Leaving a Marriage: Selfish or Selfless?
Leaving a Marriage: Selfish or Selfless?
(check out my blog every Wednesday and Saturday)
Last week in "Since You Asked," Cary Tennis's advice column on Salon.com, a young woman in a sad marriage suspects she shouldn't be married at all and wonders how to be happy again. The poor thing is caught between the guilt born of a religious family of origin who believe divorce is a sin, and a self-evident truth that she got married too quickly and simply doesn't love her husband.
She even says her husband is a perfectly nice guy. Huh. Sounds familiar.
Tennis's response blew my mind. It validated her (and my!) discomfort as perfectly legitimate and pointed out that leaving the marriage is not a selfish act but instead rectifies the previous selfish act of marrying for the wrong reasons.
Staying in a marriage that cannot be fixed is continuing to patch something that is monumentally broken.
Further, leaving would release her husband from marriage to a wife who doesn't want to be with him any longer, and he could move on. In this case, if the act of leaving is not an act of service to another, I don't know what is.
Cary also talks about how we all carry with us something like a personal truth — he describes it as a package we clutch to ourselves through thick and thin — and suggests that in her case that truth, the thing that defines her and that she is compelled to honor in her life, might be the spirit of freedom.
Perhaps she is a free spirit and marriage in general is not a good fit. Amen. I don't know if he has her figured out, but he sure has my number.
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