An anonymous letter from a Partlee reader, written to a friend who asked twice what made the writer stay in the marriage. Published with permission, lightly edited. The letter is, the writer says, not a recommendation but an accounting. The companion piece - written from the other side of the decision - is a letter on leaving.
Dear M.,
You asked me twice - once over the phone in March, once at the small dinner in September - what made me stay. I do not have a single answer. I have an accounting.
I stayed because, on the morning the decision had to be made, I could not name a better life on the other side. I stayed because I could not afford the move, not financially but in the ways that the financial part stands in for. I stayed because the children were six and three, and the version of their childhood I could imagine without staying was worse than the version I could imagine by staying. I stayed because, somewhere inside the marriage, there was still a person I recognised, and I was not yet certain we were past finding each other again.
I am not writing to recommend staying. I am writing because you asked for an accounting and I am not in a position to give you a clean answer. The answer is messy. It is the answer most people who stay have, when pressed.
Some things I have learned since.
Staying is not a moral position; it is a practical one. It is not better than leaving. It is what worked for the specific people I had to consider and the specific year I had to consider them in. Leaving might have worked too. I do not know. I have made peace with not knowing.
The marriage I stayed in is not the marriage I would have signed up for at twenty-three. It is the marriage two specific people, in their forties, have renegotiated in their own way. The two of us are quieter. We have separate Sundays. We have agreed that some things will not be discussed and we have stopped trying to force them open. The discipline of that agreement is its own intimacy.
We sleep in separate rooms now, since 2024. We did not announce it. We did not present it as a marital project. We moved a bed and we did not move it back. Both of us sleep better and read more. The piece I read last month - on sleeping in separate rooms - said more or less what I would have said about it, except in better sentences.
Some weeks I wonder. Most weeks I do not. The wondering used to be every week, and then every month, and now it is something like a scheduled appointment with myself, on quieter Sundays, and I have come to look at it the way one looks at any old appointment that does not produce news.
If you choose to leave, I will not be the friend who tells you that you should have stayed. If you choose to stay, I will not be the friend who tells you that you should have left. I will be the friend who answers the phone. The accounting is the accounting; the choice is yours.
With love and without a thesis,
- Your old friend.
The marriages that survive are not the ones that did not have a hard year. They are the ones that re-introduced themselves after.