Our Decision to Separate

04 Jan 2023

How we “Grew Apart”

Kate and I met in high school, when there were many things that we didn’t yet know about ourselves.

As we grew up together, we stayed compatible in many ways, and I think we were very good together. Especially early in our marriage, Kate helped me fill in many missing relational skills that weren’t demonstrated for me by my parents. We were also well aligned in our desires and values around domestic life, Christian community, children and parenting, and shared interests around TV, food, and travel.

Right before our first son was born, I was diagnosed with depression, and this became a significant part of my life thereafter. I’ve read the advice that, similar to how it’s critical for partners to agree on whether they want kids, it’s critical that you are aware of any mental illness that your partner deals with, and that you are willing to sign up for the challenge of supporting them. Kate never got to make that choice, but has supported me all the same for years.

For the next ~10 years of our marriage, we continued to discover things about ourselves that changed our needs and priorities.

I discovered that I’m a “creative”, a person who craves / thrives on making things and putting them out in the world. It’s a kind of entrepreneurial personality (I think having creative talent, like Kate, doesn’t necessarily imply this personality).

Creating requires significant time alone. Meanwhile, Kate really values emotional connection, which requires time, so those two needs have been in competition for us.

We discovered that I am very squarely an introvert, and that Kate is an extrovert in most ways. This is a difficult pairing! She processes verbally, I process internally (and slowly!). She expresses emotion, I am reserved, analytical and sensitive. She’s decisive, I like to carefully consider.

And most of all, she has a very high capacity for connection and socializing–I value it, but can’t handle nearly as much. I also developed some social anxiety which I think came from placing too high of expectations on myself for socializing, along with the ways in which my ADHD can make conversation challenging.

While Kate and I would both put our most important relationships at the top of our values list, I think my next several would be:

• Working on my mental health, and other self-care needs.
• Creativity
  • Sharing my experiences, in particular
• Relationships and Communication

The only shared value there is our interest in relationships, (i.e., how to do them well) which seems to be something we talk about often.

I think I value communication more highly, perhaps because “affirming words” is one of my primary love languages, and maybe that being an internal-processor means I value carefully considering what I say.

I learned maybe 5 years ago that I have ADHD, and this has had some major impacts on how I “do life”. I’ve always valued routine and structure, but this clarified for me how essential those things are for me. Decision making is often very costly with ADHD, so routine is meant to reduce that burden.

Spontaneity is costly for me, but a high value for her. Same goes for novelty–she highly values having something new ahead of her. A next trip, a next project. I’d prefer to have less disruption and more stability.

I now take Adderall to help with my ADHD, and it’s been wonderful for improving my emotional regulation during the day and my ability to handle the tedious responsibilities of adult life. It’s made me more effective during the day, and this has helped with my depression.

However, Adderall comes with a cost: at the end of the day, I start to experience withdrawal, and my ADHD symptoms I think are actually worse during that time than my baseline without Adderall. This makes it a harder challenge for me to be present in the evening with Kate and the kids, and to be emotionally available for her at night.

Part of the challenge is our differences in interests and personality–I’m a slow processor, and that makes it difficult for me to participate in the fast-moving conversation that Kate is capable of at the dinner table or in the car as a family. And when my participation doesn’t seem critical, my brain is less likely to stay present and focused.

Our desires around adventure and travel have diverged. I’ve grown to favor trips which are shorter and easier to plan and pull off, at the expense of the “star level” of the experience. Kate likes to plan bigger adventures with nicer accommodations.

Kate has come to really value social justice, and enjoys passionate conversation on these topics. Her emotional energy makes me uncomfortable, and I prefer dry, intellectual discussions around these things.

As part of my value around communication, I really like to understand both sides of an issue. We end up having “two different conversations”, and I seem to end up giving Kate the impression that our views are also totally misaligned.

One of the most difficult changes came around 5 or 6 years ago, when I learned about assertiveness, and my problems with being passive. I discovered that much of what I was doing to meet Kate’ needs was overextending myself, causing resentment and depression. It was a turbulent ride as I learned how to communicate assertively, and it also meant that suddenly I was doing less of what Kate needed in many areas.

Our faith practice in our relationship and family has always been a little less than my ideal–not as much discussion about God in our lives, or practicing prayer.

Our practice came to a complete halt during COVID and our adventures the past couple years. After some deconstruction for both of us, it seems most likely that Kate would like to stop, and I would like to re-engage.

Kate has also discovered that she really values extended family, and it’s been heartbreaking for her to see how dysfunctional or inaccessible that is to her in both of our families. If she had known how important family was to her when choosing a partner, she’s said that she would have sought out someone with a healthy extended family that she could become a part of.

One of the pillars of our marriage has been our sex life, in part because “physical touch” is my strongest love language. We’ve always tried to do it well, and explore it, and were proud of how healthy our sex life was.

As we’ve learned more and more about sex, though, we’ve come to recognize some areas of sexual incompatibility between us. The issues certainly aren’t insurmountable, but it was still a shock for me to see this shift.

We’ve also learned that for most of our lives our identities have been highly entangled–we haven’t existed as “two unique individuals, in a relationship” as much as “we are this relationship”. I think this creates a false sense of secure attachment because it makes us terrified of separation–it would be the death of our identity–so we know neither of us would consider it.

Untangling our identities has helped us finally take a harder look at our relationship and how it serves us. I think Kate went through this process over the past ~5 years, and for me it’s been much more recent, maybe even just the past 6 months.

I read recently that you should measure a relationship by asking, “Is this relationship helping me become the best version of myself?”

I think that was true in many ways for a long time in our marriage. But I think that each of these self-discoveries has placed a higher and higher burden on Kate to accommodate my needs, and it’s too much. And as much as we might recognize and appreciate our differences, they do make this all harder.

On my end, I think I have been over-compromising on my values and overextending myself in order to try and meet Kate’ needs for a long time. Becoming more assertive helped, but I think with each new self-discovery of mine, as much as Kate tried to adapt and support me, I was disappointed that she couldn’t do more.

So, to answer that relationship test: Yes, I believe that trying to meet each others’ needs is holding both of us back from being our best selves, and that this relationship, in its current form, is no longer serving us.