I visited the home of my friend and her husband. He was also my friend, we all went to the same college, but I was her bridesmaid and she was my roommate when I lived in New York. I hadn’t been back to New York since they got married. In the kitchen, I saw the singing rice cooker I bought them for the occasion. I sat on the turquoise couch that she bought when we lived in this same neighborhood in Queens seven years earlier.
I asked after another couple I don’t know as well who have moved out of the city. “Would you do that?” I asked.
“He doesn’t want to,” my friend pointed to her husband.
“Why do you want to?” I asked, surprised.
“I don’t know if I want to be in the city forever,” she said. She had grown up here, after all.
“I wanted to get married because I wanted to have a party,” she said. “And because we’d been together for a long time.”
The other couple, they sought out stability. Their marriage was part of a sequence of events: moving out of the city, getting engaged, getting married, buying a house. She said, and her husband agreed, their reason for getting married was different.
I wondered how different they really were from each other, my friends and the other couple. Maybe the differences feel inconsequential when a script is being adhered to. But I have no doubt that the differences are important.
“There are three kinds of marriage,” writes Haley Mlotek in No Fault: A Memoir of Romance and Divorce. “There is my marriage, which is special: distinct, it defies easy categorization. There is your marriage, which is evidence: of how, as seen by me, your values have served or failed you. Then there is marriage: the category that presumes an ideal exists at all.”
By the time Mlotek divorces her own husband, she has already had plenty of experience comparing and contrasting her own marriage—and her divorce—with other marriages. She describes “my marriages”: her parents, her grandparents’, her own. Most of these end in divorce. Her first job was working as an office assistant for her mom, a certified divorce mediator, in their basement.
Here are the facts of her marriage: Mlotek and her ex-husband were together for twelve years, high school sweethearts, before getting married. They married for visa reasons. Some of the duration of the marriage would be an open marriage. After thirteen months of marriage, she asked to separate. She stayed in the apartment that he would move out of.
She tells one story about a fight between them twice —once near the beginning, and again near the end—with renewed context. Is it that I’ve earned enough good will as a reader to hear the fuller version of the story, the way a friend only reveals to you later the full extent of a breakup? Or is this form merely what her experience resembled, a story that continues into her next relationship and next breakups, but circles back, full of repetition, fixation, and revisitation?
•
Mlotek’s friends think she has secrets because she doesn’t tell stories. She does have secrets (though I’m not sure it has anything to do with not telling stories). She and her friends go around the table and share their shame types, a type of person they were ashamed to be consistently attracted to. “Poets,” she says out loud, inwardly thinking “other people’s husbands.” Her language is sometimes purposefully elusive: “A friend I loved once said,” she writes elsewhere. Another secret. Once said? Or loved once?
Some secrets may also be secrets she is keeping from herself—or the ordinary condition of not knowing. In this way, she eludes herself and the reader. “My friends and I are alike in that we both had no idea why my marriage ended,” she writes. Then in parentheses, like she’s keeping it an even greater secret from the page, “(We are different in that they think they can find the answer, and I know I never will).” Sometimes this elusiveness is a chosen defiance. “Later I would learn that people most certain that they knew how other people should live were those least certain of their own lives,” she said.
Mlotek’s friend’s husband asks about her divorce. He’s asking her, by way of speaking about himself and his marriage, whether her successful career made her husband jealous. “That’s not why our marriage ended,” she had said to him. Then weeks later, she thinks about this conversation and it comes back to her in the shower “hot and bright behind my eyes.” She is not sure. She concedes that things did change when she got a job closer to her husband’s job, and that the identity of their relationship rested on the belief that he took care of her.
Is it possible to share perspective without projection? Mlotek’s lack of narrative only meant there was more room to project outside narrative onto her divorce. Mlotek quotes Phyllis Rose in her book about Victorian marriages, Parallel Lives, “It is, of course, one of life’s persistent disappointments that a great moral crisis in my life is nothing but matter for gossip in yours.” But getting perspective, at the risk of projection, is invaluable.
For a few months last year, I was talking to my therapist about how my partner and I were negotiating whether to open up our relationship. I was all kinds of anxious, the kind of anxious that drives you to Reddit stories to reach for understanding. Sometimes I came to sessions unspooling, thank you so much for meeting with me on such short notice. My partner and I gradually worked through it. Months later, my therapist shared with me that she and an ex-partner had similarly struggled to negotiate an open relationship. When I asked her why she didn’t share this with me, she said she was worried she would have projected her story onto mine. “It would have made me feel less lonely,” I said to her. I didn’t say this to her but thought later, I can tell how your story is different from my story.
