I bring this up because I think people sometimes assume that a marriage that has gotten into trouble was never anything else, and I want to push back on that. What Nathan and I had in those early years was real. What went wrong wasn’t that we were mismatched; it was that we handled a long, grief-shaped crisis in a way that slowly rewrote the terms of our partnership without either of us fully noticing.
The first year after Gerald died, as I said, I was present and willing. I absorbed the expansion of Elaine’s needs into our life because the needs were real and the situation was acute and I cared about both Nathan and his mother in a way that made the absorption feel like love.
Somewhere in the second year, I started noticing that the absorption had become the baseline. Elaine’s calls came multiple times a week rather than twice a week. Nathan began consulting her schedule when we made plans, not to include her necessarily but to be sure nothing conflicted. I started getting the sense that our decisions had a new implicit party.
I raised it that year. We had a conversation, good in parts, that produced a set of mutual intentions: we’d be more deliberate about protecting our own schedule, we’d encourage Elaine to build more of her own life, we’d set some gentle limits on the frequency of contact. Nathan agreed with all of it.
The intentions lasted about six weeks. Then there was a difficult moment — Elaine had a bad week, couldn’t sleep, called Nathan four times in two days — and the intentions got set aside in favor of the immediate need. And once they were set aside, they never quite came back. That’s how it goes with grief, and with the habits grief builds. The acute phase is always happening; the maintenance agreement gets crowded out by the latest crisis.