Anniversary

I spent most of 1989 in counseling, in an attempt to save my marriage. Over the objections of my "wife," I had this notion that the Church founded by Christ might have a role to play in helping us. A local parish had a "pastoral counseling center," with a husband and wife team who were licensed therapists. We both began seeing the husband early that year.

Actually, I should say that I went to see him for the most part. You see, our marriage was founded on the proposition that I was this piece of raw material who, if I could only listen to a woman who had more sense than I ever could, I might redeem myself as a member of the human race. As ridiculous as it sounds today, back then I believed it. What is even more ridiculous, was that the therapist appeared to believe it as well. My "wife" managed to convince him that I was the problem, even though she was not above walking out of sessions when it was clear she would not get her way. I was virtually forced to apologize for being a man of many interests. ("David, why do you like reading so much about religion and stuff like that?")

I did manage to gain some useful information about myself and my past. Much of it is too personal to include here, but not all of it. My parents, whom I love dearly and will unto eternity, did not make the wisest choices in their behavior toward me. That my father was the son of an alcoholic was a factor in his temperment, and his treatment of me from time to time. To this day, my siblings' reaction to this claim of distinction is somewhat mixed. As the oldest of four, most of the few mistakes or miscalculations that were ever made, were made with me. My younger brother -- whose marriage stayed intact, with a devoted wife, three well-behaved sons, a nice house in the Cincinnati suburbs, and an overall charmed existence -- once said, "Whenever I saw Dave have a problem with Dad, I told myself, when I'm that age I'm not gonna do that."

Glad I could help, Steve.

By the fall of that year, my therapist called me to tell me he was giving up on us. It wasn't our differences that were coming between us, he said. It was that we were so much alike. But that wasn't the end of it. He confessed to being a party to "triangulation" -- that is, becoming involved in our dispute to the point of taking sides with my "wife" against me.

The following summer, we were legally separated. We divorced two years after that.

In the years since, I was told by a young priest who spent his diaconal year at that parish, of his observation that the "pastoral counseling center" appeared to him to be a way of the pastor avoiding having to deal with such problems. And I suppose there is some perverse sense of poetic justice, in the knowledge that the man who enabled the downfall of my marriage would eventually suffer from dementia.

Even with the benefit of a declaration of nullity, most suitable Catholic women of the middle years are themselves the product of a divorce. Even if they are not, it is easy to tell when those unmarried ladies of more "traditionalist" sensibilities look with disdain upon a gentleman whose freedom to do so is the result of having "beaten the rap," so to speak. One is loathe to resort to the lonely hearts clubs that are most "separated and divorced ministries."

I've seen the online "Catholic Single" dating services. I'll be impressed when those fresh-faced visions of Catholic orthodoxy can hold out after ten years, several children, and a fair share of disillusionment.

I tell everybody I prefer to meet women the old-fashioned way -- in pubs and dance halls.

Most of my friends are women. Those over fifty will generally confide in me, of how "there are no men out there." I have seen many relationships that are held together, for the most part, by either a lack of imagination, or mutually-compatible pathologies. I would wish to do better, or not do so at all.

Today, I would have been married twenty years. This too shall pass...