My Stranger Spouse

A divorce mitigation meditation

Sometimes I pretend my husband is a stranger. Someone I invite over, who cooks for me, whom my kids love, but someone I don't know.

I don't want him to be a stranger, which is never more evident than when I pretend he is one. Since I believe in intentional living, I frequently force myself to imagine our deaths. Not as in us being dead, but as in the death of us as a couple. It's a divorce mitigation practice. It's morbid but sexy. It's disconcerting, but it disarms my selfish tendencies and elicits that feeling of gratitude of which people speak so highly.

The first time was an accident. On the train back to Brooklyn, the subway shook me out of my self-obsessed slumber.

I stood slumped against the pole. I’d shed the baby weight from my firstborn, and then some. My inherited denim dress hung on me. I felt unsteady on my feet. With one underground jolt, I grasped for the overhead metal bar to brace myself and looked for him. My emergency contact reflex. 

I saw Joe's profile: Stubbled jaw line, sweat-textured volume in his cropped hair. His collar was the only part of him on edge. He had a look that expressed thought, not absence. But it wasn't directed toward me. I followed his posture down. One foot crossed over the other, leather loafer toe pointed.

I could’ve seen someone there seeing him as I saw him and falling in love at that moment. Love at first sight is only possible amongst strangers.

Our relationship’s impending death was hallucinatory in that subway moment, of course. But near-death clarity doesn't differentiate against illusions. At that moment, I realized how concocted the tether between Joe and I was. Marriage is imaginary. Nothing binds us but will. Will can be lost.

It wasn't lost - not then, not later, and I hope it never does. That's all a story for another time. Between then, then, and now, I've developed this practice to preserve Joe's will and my own. 

I take a deep breath and let my memories leave me. I know nothing of our history. I have no impression of our future. We're unattached.

I see his doughy lips. His furrowed brow. Crossed legs. The light illuminates his sockless feet; boney, handsome. I smile at my Stranger Spouse. I get him a cup of tea so he knows I'm thinking of him. I brush his shoulder with my fingertips as I pass.

Sometimes, I do this while we're walking side by side, sometimes while he's cooking dinner and I watch from the other room, and sometimes, I do it when it's dark. The imagined emotional distance scares me most at night. Not that I'm infantile; I loved my solitude before meeting him. Nor am I afraid of the dark. But at night, the sunlight can't distract me from the fear that the man with whom I’m raising my babies could suddenly be an unknown other. Crazier things have happened. It's certainly more likely than a subway crash. I would rather it not happen to me.

Looking at my husband as a stranger is unsettling. The practice is especially so in the symbolic bedroom. When intimate, I'll occasionally look down and look back up at a different person. It isn't foreplay. I'm not acting. It's a reminder to see him independently. We are wed, but what does that really mean to strangers? He's not mine. I'm not his. And that makes sex all the more compelling, even when it's scary. ("Don't leave me," I plead. "I'll never leave you," he breathes.)

Strangers are unattached. They could be who you think they are. Or they could surprise you. Familiarity eliminates possibility. Not because one genuinely knows everything there is to know but because one stops looking. Joe can surprise me when I let him.

Recently, when I've looked upon him as a stranger, I've noticed he's sexier than ever. Those things come with age - confidence, contentment, and thickness.

He wasn't always this way, and I wasn't always either. That denim dress suits me better today. We have each other to thank for our current state. He's someone just strange enough to notice what I can't see myself and not so strange to pass on without mentioning. That balance takes practice. So, I practice preventative care - divorce meditation as divorce mitigation. 

Imagining a life where two people grow irreparably apart, unsure where the schism first was, is scarier than anything. Two sleepwalkers with eyes too fogged to really see each other. Fortunately for me, that subway lurched. How much I would've missed.

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