Understanding and accepting are different categories. I spent three months confusing them.
What I want for Patricia is what I would want for anyone making a difficult transition: that she find the things that are genuinely hers, that the apartment feels less like a fallback and more like a place, that the book club and whatever else she adds to it give her a life that is centered in itself rather than orbiting someone else’s.
I am not responsible for those things. I can want them, and I do, and I can keep the door of a relationship open to the version of her that rings the bell and brings the grocery store pie and says: I know I didn’t make it easy.
That version I can work with.
The version that tells me I am a guest in my own home is not invited back in.
What Counseling Actually Looked Like
Martin Cole had an office in a two-story building between a dental practice and an insurance agency, which is the kind of location that makes something feel both ordinary and slightly furtive, like you are going somewhere practical but would rather not explain which door you used.
We went four times in six weeks. I want to be specific about what counseling was and was not, because the version of couples counseling in most stories functions as a tribunal where someone wise and credentialed delivers a verdict on who was wrong. That was not what happened.
Martin was a tall man with reading glasses he wore on a chain and a habit of writing notes on a legal pad that he occasionally read back from in the same flat voice he wrote them in. He asked questions. He did not tell us what our marriage meant or should mean. He did not declare winners.