Until I Fall Away

I'm a sucker for songs with deep lyrics. Especially songs that fly under the radar. One of those is "Until I Fall Away" by the Gin Blossoms. The first verse starts off "I wanna tell if I am or I am not myself" which is a question I ask myself almost daily. The second verse "My fear pretend, that I'll never fall in love again." And if I'm honest that is a fear I have. Maybe one I always will. 

I don't like being pretentious. This blog was never about presenting myself as anything other than what I am. Or at least, the version of myself that I see: a fundamentally broken man who never figured out how to fix what was wrong with him. Objectively, I fixed some things, but maybe on others I just swept everything under the couch and hoped it would resolve itself. 

My marriage with Becky (again, not her real name) is at a crossroads. In my heart I guess I always knew we were existing on borrowed time. But just like the dirt under the couch, I thought if I didn't acknowledge it, things would be ok. 

To be clear, it's not a lack of love, nor of care. No one cheated, we don't fight. Our marriage has easily been the smoothest human relationship I've ever had. Which is remarkable given our very different upbringings and cultures we grew up in. We see eye to eye on almost everything that matters in a relationship/marriage. 

But Becky is not a normal person. She craves variety. Variety in relationships, variety in living situations, and places to live, variety in social circles. All of it. And it's the relationship variety that sits at the crux of our dilemma. 

She thinks we should separate. Not yet divorce, but maybe. She wants to know what else is out there. She has a nagging suspicion that she'll never find a man as good as me (something her mother, and her aunt have told her as well) but also feels like she'll be a failure if she doesn't at least try other relationships before settling with me. She also feels like we didn't have the normal dating/courtship dance that other couples do and that maybe that's part of what she feels is missing (not all of it, but part). And it's true. We had built up this long distance relationship, itself built on the foundation of our friendship from college, that culminated almost instantly into a marriage and shared life. It never bothered me because a) I've enjoyed our relationship and b) I finally had someone special in my life after years of failure on that front. 

She's also said she thinks I would benefit from this time apart as well. That I should be trying to date other women. That it would have been better had I done so before we got married, because at least then we'd both know that I chose her, and didn't just settle for her. 

And I gotta say, I don't know if she's wrong or not. I know that's a terrible thing to say. But how can I know that she's the right person for me if she was the only person for me. I've asked this before in older posts (you can go and read them yourself) but once we were married I never really pondered it. And honestly it scares me. Not only because we have a relationship that spans 17 years, 10 of which were as a married couple, so we've built a trust, a comfort that is impossible to replace. But also, what the hell am I going to do? Get a girlfriend? Who in God's name is interested in a 37 year old man, who's muscular but needs to lose about 35 pounds, isn't rich (though I do own two houses), doesn't look like Brad Pitt, but also isn't exactly the smoothest guy when it comes to picking up women. Dating sites, which were already bad when I was on them a decade ago, have only worse. I've gone to meetups, they aren't conducive to coupling up. So...very real chance I'd end up alone. which, without Becky, would have happened anyway. 

I don't know. I'm just thinking out loud right now. This is something that has been ongoing in our marriage for at least 3-4 years. Not consistently, but ever present. It's become more concrete over the past six months as Becky has started intimating that she is quite serious about at least a temporary split. But she also waffles on it. There are times where she wonders if she should stay with me, if for nothing other than the fact that I love her and that I'm a good man, things that you can't always replace. I don't like the idea of being "settled for" but at the same time, I don't want to be left without a chair, and I'm genuinely happy with our life together. Becky doesn't nag, doesn't belittle, doesn't tell me where I can go, or what I can do, or who I can do it with. I've seen bad marriages (my parents have one), we don't have that. 

So I don't know. Do I fight it? Do I convince her that staying together is better than parting? Or do I bet on myself that I can manage to do what I never did in the first place, only now in a worse dating environment than the one I tried dating in 10+ years ago? 

I don't know. I wish someone did and would tell me what to do.