yesterday when we spoke on the phone, I heard it in your voice -- that you're still trying to find a way to come to terms with all this -- with me. and I feel like I really need to state a couple of things.

I hope with all my heart that you do find a way to make peace for yourself -- I will always love you and hope for you only the best. but, in case it's not obvious, which I expect it is, I just wanted to state for the record that our marriage is over. when you demanded divorce, you ended it, period. and we will divorce next month, after a year apart, amicably I hope, but finally.

and when I hear the unreconciled pain and anger in your voice, I worry for you that you haven't taken care of yourself -- that you may wake up one day and realize that all the awful, terrible things I did were not, after all, the unbearable crime against you and against our marriage that they seem now, that they have seemed to you for this year. and that you may regret ending our marriage in days of anguish and confusion.

I just want you to know that I held on for you as long as I said I would -- and would have held on longer -- past december, through spring, into summer -- then it may have been long enough for me. but when you told me in no uncertain terms, and none too kindly, that you wanted to divorce -- well, I did all that I could do at that point, and let go.

you have been focused on your own pain for a long time now, and you are by all means entitled to attend to that. you should certainly be your own first concern. but your anger and lack of forgiveness, I believe, do you a disservice. as you have said, marriage is made of all kinds of compromises -- including finding the combination of flexibility and stalwartness to overcome even unthinkably grave acts of betrayal -- immense mistakes made by your partner.

I don't want you to succeed in convincing yourself that I gave up on our marriage -- I surely betrayed you and erred in some of the worst ways imaginable in a marriage, but I never gave up on it until you said "divorce." I was in it for the long haul -- through the thorny places -- willing to relinquish my ego and pride to the good of our marriage -- I begged you to stay with me when you wanted to move out -- I wanted us to come through the thorny place together to a place full of petals even more beautiful and fragrant than those we'd seen. I never married you lightly.

and I never transgressed lightly. the crimes against our intimacy that I committed were terrible -- but everything I did, I did while married to you -- that's a terrible sacrilege on the one hand, but on the other it is testament to the fact that I believed our marriage to be the thing to persevere.

and I will always believe we ought to have found a way to sort it out. that those crimes shouldn't have caused mortal wounds. that the basis of our marriage should have been stronger and better than that. that you were, and are, stronger and better than you have allowed yourself to be. that you never ought to have become so mean. even in your unimaginable pain.

I feel more disillusioned and disappointed in you than I can adequately express. I continue to be astonished by the fragility of your ego and by the conditionality of your love for me. I honestly believed that you and I could overcome anything together -- that we could forgive one another anything -- that we would have a long life together and sit beside one another when we were old. that we wanted, essentially, the same things -- family, growth and learning, honesty and truth, beauty. it's true that I botched a lot of things -- I totally botched the honesty part -- but I feel that I did, in part, because it became increasingly clear to me that there was a very particular kind of truth that was acceptable to you -- and beyond that you would rage or leave -- even just for a night, you would leave me.

in the end I believe that I was mistaken -- that our foundation was much more fragile and flawed than I let myself believe it was. early in our relationship I allowed you to circumscribe some of my own most important personal parts -- I gave up some of my inalienable identity ground to you -- I made a belated and compromised attempt to reestablish some of my forfeited autonomy by writing, by my web page, by asserting my own place as an individual -- and even these pieces, some of them -- my friendships, my publication of my heart in a wide-open realm -- you saw as a betrayal of your trust, as a betrayal of you. they never were.

here is something which we considered including in our wedding ceremony, but did not -- I believe now we never should have left it out:

"Then Almitra spoke again and said, And what of Marriage, master?
And he answered saying:
You were born together, and together you shall be forevermore.
You shall be together when the white wings of death scatter your days.
Ay, you shall be together even in the silent memory of God.
But let there be spaces in your togetherness,
And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.
Love one another, but make not a bond of love:
Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.
Fill each other's cup but drink not from one cup.
Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf.
Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone,
Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.
Give your hearts, but not into each other's keeping.
For only the and of Life can contain your hearts.
And stand together yet not too near together:
For the pillars of the temple stand apart,
And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other's shadow."
- Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

I think we never found this together-yet-separateness adequately. I look back at our interactions and am struck by our tentativeness with one another -- I watch the video of our last christmas with my family, before the troubles supposedly had begun -- at least before I'd ever strayed, though the trouble was obviously already there -- and I see you as a stranger, a visitor with my family, even after more than four years together -- sitting stiffly, keeping yourself apart, watching on the periphery -- you don't engage with a single person or say a word in the whole of the video although everyone else interacts -- the only time I see you at all at ease is during the serving of the cake -- you are comfortable only in action and with the food -- something you understand intimately, as you clearly don't understand or feel at ease with my family -- I have to ask myself if I could have done better, differently, to integrate you more with the people I love -- to bring you in and welcome you better -- and surely I could have -- there must have been ways to do better -- but there is also an element that is only your own -- to give yourself or not -- and I don't think you ever did, wholly.

