Loading...

LA Affairs: Empty Nest Syndrome Turned Me Against My Husband

LA Affairs: Empty Nest Syndrome Turned Me Against My Husband

When I made my first post-divorce online dating profile, I was looking for a man who wouldn't make me feel invisible. Someone who didn't take up all the space in the room. I wanted a partner who would encourage me to shine.

For almost five years, I searched. First there was the businessman who drove a Bentley and looked more at his iPhone than at me. When I asked him on our third date to put the phone away during dinner, he scoffed, "Oh, didn't someone's dad pay enough attention to her when she was a kid?"

He was done with rich men, men who seemed driven by title and expense account.

I kept looking, dating all kinds of men: bartender-actors, a teacher or two, and an up-and-coming businessman who placed his laptop between us on every date. No, no and definitely not.

Ad

She wanted a kind, self-aware man who was more generous with his time than with his credit card. I imagined someone a few years younger than me, muscular and well endowed. While watching Hugh Grant in "Love Actually," I decided that a British accent might be nice, and if I could look like Hugh and have Hugh's sense of humor, that would be a bonus. I also knew that this man had to like children and he had to be willing to fit into the life I had created as a single mother with my daughters.

Six months later, it happened.

I tripped over a chair at a personal development seminar and was met by a handsome man who held out his hand to steady me. He introduced himself, making an awkward moment perfect. Several dates later, the man I nicknamed "The Brit" explained to me that the reason he had so much time to spend with me was that he had taken a break from high-pressure work in the entertainment industry and said he was looking for a new career.

We took our first vacation two months into our relationship, zip-lining, canoeing, and mountain biking. When we took off our clothes and swam in a Canadian lake in our underwear, with our cell phones stuffed in our backpacks for hours, I knew I would never be a man who traded time for money. As the relationship progressed and he went back to work in show business, he took fewer of those jobs he hated so much, instead offering to help me with the house, with the girls, and to support the business I ran. I was building as a dating and relationship coach. At six months, when we took a photo in front of a sailboat called “Finally”, his name became the title of what I felt: In love. Finally.

When we moved in together, I was buried in email while he designed the new business and was on his way to earning many times what he was earning in the entertainment industry. When he went back to work, our life together turned into chaos. His 16-hour days made it difficult for him to be home constantly. It was impossible to plan around his schedule. When she wasn't working, I found that she was calmer, more grateful than angry, as she happily took it upon herself to chauffeur the girls, do the shopping, take care of them when they were sick, and much more. When we all visited her parents in rural France together and my youngest daughter tugged on her arm to go collect eggs from her chickens, I savored that moment, grateful that my daughters, raised in Los Angeles, met a caring man who valued time over money and could offer them a respite from city life.

Over the years, and after we got married, he began to choose less of his own work in favor of mine and our family. Last year, he briefly became my full-time caregiver after a traumatic skiing injury left me bedridden for months.

But when my daughters grew up and left the nest, and the role he loved as a mother became unnecessary, I wanted him to change.

The day the last of our daughters moved out, I found myself complaining to my best friend, “I should go back to work now. I should look for a job."

With the house so quiet, I felt unhinged and spent most of my time criticizing what I perceived as his lack of concentration. It worried me. Although we didn't need the extra money, with each passing day I was more insistent that I wanted him to earn something.

He took the comment of a well-intentioned friend, a housewife, to provide me with some clarity. “I could be a travel agent or help children with special needs,” she suggested. And I wondered if her husband, a lawyer, had ever lain in bed at night thinking, "My wife should work." After all, her children were already over 20 years old.

Would I feel different if the roles were reversed?

Perhaps, I thought, he wanted me to change because what really terrified me was freedom.

As a dating coach, I knew I would tell my clients to let go of preconceived ideas of what a husband should be. He asked them if his partner violated their own "breaking grounds." Did his partner uphold those five values ​​that really mattered?

My husband easily passed those tests.

However, one night I couldn't help it. I began to ask him if he had investigated the possibility of becoming a paramedic, a career he had recently expressed interest in.

"Yes," he said, taking the remote and turning off the television. “I have investigated it.” But then he realized that the extensive training would conflict with the plans we had made to travel the country in a motorhome. He was right. And then it caught my attention.

“Look, I love taking care of you. I guess I'm confused,” he said, frowning.

That night in bed, I melted into his arms, longing to put my resentment and fear behind me, only to remember another list I'd made of things for him to do, all of them seemingly urgent.

"What happened to fixing the nozzle in the shower?" I asked, my voice waking him up just as his breathing had begun to settle into the peaceful stillness of sleep.

I struggled like this for weeks. In the mornings, when he meditated, I tried to free myself from the supposed ideals he had learned growing up, from husbands like Darrin in "Bewitched" and Mike and his "Brady Bunch." When it hurt too much to bear the pain of my daughters living across the country without me, I thought of him. Instead of focusing on my deep fear of letting go of the role of mother, or my terror of empty nest discussions, I tried to control the only thing I had left: him.

A few nights later, while chopping vegetables in the kitchen, I wondered if maybe she just wanted him to put a paycheck back in the bank because she was just exhausted from doing the things strong women do after they get divorced: bring house the proverbial bacon and fry it in the pan.

A mentor once asked me to explore how my husband could meet my needs if I could put him in charge and allow him to meet me in a way that was authentic to him.

I wiped my tears remembering his words.

“Do you need help?” my husband asked as he entered the kitchen. I turned to him and took his hands, appreciating his still sexy accent on him, remembering the photo we took in front of that sailboat, I leaned in and kissed his lips.

He had been exactly what he needed to make me who I am now: the real, authentic me. I could never have been with a man too insecure to let me shine or chase my own big dreams. He had sacrificed his own dreams and his own perceptions of what life should be like to give me and the girls what we needed, and that had really been what I had asked for all those years ago.

He had met my needs, he continues to meet my needs, in a way he could never have imagined.

I was finally ready to talk about selling the house, trying that two-month digital nomad experiment he had planned, driving the huge RV out of LA and finding out who I am along the way, not just a reflection of the amazing daughters we've raised. .

I am free.

And he too.

Finally.

The author is a transformational life, love, and relationship coach and Executive Director of the Institute for Living Courageously. She is working on a memoir of hers and you can find her on Instagram @datingwithdignity.

LA Affairs chronicles the search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the Los Angeles area, and we want to hear your true story. We pay $300 for a published essay. Email LAAffairs@latimes.com. You can find the submission guidelines here. To find previous columns here.

If you want to read this article in Spanish, click here

Related Articles