The question arrived in my inbox: Why Did I Marry Him?
I married my third husband so I could keep my art studio.
There. That’s the answer.
It wasn’t romance. I wasn’t swept off my feet. I wasn’t dreaming about growing old beside him. I wasn’t standing around hoping some man would come along and complete my life.
It was a business arrangement.
My father had died nine months earlier. I had been living with him in his house, but when he died, the house did not simply become mine. The proceeds from selling it belonged to the four surviving adult children.
Which meant I was going to have to leave.
And I desperately did not want to leave. Not because of the house itself. Because of what I had created there.
Attached to that house was my art studio. Thirty feet long, fifteen feet wide, glass and windows everywhere. Heaven on earth for an artist. Open the door from the studio and you stepped straight into the backyard sanctuary I had built.
That studio and that garden were not simply property to me. They were my life.
And the realistic housing options available to me at the time were not options I wanted. I had spent ten years caregiving. I did not have a conventional job or enough income to qualify for a mortgage on my own. I was selling my art and receiving a small pension, but this was before I qualified for Social Security. I did, however, have money for a down payment from a separate cash inheritance.
Enter Terry.
I was keeping company with him at the time. I say “keeping company” instead of dating because that’s closer to the truth. We liked each other. He had a swimming pool, and God knows I loved to swim. We grilled hamburgers and steaks around the pool. We laughed. We had fun together.
So I told him about the situation with the house. And eventually we worked out a solution. I could provide the down payment. He could qualify for the mortgage. My name would be on the deed, though not on the mortgage. Terry would move in.
Problem solved.
We weren’t setting up some romantic newlywed nest. He had his bedroom. I had mine. We each had our own space. As far as I was concerned, the arrangement was working just fine.
And then came the marriage.
Terry was 58 years old. And apparently this 58-year-old grown man could not look his father in the face and admit he was living in a house with a woman he wasn’t married to.
We went around and around about it. Finally one day I said essentially: I am tired of having this conversation. I told you I never wanted to get married again, but fine. We’ll go get married and satisfy your daddy.
Yes. I got married so a 58-year-old man’s daddy would feel better. You cannot make this shit up.
The funny thing is, I didn’t expect marriage to change anything. Terry still had his rooms. I still had mine. I still had my studio. I was still Monica.
Except apparently nobody had given me the employee handbook.
Anyway, if you like the idea of finally living by an agreement you actually signed — not the unspoken one somebody else wrote for you —
And you don’t want to spend the next twenty years quietly performing a version of “wife,” “mother,” or “good woman” that was never yours to begin with —
You might want to join the Breakthrough Circle, where we do the work of figuring out whose life you’re actually living, and start writing the terms yourself.