The Rough Patch: Marriage and the Art of Living Together by Daphne de Marneffe

Author:Daphne de Marneffe [de Marneffe, Daphne]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2018-01-23T05:00:00+00:00

8

Lovesickness and Longing: Putting Them to Use

When Christina sat down in my office for the first time in sixteen years, she looked very much the same as before: petite, expressive, tending toward nervous thinness. I had seen her in psychotherapy when she was a graduate student who, by her own account, was working too little, drinking too much, and sleeping with too many men. Since that time, she told me on the phone, her life had gone well. She loved her job at a local research lab. She’d been happily married for more than a decade and had two “apparently well-adjusted” kids. After her friendly preamble, she said, “I’m having some trouble,” with tears thickening her voice. “But I’d rather explain it in person.”

When she came in, I felt happy to see her. She sat and gathered her breath, looking as if she was trying to find a way to begin her story that was truthful and complete. She was a scientist, and despite her youthful excesses, she valued precision. “I guess the way I want to start is to describe what happened. Because I don’t really know what happened.” She told me that two months before, when her husband and daughter were visiting his parents across the country, her five-year-old son, Ethan, had woken up one day with a high fever and had seemed incoherent. She got worried, and when she called the doctor’s office, they told her to bring him in right away.

“I was driving down the hill from our house, totally distracted, and I drove over a garbage-can top that had blown into the street. I stopped, even though I was freaked out and tempted to just keep driving. My neighbor Michael came out of his garage. He picked up the top and gave me a big, warm smile. I felt shocked at how beautiful his smile suddenly seemed to me. I remember the words bright spot went through my mind. It felt like some weird kind of otherworldly moment, looking into his eyes, in that light.”

After two days of blood draws, urine samples, and consultations among herself, her husband, Ben, and her son’s doctors, Ethan’s health picture was clearer and his recovery assured. But she kept returning to the “otherworldly” moment, like a secret source of security. During the hushed, long days when her son slept, she wandered around the house, unable to focus, replaying the memory of Michael and his smile.

“At first it felt like a harmless vacation in my mind. I’d think about Michael, and it felt comforting and exciting at the same time. Taking care of Ethan in the house all day, I almost felt like I was recuperating too. But then, when Ethan got better and went back to school, I kept feeling this way. A few weeks ago, I ran into Michael at the supermarket, and I started shaking. The day was pretty much shot. I felt like I was going crazy.” Christina wept. Struck by her tears, I asked if she was aware of feeling depressed, something she’d struggled with earlier in life.

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