PERSONAL ESSAYS

Reader Feedback on "Uncoupling"

thank you for making me feel not alone.
--tks
09/20

I thought this was so well written. I could relate to her very well that it made me want to meet her & seduce her.
--LT
09/04

Sounds like you've made your decision--and the right one--but don't want to admit it to yourself, or more likely, your husband.
--TJ
11/01

Dear DH: I couldn't agree with you more. I think these two belong together, to keep the rest of the world safe from them. When you sign on for a marriage, you agree to "for better or worse," and when the gifts are all opened and the wild nights of honeymoon sex are over, what remains is REAL LIFE. Real life is full of joys, disappointments, anger, hate, love--the whole gamut--and there is no reason a marriage would be exempt. Relationships are as volatile as the people who establish them--either this woman enjoys the misery and thrives on it, or she's a bona fide weenie who can't make a decision without wavering incessantly. It's a shame, too -- I enjoyed her initial columns and really felt empathy toward her. Like another reader said, the person who was strong in the face of a dissolving marriage has morphed into a total whimpering coward.
--JLB
05/28

I am not married and a commitment phobe (unfotunately) but I'd like to give some advice. Him. Be a man stand up for your self personally and with your wife. Don't take her shit... Her. Be supportive to your husband. Stop bullying him, and stop unloading your problems on him. Have you tried meditation? Also I can't help thinking that you need to do things togeather that you enjoy. Something that will get you working as a team again. Have some fun. regain a joy for each other. It may take a while but it is possible in time. Good luck.
--JJVP
05/27

This sounds like my marriage before it ended three years ago. I actually wanted out after six months because I felt that it wouldn't work. My husband wanted the marriage. I trudged along for four and a half years afterwards, depressed and feeling alone. On top of it, I had gained weight due to an accident and was in a knee brace for three months. After a while, I stopped accepting his advances. We went to counseling for a year. The last night our sessions, our therapist asked if I actually liked him as a person. The answer was no. After we left, I got to hear how I ruined his life. I moved out two months later. Flash forward five months, he's going to the UK to stay for three months with a woman he met online. I have to go to our divorce hearing alone w/my lawyer. His being on holiday doesn't bode well with the judge. Three months later, he announces that he's marrying this woman and moving. I don't feel anything. In the end, I wish that I had held out and dated more. I've been dating for three years now and it's much harder in my thirties. Men either want younger women, can't handle that you're divorced, or are just downright scared to commit. I have to say, though, I'm glad that I'm not married to him anymore.
--DS
05/26

Mega-unendurable. Reading this was like spending a week in Abu Gharaib prison, without the fun.
--rs
05/26

Pathetic
--cmd
05/26

I too, have read all previous columns about this marriage and I have noticed a steady deterioration. The earlier work was written by a strong person looking for a solution. Now, we get all this whining, because evidently neither of them has had the courage to really change their lives. This comes dangerously close to self-pity. I have lost my patience.
--wg
05/26

I've read every column the author has written on her marriage for Nerve. So I feel I can make an informed decision NEVER to read her work on this site again. At least if she insists on continuing to give us the repetitive blow by blow of a marriage that should never have happened in the first place.
--MH
05/26

TS is right: this is an honest portrait of pain, in all of its ugliness. At the same time, the author seems to present a scenario where their happiness is impossible (her husband hates conflict; she yearns for a "charming asshole," and gets mad when he doesn't deliver). And that's where the vitriol comes from. I wish she'd realize that while it's certainly possible to get what she wants, she'll never get it from him and, most of all, why do you want *that*? It reduces the readers' sympathies. Especially since the world is full of assholes, men and women, and most of us have to fight our way through them to find someone worth living with.
--dh
05/26

I don't know what-all is with the vitriol. Isn't this a lovely portrait of pain, from the inside? No one said that suffering would be pretty, and yet here it is. Wonderful.
--TS
05/26

"The one where I get mad about something and he panics and I feel like a monster and all is lost." This sounds like hell on earth. But are these people cabable of any better?
--Alf
05/26

I can't imagine a bigger mistake than this couple. I completely agree with the comment about not wanting to meet these people on a plane. I think I might jump off the plane. which it sounds like the husband wants to do. and who can blame him with this immature, combative, psuedointellectual blabbermouth? I can't imagine how he feels having his problems papered all over the internet.
--jdw
05/26

You stated in one of your orevious essays, "I much prefer the idea of the occasionally frustrating push and pull. This sounds to me like a kind of heaven. Winning a few fights, losing a few, but getting to have sex all the while." In other words, you want to squabble endlessly about things you don't even care much about. MY GOD THAT SOUNDS SO BORING! Oh well, to each his/her own...
--pdh
05/26

I agree with the first feedback on this article. It's nothing but depressing. Don't waste any more time, guys. Life is way too short.
----c
05/26

