Why?

Why did my husband marry me?  I married him in order to be able to get a job so I could support my child.  I was fired from my job because I had a child so marriage seemed to be the only solution.  Apparently the people of the town where I was teaching thought so as well because there seemed to be a fairly active movement to get my husband and me together.  I was continually informed "what a great catch" my husband would be and the couple I boarded with actually took steps to discourage the young man I was dating and facilitate my husband's efforts to date me.

When my husband, with a reputation as a confirmed bachelor, proposed to me two months after I was fired from my teaching job and two weeks before I was leaving town to spend a year in Toronto attending library school, I accepted his proposal but didn't believe he would actually go through with it.  I expected that in a few months he would have forgotten all about me.  When I look back now, it wasn't me he was so attracted to; it was what I represented for him.  He was looking for a home, a family and a social life of his own, he was looking for freedom, and marriage to me would be the gateway to what he wanted in life, particularly as I already had a family.

He got what he wanted out of marriage in spite of his mother's and his sisters' efforts to take it away from him but I had hoped for a closeness and a sharing in the long run that we never achieved.  My husband always carried within him a deep seated sense of unease and unworthiness that kept him from enjoying life to the fullest and interfered with the intimacy of family life that we should have been able to enjoy.  He couldn't trust me and so I couldn't trust him.  I kept waiting for things to get better and then they got worse.

Last week we talked about the relationship between him and his sister, his only surviving sibling and the fact that he never hears from her.  It's too late for her to change, he said, and for him, it was also too late to change.  He did change in many ways, but some things he was simply unable to change. We do have choices in life but sometimes, too many doors have closed and choices we have made in the past limit us so severely that we can no longer choose the things we would like to choose.  Of, course, theoretically, change is always open to us, but practically, we don't make the effort that would be required and we stay the course in spite of the fact that it may be the worst thing for us.  How strange, how sad.