are both regularly at the end of our ropes, certain we can’t support each other for another second. But it’s when we reach the end of ourselves that we find each other more fully. More ful-filly.

My husband still has every reason to give up on me. This would certainly be the best choice for his mental and emotional health. He’d also have a lot less dog poop to pick up, and I mean that literally. As I was writing this, I actually had a dream that he did leave me, for my college roommate, because I didn’t fold the laundry promptly (it does usually takes me days, if not weeks, to fold laundry). When I woke up and told Cory about the dream, he laughed. He has the most genuine, joyful laugh.

“I’ll never leave you!” he said while giving me a big hug. “Though I do need to leave for work soon. Is that ok?”

If I had said no, I’m sure he would have stayed. ❖

This post was brought to you in part by Kat Foley, developmental editor extraordinaire.