I was duped

No one told me how disappointing and boring married life is!

Published July 1, 2003 7:24PM (EDT)

Dear Cary,

I am a 34-year-old woman, married for about 14 months. If I had known how disappointing and boring marriage would be, I would never have done it. What is worse, is that all my married friends and siblings never really talked to me about the reality of married life -- they all act as though I should have known. But really, I had no idea, and am bitter about not having a clue; I feel like I was tricked into something. (I had tried to postpone the marriage, and my husband took it so badly, I went ahead with it anyway. A big mistake, I now believe.)

My husband is the kind of guy I was supposed to marry -- handsome, funny, ambitious. Loves my mom, and is very considerate to me. In some ways, I shouldn't complain, except for the fact that I feel I am sleepwalking through my life. The depths of my quiet desperation are amazing to me, and are approximately 14 months old.

When we were dating, we always had fun; he made me feel sexy and attractive. He's still very kind, but the sex has dropped off considerably. We don't go out together much because he's not interested in the things I am. I often go alone to plays or exhibits I want to see. I have tried to involve him, but really, I have married someone who is not my intellectual partner. He's simply not interested in those things, and I feel as though he was duping me into believing he was. I have spoken to him about my unhappiness and he's always attributed it to something else -- living in a different city from family, not having enough friends, etc. But after developing new hobbies and friendships, I still feel the same dullness about my entire life, stemming from my primary relationship being so mundane. I've always been a happy-go-lucky, independent person, so I am bewildered as to the depths of my unhappiness now.

We are all taught that marriage is the natural culmination of all our efforts toward love, and yet, I know of no one who is happily married. I do know some miserable parents of toddlers, and some couples who bicker constantly. Perhaps they are happy. My parents have been married for 40 years, and don't have sex anymore. I no longer suppose they are happy -- just together out of habit by this point.

Perhaps I should mention that I began dating my husband after leaving an exciting but underpaid career for one that I enjoy, and pays better, but lacks the adventure quotient. My husband is very emotionally dependent on me, and would be crushed to learn that I am considering leaving him and starting over somewhere new. We don't have any children and I feel that I could leave and begin again.

Please don't tell me to try harder. I'm the one doing all the work to try to bring some stimulation into our relationship. He seems to think that all is well, despite my explanations to the contrary. How much boredom is one supposed to cope with as part of marriage? Am I just having a problem maturing? Is "lack of fun" grounds for a divorce? How do people do this? I had always wanted an extraordinary life. But from here, it is looking very long indeed.

Trapped in the Marriage Donut

Dear Trapped,

Madam, what you need is a divorce. You made a dumb mistake. It was an honest mistake, but it was dumb. Luckily, this isn't the Middle Ages -- not yet anyway. Get a divorce, and the sooner the better -- while it's still legal.

The divorce should free up some time for you to write the book. And then, after the book becomes a bestseller, you will have all the time you need to visit the museums and eat the lunches. In the book, if you just tell in, say, a couple of hundred pages what you just said to me, in more detail but with the same combination of dizzying naiveté and withering honesty, every married woman in the country will want to read it -- aloud to her friends.

Of course marriage is sometimes as you say. But then, so is single life. Those of us who are married and plan to remain so have done it because the alternative is so much more frightening and bizarre -- to be out there among all those dangerous, untethered people, randomly ranging on the urban prairie, unleashed from family and institution, neighing and pawing the ground as the sun sets every night: It's sheer madness to contemplate singlehood. Many of us who are now married tried to remain happily free and single but could not bear that kind of happiness and freedom any longer.

As you say, the world offers so much in the way of books and music and entertainment! There is so much to do! But some of us also need security, comfort, routine, an ally, someone we can trust, someone who when encountered in the morning does not bark like a stranger raised by hyenas, someone whose allegiance is unquestioned, someone who has read some of the same books, someone who can buy toothpaste at Target when we run out, someone who is not an aunt or uncle or visiting graduate student at the nearby polytechnic institute: there are a million reasons to stay married, aside from the sheer madness of love, that is. It is hard to explain sometimes, especially when one is moody and inconsolable and wants to crawl around inside an apartment with all the drapes drawn for three or four days but there is this other person in the house to whom some explanation is owed for the unaccountable blankness of affect ... there are times, of course, when the sheer lunacy of the arrangement strikes home with particular force.

Nonetheless, as marriage is a delicious and mad torment, so is life itself.

So get the divorce, free up some time and write the book. Call it, "If I had known how disappointing and boring marriage would be, I would never have done it." Who could resist a title like that?

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