you never much liked the women of my family -- you liked the men, and in fact redeemed for me my own love of my father in some ways -- which I thank you for. but I wonder now, how could you love me, and respect me, when you were loving me in spite of the women I grew from? I think you liked one of my sisters in law, of course, and my sister sometimes -- although not always. but the contempt you held for my mother -- you were never rude to her -- you never openly disrespected her -- and it is obvious that I have my own issues and ambivalences about her. but I saw clearly enough that you never saw, or valued, her strengths. they were lost on you. your love for my family was as conditional as your love for me.

it's possible that I did no better with your family -- surely your perspective holds things I can't see -- but as far as I can see, I made your family my own. another part of our wedding ceremony -- "thy people shall be my people." I put myself in their hands and did my best always to be open to them and to come to know them as individuals, on their own terms. sometimes I was shy, no doubt -- but my relationship was growing with them steadily -- and I feel the lack of them in my life now, painfully. I spoke with your mother often and openly -- in some ways more than you did. I can't say I understand how your heart had become so closed to her -- you had written her off as a caricature to a large extent -- your sister too -- but maybe it's not my place to comment on these family dynamics. I don't know how it is to be a son or a brother. surely there are gender issues I can't grasp. all I know is that they love you, and would reach you more if you would let them in. in the end it's true that blood is thick -- thicker than the bonds I thought I was building.

I feel that I made myself as available to you and yours as I possibly could -- and when I asked for my space, my place to think and write and evolve, you gave ground grudgingly -- always feeling threatened -- mildly xenophobic of the world out there -- holding me jealously, you drew the line in the sand -- and ultimately that obstinate, independently-willed part of me demanded that I step over it. that was an irresponsible, childish thing to do. I believe that there never ought to have been proscriptions of that kind in the first place. but that afterwards, given them, and the bullheadedness of transgressing them, that those transgressions should have been dealt with, assimilated somehow, accepted into the fabric of our life together, and put behind us to grow from.

my "crime against you" wasn't about you at all, as much as you'll probably never see that. it was only ever about asserting my own autonomy on the sands that always felt like they were slipping under me -- giving way to the dictates of your will. I honestly almost lost myself altogether -- when I stopped writing, when I lost my sense of my self as a whole, independent and viable person. you'll never understand me when I say that I believe the experience of him saved me from losing myself totally -- to inaccurate roles and expectations I carried in my own head. and I had come to feel with you so utterly undesirable, so unbeautiful, so unvalued for myself, for the parts of me that I most treasured -- I felt so diminished in your eyes, so diminutive -- I stopped feeling like you saw me as a dynamic thing -- I felt like any dynamism of myself only presented you with a threat -- something to be controlled, to be limited, to be claimed and maintained as yours.

I know we've been over this ground. I know that the dynamism was suffering or lost terribly for you as well. it was a bad way to do it, but the affair was the means I bumbled into for shaking up things that needed to be given a good shake. and the really incredible thing to me is that we were this close to coming through it -- to turning it around to make us stronger individually and together. And then I'm not quite sure how that broke down.

in any case, we were stagnating together for a long time. I'm sure, I know, I had a significant hand in that process. as much as you've been adamant about asserting my responsibility in all of this mess, I have never been dodging or denying it.

I would question the degree to which you've been willing to examine your own responsibility and actions and motives. you have been so busy throwing the focus onto the gravity of my errors, you have wholly neglected your own part, whatever it might be -- and the imbalance of this worries me. I am afraid that at some point the pendulum may swing back the other way. I worry for you in that case.

I know that you don't have a lot of inner peace -- I've watched over the years as you've neglected the construction of it -- as you've neglected the nurturing and growth and tending of your own reserves -- and barreled on in the world in a very strong, heroic fashion -- setting up the pins to knock them down. I admire you in a lot of ways, and know that you'll achieve untold success. but I still worry for the fragility of your inner resources. I worry about that cruel person in you who can spit out such hateful things -- I never ever want that person to turn his barbs inward -- I hope you make peace with that person, come to terms.

I hope a lot of things for you. I wish you happiness and peace and joy and love. I know, without a doubt, that our time is over to find those things together -- and I needed to say goodbye, to find closure.

this hurts, but I have to tell you that you did a very thorough job of killing my hope and my active affection. there is only so much acid that any heart will take before it disintegrates altogether. I am very sorry that that ever happened. I don't want this letter to convey any acid at all -- although I know how difficult it will be to read. it is brutally honest. but I feel like I owe you at least this much honesty. I'm only sorry that it is so late coming.

I know that I will love again fully, with someone else. I know that I will find lessons in all of this to grow by. I hope that you will, too. I have never wished you anything but love and good will -- and I still do.

sarah