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"Sadly, and to my horror, I am divorcing."

"This was a 20-year partnership. My husband is a good man, though he did travel 20 weeks a year for work. I am a 47-year-old woman whose commitment to monogamy, at the very end, came unglued. This turn of events was a surprise. I don?t generally even enjoy men; I had an entirely manageable life and planned to go to my grave taking with me, as I do most nights to my bed, a glass of merlot and a good book. Cataclysmically changed, I disclosed everything. We cried, we rent our hair, we bewailed the fate of our children. And yet at the end of the day ? literally during a five o?clock counseling appointment, as the golden late-afternoon sunlight spilled over the wall of Balinese masks ? when given the final choice by our longtime family therapist, who stands in as our shaman, mother, or priest, I realized ? no. Heart-shattering as this moment was ? a gravestone sunk down on two decades of history ? I would not be able to replace the romantic memory of my fellow transgressor with the more suitable image of my husband, which is what it would take in modern-therapy terms to knit our family?s domestic construct back together. In women?s-magazine parlance, I did not have the strength to 'work on' falling in love again in my marriage. And as Laura Kipnis railed in Against Love, and as everyone knows, Good relationships take work."

Read the whole thing. Sandra Tsing Loh is getting to the question: "Why do we still insist on marriage... isn?t the idea of lifelong marriage obsolete?"

Here's the accompanying ? and perversely light-hearted ? video.

And here's her "final piece of advice":

[A]void marriage ? or you too may suffer the emotional pain, the humiliation, and the logistical difficulty, not to mention the expense, of breaking up a long-term union at midlife for something as demonstrably fleeting as love.

There's something confusing about the structure of that sentence. What does "for... love" refer to? The reason for marrying or the reason for breaking up? She does say that she had an affair. Did she leave in absurd pursuit of love or was the original idea of marrying foolish?

Also, I detect a contradictory message in that advice. "Or you too may suffer..." Don't we ? many of us, most of us ? read that and think: Yes, bring on the emotions. I know that is what is involved, and I say "yes" to all that. You could just as well have said avoid life ? or you too may suffer. But we revolt against the serenity of death.

I say that, and yet, for many years, for more than 20 years, I choose the serenity of the partnerless life. Still, if you ask me today, my "final piece of advice" is: When you think of what you might lose if you do something, remember to take account of what you might lose if you don't do it.

Full post as published by Althouse on June 17, 2009 (boomark / email).