"An absence." I almost wrote "the absence", then realized how pretentious that would sound. This is not about Napoleon and Josephine, or FDR and Eleanor, or JFK and his two hundred and some odd true loves, it is about two ordinary people living ordinary lives and about the end their marriage and lives together.
We had been married a little over ten years and were in our early thirties. We were neither of us remarkable for breast size or male endowment, but had found each other attractive and had had a pleasant and uneventful marriage up until recently. The seven year itch had skipped over us and we had a satisfying and mildly adventurous sex life for most of our marriage.
We both worked, with me earning more than my wife earned, and had postponed having our first child until we felt that we had our financial feet on he ground. I had inherited our modest house from my grandmother, and so we were in the privileged position of having no house payments. The house was in my name as I had inherited it before we were married. We had two automobiles, both registered in my name, not for any particular reason other than that I had made the purchases and paid for them. Up to now, it had not occurred to me to think of them as mine instead of ours.
Our home life had been warm and friendly, with discussion of our work lives and interests and in shared interest in a few TV programs. We went out for dinner once in a while, and to movies, and occasionally took short vacations together, and generally enjoyed each other's company.
Then, for a few months, I began to notice an absence of the close relations that we had generally shared. Casual and pleasant conversation tapered off to nothing, and our sex life did as well. She never refused me, but seemed uninterested and uninvolved and I asked less frequently as it did not seem that attractive a prospect with a largely disinterested wife.
An absence. She seemed distracted and seemed to be elsewhere in her mind.
It was after several months of this absence of normal relations that she said, for the first time, that she was going to go out this evening for a "girls' night out". I said, "whoa, this is a first. How did this come up?" I had until the last few months enjoyed our evenings together and did not like the prospect of an evening alone.
She said, well, she needed some time with her friends instead of always spending evenings at home with me and that that was what she intended to do tonight.
I said that for some months now she had seemed to me to be absent from our marriage and it seemed to me to be a bad thing for her to now decide to have evenings away from me with people that I did not know. I saw no good reason to equivocate, and so went on to say that from my reading and talk with other men, girls' nights out usually meant that a wife was seeking romantic and perhaps sexual relations with one or more other persons outside the marriage, or that indeed a wife had already formed a relationship outside her marriage and was going out on her own to be with her new boyfriend. I added that neither of these possibilities was even faintly acceptable to me, and asked her to cancel this girls' night out and have instead a discussion of where our marriage was and where it was going, and whether she had found someone else and was that what this was about.
She was irritated, and said that she did not feel like talking about our marriage and that she had a right to go out on her own if she wished to do so, and that indeed is what she intended to do.
I decided that there was nothing to be gained by shouting and took a moment to compose my statement to her.
Then I said, all right, if that is your decision, here is mine. If you go out tonight I will assume that this is the beginning or continuation of infidelity on your part, and that this marriage is over. I said that I would initiate the process of divorce first thing in the morning, and that she was not to return to this house, tonight, or ever.
I went on to say that I would immediately change the keys on all locks and reprogram the garage door opener, and would engage two security guards starting this evening to insure that if she and any companion tried to approach the house that they would be forcibly removed from the property.
I then took her purse from her, and removed her key ring and her telephone, which was in my name and paid for by me, saying that I was not going to provide her with a telephone to call her boyfriend(s), and that she would need to get her own. I added that she would need to take an overnight bag with whatever she might need for a few days, and that I would tomorrow engage a professional moving and storage company to come and remove her possessions from the property and put them into storage for her to retrieve at her expense. Any thing that did not get removed tomorrow I would gladly box or bag up and send to her, so that she would not lose anything that she valued, as long as she initiated this process within a month from tonight. More than a month, anything left would go to a charity. I suspect that a judge will give me a hard time about this at some later date.
Continuing in her purse I removed all credit cards that were in both our names, along with the checks on an account in both our names, and resolved to cancel all such credit cards by telephone this same evening and to go modify the joint checking account in the morning, leaving half the balance for her and removing my name from the account. I mentioned that I was keeping the car keys as well as the house keys, as both cars were in my name and not hers. Who got which car and so on would eventually decide by the judge during the divorce proceedings, but for now I was keeping them rather than make it more convenient for her to fuck around outside the marriage. I suspect that a judge will give me a hard time about this too, but so be it.
