The greatest distance in the world is the one between an unhappy couple wondering what they are still doing in a relationship that has collapsed without any hope of resurrection. Before my marriage broke up, like any rational, optimistic individual who had tied the knot, I tried staying in it, wishing for the unhappiness to drop the ‘un’, the cracks to miraculously heal themselves and the problems to disintegrate without a sign of the impasse we had come to. It was perhaps the loneliest period of my life. I felt I had walked into the wrong play. I didn’t know my lines and I was stuck on the stage with this strange actor who didn’t seem to know his either.

We would go to restaurants, sit across each other with nothing to say. We would look at the walls, other people, our phones, and finally when our gaze would rest on each other we would wonder who this person across the table was. We would read the menu like a book, insist on holding onto it even after we had placed the order, as a shield from meaningless conversations that amplified our disconnection.

If either one of us got a phone call, we would answer it almost joyfully, irrespective of who it was at the other end. It’s the only time in my life that I have engaged patiently with a rambling service centre executive who tried to offer me a 50 per cent discount on a television overpriced by 200 per cent. At least he hung up happy and confident this customer would bite the bait.

When an anniversary or a birthday arrived, I would look at the date with dismal discontent. I would wish him a happy-whatever-day like a trained robot or an automatic e-mail greeting from a spectacle company. It was almost impossible to celebrate anything, for special occasions demand joy, enthusiasm and love, and all of these things had run dry. For my birthday I switched off my phone, for I really didn’t want anybody squealing ‘Happy Birthday.’ Like an old, disgruntled and embittered cynic I thought what is there to be ‘happy’?

Meeting other people was always a saving grace. We would go to a party together. Once we reached the venue, we would flee towards other human beings. For those two-three hours we would feel normal, sometimes even happy. I would look across the room and see the ex cracking a joke, laughing. It didn’t seem like he had forgotten how to do these things. Then why was there the silence of graveyards in our house? At the end of the party, like people who carpool every day, we would share the taxi, each looking out of our respective windows, a million miles away from each other, planets orbiting separate spheres, perhaps even galaxies.

The biggest saviour during that time of despair was work. At least there I knew I was efficient and doing well. I could fix problems, resolve tricky situations, make my colleagues laugh, even be the life and soul of a party. After the day’s toil was done, I was like a clown who would take off the red nose and wipe the make-up to reveal a face in limbo, one that wears sadness like second skin.

This period of holding on when there was nothing had a strange kind of emptiness. The time for anger and accusation had passed. It was waking up daily to an incredible tiredness that seemed to have taken control of the whole house. I quietened down a lot during that time, read more books, listened to a lot of jazz and, occasionally, asked him to pass the salt.

We could have spent our entire lives in this incompatible sullenness of being. A few of our friends had done that. They had built individual lives, got their happiness from other sources and operated as if they were alone. The only place they were married was on paper.

We, however, chose deliberately, wilfully and desperately to break the pattern of comfortable loneliness. Why, you may ask. If you are anyway going to be alone isn’t it better to be so in a marriage? At least, there is someone at home. To that, I would answer ‘No’. It is not better for when you are alone, on your own, there is hope. For him and for me.

Arathi Menon is the author of Leaving Home with Half a Fridge: How to Survive a Divorce Happily , published by Pan Macmillan India

Related Topics
comment COMMENT NOW