How I Left: Reflections on My Journey into Marriage…and Out

Estimated reading time: 10 minutes

Following a lineage of arranged marriages, one woman realizes that her life could not be fulfilled within the walls of her own marriage of convenience

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My grandmother was fourteen when a man in her Southern Italian village asked to marry her. He was twenty-eight, a stranger to Gramma. She said, No! But her mother told her, “Marry him. He’ll take you to America.” They settled in a Pittsburgh steel town, where my mom grew up “American.” But when she was eighteen, her parents brought her back to their village, where she and my father had an arranged marriage, which helped him immigrate to the U.S. from war-bedraggled Calabria.

The first in our clan born in the U.S., I was always the family rebel, but at thirty-nine, I improvised family tradition and arranged my own “marriage of convenience” to a man I’d known for only four months and who was thirteen years older than me. He proposed on a Monday; I married him on a Friday. Of course, I had heard the advice to never marry until you’d been with your partner at least a full year and observed them in every season and during every holiday. Our Memorial Day had been great. Ditto Flag Day. The practical peasant within me said, Let’s not waste time. Said, Do you want to have a baby or not? Said, If you marry him, you’ll have health insurance.

This sounds terrible, but it’s the truth. Three years earlier, I’d been engaged to a man I loved but our relationship had fallen apart; two years later, my beloved father died. I felt I had nothing left to lose — except my slim chance of still becoming a mother.

As I made my calculations, I was fairly sure my future husband was making his, too. His ex-wife had recently remarried. If he married a younger woman, it might make it a bit easier to walk around town. But all that aside, he was a clever story-teller, and he made me laugh, and he had lovely hands. In our giddiest moments, we shared the belief that we were “meant.” During our brief courtship, I learned that it was possible to be calculating and at the same time to fall in love. Maybe that was exactly what had happened to my parents and grandparents as they moved toward their own marriages of convenience.

Married, I moved to my husband’s house in rural Missouri and lived with him for one full year. Of my hundreds of nights there, I remember warm Sunday evenings when, after our walk or a drive into town for dessert, I’d linger in the driveway and look at our country sky patched up with stars. Summer nights cluttered with insect noise and the slanting scent of chicken shit had an end-of-the-world texture to them.

You wanted to reinvent marriage, and here’s what you came up with. 

On good nights, this thought made me smile. I was now a sandal-footed, dusty woman who lived near pastures and wore all manner of thrown-together clothing, hair pulled up into odd piles. As a married woman in Missouri, I felt more solidly on latitude with my family’s Calabrian village than with New York or Washington State, where I had lived on my own as a teacher and a writer. What am I meant to learn here?

I had so harshly judged my parents and grandparents for their inability to be happier in marriage. It shamed me now to remember that I used to challenge my mother and grandmother when they felt confined in the role of wife, waiting for permission from the husband. To me, my father and grandfather didn’t seem to even want that much power. Impatient, I’d tell the women, “Why don’t you just do what you feel like doing? And if you think you can’t, just leave him!”

But back then, I knew nothing about the way troubles in marriage move like water—ever shifting—and it’s often not clear if you’re swimming or drowning.

You can’t know this until you’re navigating the rapids of your own married life. Every time my husband and I floated into peaceful waters, I believed fully in our marriage. But, as quickly as we’d married, we got pregnant. One miscarriage. Another. I was bereft, my husband at a loss to help me. He raged, I wept, and every time the undertow caught us, I hated myself for my inability to either improve the marriage or decisively end it. Mostly, I wondered how anyone could work at marriage as hard as I did and still be so bad at it.

How modest our wedding had been, with a slight air of desperation to it, like the wartime weddings I’d heard about in Italy. One of my uncles had had a friend whose wedding shirt had been quickly sewn from the cloth of an American soldier’s parachute.

I’d parachuted myself into marriage as if on a mission, its purpose urgent but unclear, landing myself in a place both mysterious and hauntingly familiar. On those nights of intermittent grace, when the country stars hung over our house just so, I felt proud of my husband and myself, engaged, as it seemed we were, in a noble experiment in the redemptive powers of middle-age love. It’s important for me to remember that our marriage included these times, too.

I’d moved halfway across the country to live with my husband. During recovery from miscarriages and fertility treatments, my job hunt had been slowed. In time, I booked a room in a church where I led private weekly writing workshops, which gave me the chance to spend time with people. I met good people, and making a little money brought me closer to a way of life I recognized. But it wasn’t much money. Since I was 21, I’d had steady income. I had savings, but by fall, they were dwindling, as was my sense of independence. So, when I got an invitation to teach an eight-week course in New York the following winter, I said yes.