As much as I really hate to get Freudian, and I REALLY hate to, I have to say that it is true that we learn what love is from those around us at an early age. Not just the good, but the bad too. We feel disasociated if things aren't the way we learned. We playout the same trials and tribulations over and over again. It is only by recognizing them that we gain any control over them. Then, hopefully, we can move past those issues instead of simpley working hard on making them okay. Or, as is more likely in our society, leaving.
--YT
05/25

"Even if you're only inching toward something, you get caught up in the inching. Progress is progress." yeah right. i have to agree, what a waste of a life.
--boz
05/25

"It put my husband in a particularly bad mood... Later, he fought with the flight attendants because they told him they had chicken dinners for us but really there was just crappy beef. After dinner, he yelled at them... It was as if I were Florence Nightingale, soothing and cooing. When I told my husband this, he said he wished I could take two pills every day. I felt similarly about his behavior: why did the slightly charming asshole only appear on the scene once he thought the marriage was over?" The whole essay gave me the willies, but this section took it to a new level. This is the behavior she prefers: She'll get nice, as long as he gets mean. Wow. I'd avoid these people on a plane and everywhere else.
--dh
05/25

First, congratulations to the author for working as hard as she has thus far. Whether the marriage works in the long run or not, they can say they worked hard to figure it out. That's more than I did when I ended an 8-year marriage 7 years ago. Remembering my ex-wife say "but you said 'forever'" at the time still puts a tight knot in my stomach because, while I didn't just walk away -- we went through 6 months of earnest efforts in weekly counseling sessions -- I also know that I did not, to over-simplify it, work as hard to figure it out as the author did. I did re-marry 3 years ago, and to the author's comment "Or, go out in the world, find someone you think is better, then after a year, realize you're right back where you ended things with your now ex-spouse?" I will also say that while my second marriage is good it's not wildly better than my first -- some things are better, some are not as good. But going through the divorce was by far harder than anything else I've dealt with in my life. So while I think I am a stronger, wiser person today for having gone through all of that part of what I've learned is that I ruined something which was probably, in hindsight, repairable had we, well mainly me, "struggled" more. Good luck, Alicia.
--MP
05/25

I understand needing companionship, and desire is no crime. But what happens when one or the other falls down? Is that a crime? Love is supposed to be about giving. That's a stupid, duck-billed platitude, but is is also gospel. Instead sometimes it's something else entirely, a form of bleeding or a state of ongoing fear. When you share a bed you have to share a life and vice-versa. I don't like passing judgment and I don't know whether these two people should be married but I do know that not every two people should. I wish them their best and feel that what was vivid in this story is what is present in the minds of all married people.
--BB
05/25

A superb essay. Honest and sad. I don't know what else much to say. I was married for about two years and then divorced. I am happy I ended the marriage (and I was definitely the one who ended it) but sad that I don't get to stare into my husband's face anymore, particularly the young face I married. Everyone needs a face to stare into. Thank you for writing/publishing this essay.
--TM
05/25

I have been married for seventeen years. It's hard to believe. But then I read a piece like this and it's easy to believe. This is an excellent, clear-headed (but not too dispassionate) view of marriage, which my husband once called "solitary confinement with someone else." He is a real comedian. About ten years ago, after the birth of our first child, we both had affairs that lasted quite a while. His was arguably less serious than mine. I didn't think I'd leave the marriage, but I didn't see how the marriage could survive. That's the kind of thing that this piece does well -- communicate the frustration and the anger and the fury. There's a bravery in facing into the winds of this kind of weather, and there's also a bravery in ending it and looking for new wind. If life were pat, it wouldn't be life. My husband likes to take out our wedding pictures and ask me if any of the things I know now were in my head then, and if so how I could have had such a carefree, beautiful smile. He is a real tragedian.
--VC
05/25

Wow. I rememeber your article from a year ago and it left me with an unreal chill. I'd recently become engaged to the best man I've ever met. He's a high school math teacher with no energy, no sex drive, other than the weekend. We've been open with each other and talk whenever we need to about our sex life but there were echoes of our situation in your essay. The more I talk with folks who date, live with or are married to teachers I realize I'm not alone and it's not me repulsing him. Some relief. But I just heard from a dear friend who seperated from his wife, briefly, before they'd been married for a year. It's got me spooked. Our wedding is in July and I'm grateful for your candor. It's inspiring some good contemplating and scary discussions.
--EK
05/25

When talking about the conflicts in your relationship, you forgot to mention, as I remember from the previous series of articles, that you _like_ to "get mad" when you don't get your way because you enjoy having a knock-down, drag-out fight over your needs vs. his needs. There are certainly men who are into this, but remember that your husband is all about solving problems, not exerting power. And _that's_ what you guys need to remember-- are _are_ other people out there. There are people that both of you will get along with better. Some personalities just aren't a good fit.
--CC
05/25

This entire ordeal sounds like a horrible waste of two lives, someone needs to be brave and break it off. Really depressing stuff.
--GRB
05/25

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