What went wrong

On my LiveJournal entry announcing the ending of my marriage to Erika, an anonymous commenter asks:

Sorry to ask but reflecting back on the article

http://fling93.com/blog/archives/culture/2004/on_marriage.html

I am thinking that maybe this wasn't the correct marriage. If so, what do you think is the mistake that you made that should be a lesson in falling for a marriage that shouldn't have existed in the first place?

No problemo. I've been thinking about how to update that article, but I think there are still questions to resolve before I make a decision on what exactly to change.

One of the questions is whether or not it was really a wrong marriage. I've been struggling with that question a lot on this journal (much of that is friends-locked). Part of me does think it might have been a wrong marriage, but right now, Erika and I seem to be leaning towards the view that it was a marriage that was right for its time but isn't any longer. People grow and change. Although I specifically had us wait until we were both over 25 to try and minimize this, we both ended up changing and growing quite a bit, largely due to the encouragement of each other.

I don't know what implications this has for marriage. Personal growth is one of the wonderful benefits of marriage, but it carries an inherent risk to the relationship. I don't think there is any way to ensure that the growth occurs in the same direction, because growth is inherently hard to predict (it's affected by your environment, after all, which includes your partner). I thought age would take care of it, but obviously, that isn't sufficient. So at the moment, the economic geek in me likes the idea of short-term renewable contracts that handfastings often use. But this strikes me as kind of a flip answer in reaction to our divorce, so I'm holding off on fully advocating that.

Of course, that isn't the main reason our marriage failed. We definitely made mistakes. Those too, have been documented at length in friends-locked posts, but the main one was that we both let the relationship develop way too fast. This largely stemmed from the fact that Erika was my first ever girlfriend. And I latched onto her and didn't want to let go. And as she had never had a relationship this serious, she went with it. But without the necessary time and space to really gauge what was going on, we both quickly believed we were soul-mates, and brushed aside concerns and troubles as being minor obstacles that we surely would be able to fix with no problem. One of those obstacles was the issue of whether to have kids. So Mistake #1: getting too caught up in a new relationship to give enough time and space to really process what's going on.

Another reason I latched onto her was the fact that I was very depressed at the time I met Erika. My parents (particularly my mother) did express concern about this when it became clear that we were getting serious, but I didn't pay them much heed. And yes, that was a mistake. Two mistakes, really. Mistake #2: trying to enter a serious relationship while not being in a healthy mental state. Everybody knows that one. I guess we just thought we were different and special. Mistake #3: not listening to my parents -- at all. Erika was not Taiwanese or Asian, so I knew they wouldn't like her, and decided I wouldn't listen to them, and as I was financially independent and we were paying for the wedding ourselves, it was pretty easy for me to not listen.

Another mistake, albeit relatively minor, was that Erika didn't clearly communicate to me her emotional needs, and I took advantage of this by leaning upon her emotionally a lot more than I should have. I could say that I just didn't know any better, but I should have realized that everybody has emotional needs, and so the fact that she wasn't expressing hers should've tipped me off that she was withholding something.

Although that was an issue that was quickly identified and mostly resolved during couples therapy, there were a few other mistakes in that same vein, where she or I didn't fully communicate something for fear of hurting or burdening the other. We had both prided ourselves on our communication as a couple, so this was a bit jarring for us to discover. And really, the reason we were so scared to communicate some of these things were because we knew they were relationship-threatening. The kind of things we swept under the rug cuz things developed too fast. Mistake #4: ignoring relationship-threatening issues. You're better off bringing them up, no matter how painful that may be, because they don't just go away.

Those were the main ones. But despite these mistakes, I'm still not sure we'd have been better off not marrying. I believe more and more that things happen for a reason, including our mistakes. After all, I don't think either of us would have gone back to school if not for our marriage.

Anyway, hope that answered the question and/or was useful. I'm still working through it all, and may come up with some more later. And maybe Erika will add to this list as well.