Editor’s Note: Is anything ailing, torturing, or nagging at you? Are you beset by existential worries? Every Tuesday, James Parker tackles readers’ questions. Tell him about your lifelong or in-the-moment problems at [email protected].
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Dear James,
I’m 32 years old, my husband and I have been together for eight years, we married two years ago, and we have a 3-year-old daughter. After we met and fell in love, we knew we wanted to spend our lives together. But these days, I’ve been seriously thinking about leaving him.
It seems to me that I’m living with someone who is absent-minded, messy, and unable to change his habits. He tends to forget to close the fridge, turn off the AC, or lock our door. He loses his keys, somehow damages his passport or other documents before flights, and turns his music up to maximum volume at night, oblivious. Despite the numerous times I’ve voiced my displeasure, I see very little improvement from him.
A few years ago, my husband’s habits seemed like small, surmountable issues. Now they’ve come to bother me a lot. Sometimes I think that I’m being too nitpicky, and that I shouldn’t be contemplating ending our relationship just because of these problems. But they happen on an almost daily basis, and it really annoys me. What can I do to overcome this?
Dear Reader,
It’s not exactly a reality-based move, getting married. Most people do it while experiencing some form of the socially sanctioned psychosis known as Being in Love. But marriage itself, once you get down to it, is a relentless engine of reality: By means of entropy and repetition (and some other stuff, often involving socks or dishes), it will eventually break down every illusion with which it comes into contact. And sometimes in that process, things that once were manageable, perhaps even slightly charming, become intolerable.
What a drag it is to be clearing up after someone, mopping up, attending (so it feels) to the heedless spillover of their personality, when that someone is a someone you’re currently not liking very much. To consecrate oneself to the care of another can be beautiful—but not when they should be taking care of themselves.
I can imagine a time when your husband’s generalized life-incompetence and mental frowziness were interesting to you. Not anymore, obviously. Like America in 2025, you have arrived at what William S. Burroughs called a “naked lunch” moment: when you can see with total clarity what’s wriggling on the end of your fork. So the question is, do you still love your husband? He’s annoying you, but can you fleetingly—even momentarily—conceive of him as a whole and unique being, an infinitely valuable energy matrix maintaining its outline against a background of steady-state gloriousness? Do you still have access to this vision? Or has your life together reduced him to, as in your letter, a list of maddening attributes? (Always worth pausing to consider, too, what some of your maddening attributes might be.)
I’m wondering also if he might need a bit of help, because from your description he’s operating at a pretty high level of self-sabotage. Might he be trying to tell you something—that his life is currently unworkable, for example? That he’s overwhelmed, has too much on his plate? I don’t know. Maybe he’s just a big selfish slob, currently for whatever reason in a sort of pubescence of slobbery. Maybe he’s trying to out-baby your 3-year-old. And I’m sure you’re feeling overwhelmed, too. But when people start leaving the fridge open, in my experience, it’s about more than just the fridge.
Holding out for the look of love,
James
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