Yes, Yes, Yes.

Emboldened by that offer, I made phone calls, mailed letters, and put together a few other gigs. January through March, my husband and I would commute between Missouri and New York City. Lucky for me, my subletter in the city was ready to move out of my apartment, so I was able to step back into my former life. More or less.

That was what I told people. The truth: I hadn’t left Missouri because I had jobs in New York. I’d set up those jobs so I could leave Missouri. So, I could get some distance from my husband. We were separated.

I didn’t use those words—not when I spoke to others or even to myself. We’re working on things, I told my closest friends; and they kindly repeated, Yes, you’re working things out. 

I’d left the house in Missouri on December 4, one year and three months after our wedding and exactly one year after I’d moved in. My New York jobs weren’t scheduled to begin until mid-January, but during Thanksgiving weekend, our arguments had crescendoed until inside myself I became sure of one thing: We can’t raise a child like this. 

We’d been to couples’ therapy and individual therapy; we’d talked to a priest and had tried so many times to talk to each other. But that night, I reached my limit—Should I book a hotel room? How soon can I get to the bank? — and this time I didn’t talk myself down. Instead, I closed my office door, got on the phone, and, in a lowered voice, reserved a U-Haul truck. The phone number was handy. I’d weighed the U-Haul option before.

The next day, I had to wait until my husband left for class, and then it was a race against time to figure out what to pack. Filling suitcases and boxes, I was in constant conversation with Gramma, my mother and her cousins, my great-aunt, all the women who’d raised me.

As I imagined them sitting around a coffee cake from our favorite bakery, I distinctly heard their voices reminding me, Grab a couple towels. And blankets. Just hurry! My plan was to have the truck loaded by the time my husband got home, and then I’d tell him I was leaving now rather than in January.

Or should I leave before he gets home and call him from the road?

I wasn’t sure yet, but I was relying on those women huddled just above me, their voices offering their best wisdom.

What’s she waiting for? She should leave now, before he gets home. Some were timid in marriage, like my mother.

No! She needs to talk to him, he’s her husband. How would that be, him coming home and her gone? No! Others had companionable marriages and were willing to give a guy the benefit of the doubt.

And if he gets angry? You wouldn’t catch me staying there, knowing how he gets. 

But she loves him.

Yeah, well, she’ll get over it. Everybody does.

Their voices were jumbled, so I was uncertain who was urging what, I just knew that, together, they were covering all the bases. Don’t forget the colander!

But he’ll need the colander!

Too bad for him. She needs it, too. Besides, how long before he has somebody else in there cooking for him, some other little dummy?

Hey, she’s no dummy. She just needs to rush and get out of that house.

Don’t worry, dear, it’s all in God’s hands. This could only be Gramma’s voice. We don’t know the future. But yes, you made this decision to go, so now you better hurry up. 

When he got home, my husband was surprised to see the U-Haul with my car attached to the back and to hear my news, but he stayed calm, and I was grateful for that. As we talked, the phone in my office rang twice—I had asked a friend and my brother to check on me around seven-thirty, when I knew my husband would be back home, in case we argued, in case the arguments got worse than ever. None of that happened.

Instead, he prepared a nice dinner for us. I don’t remember if we made love that night or not, but I do know the mood was such that we might have, as strange as it seems. I do remember that we lay on the futon reading, our night-table lights on, our feet touching, commenting on how “not uncomfortable” the futon was—the mattress and box spring I’d brought to the marriage were now loaded onto the truck, thanks to the help of a teenager I’d hired. As my husband and I held hands, I once again wondered if, with some work, we could return to this blessedness and figure out how to live this way permanently. I wanted to believe it. But I knew it was too late.

The next morning, as we said goodbye at the front door, I was the one who raised my voice. “I don’t want to be leaving here.” He hugged me a long time. I could feel how tired we both were. We had tried, and tried. Crying, I climbed into the truck’s cab and drove slowly through the streets of our development and out onto our country road, past the grazing cows and the collapsed barn that had been a destination for our evening walks. I made a left turn onto the two-lane. When I finally reached New York, about a week later—I spent a few days with cousins in Pittsburgh—all I had to worry about was what I should do next.

But I had some ideas. During my days driving that U-Haul caravan, I’d begun to consider my next plans. Three years later, I adopted my baby son.

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