I ended my relationship with my therapist shortly after. It was hard not to feel like I would have gotten more insight from talking to friends and acquaintances than to a licensed professional, not to mention I lost insurance coverage.
•
Mlotek’s book is fragmented, chapters unlabeled besides being divided into four sections, some chapters no longer than a few lines. She brings together political and social histories of marriage and divorce, attending to what is happening “on paper” (statistics, legislation, what is socially sanctioned) and what is happening off the record. Who had access to the legitimacy of legal marriage? Who effectively separated but couldn’t (or chose not to) legally divorce? “The Census Bureau has pointed that lots of people who report that they are divorced (for example, me) do not actually file, in court, for divorce within the same year (also me),” writes Mlotek. Where would we find these stories if not through word-of-mouth, through friends of friends, through gossip?
In Women: A Journal of Liberation, a woman named Betsy Riley submits annotated diary entries she wrote as a newlywed, in which she admits she often lied, fearing her diary would be read. In her marriage, her husband wrote while she earned the majority of the money and did all the housework. Even what is technically off the record—a private diary—upholds a story different from the one Riley was experiencing.
When I thought about what was shocking about this story, I thought about how diaries are for secrets, and secrets are for making sense of what isn’t legible to you, at least not in the present. “Even after reading the diary over in retrospect, I cannot be sure how much my husband was to blame for the shitty situation we were in. I still feel ambivalent enough about my husband to want to believe that we were both potentially good human being trapped in a horrendous romantic myth,” Riley writes.
No Fault is full of archival gems; many of her objects of inquiry are from different eras of distribution, including print journals from feminist presses. Women: A Journal of Liberation had at most twenty thousand copies distributed.
Another such object is The Continuing Story of Carel and Ferd, an art film and documentary from the ’70s, featuring “two freaky people going straight” (as marketed). It was originally shown as a three-channel video, eight-monitor installation including an audience live feed at avant garde gallery The Kitchen in New York, later distributed by small video distribution organizations.
Over the course of five years, Arthur Ginsberg filmed thirty hours of Carel Rowe and Ferd Eggan’s wedding, short marriage, and eventual breakup. “I was so drawn to their cavalier way of being:” writes Mlotek, “their certainty that they could make marriage into a bit, their crumbling in the face of marriage made real.” Not all thirty hours are accessible, but Mlotek says she would watch all of them if she could.
The title, “continuing story,” speaks to the desire to get ahead of the present. As if you could ever get ahead of the unfolding narrative, as if you could ever get a view from above, seeing yourself before the camera sees you, when you are busy living your life. I can see the ways a decision like leaving a long-term relationship is connected to time: to time changing your mind, to be continuing until you can no longer continue.
For the duration of filming, Gary Indiana is Ferd’s lover. Mlotek describes one scene where Indiana uses Carel’s cigarette to light his with “the uneasy affinity that naturally occurs between two people fucking the same man on display.” She then writes, “It reminded me how much I miss smoking, which is to say, it reminded me how much I miss the excuse to share something with someone that feels good enough to ignore how bad it is for both of us.”
The cigarette, whenever it appears, is a bid for intimacy alongside tension and risk. With one man she dates after her divorce, he convinces her to smoke in the backyard naked: “What if the neighbors see! I protested, but barely. It’s too dark! he insisted. It was night, true, but the sky was bright and purple, even more so when considered behind the red glow of a lit cigarette.” It is in the glow of this cigarette that I feel like I can see Haley at last.
•
On a day when the snow fell from the sky in long, thick sheets, I took a bus from work to meet my divorced friend. Our only time to catch up in person was in between commitments, so I sat in their car on their drive home. I would get off downtown to take another bus home. The ongoingness of a divorce meant things were happening everyday, sometimes new events, sometimes new emotions. A new emotion can be an event.
“It would never be our story to tell, but it had changed something about our lives to be near it.” Mlotek writes about two people she knew who separated. Not long after helping my divorced friend and their dog move out of their former spouse’s home, I told my partner I wasn’t ready for us to move in together, despite the plans that we had made. These events are related and unrelated, in ways that are mysterious to me. Was their story instructive, revealing to me the risks of cohabitation? Was I trying to evade sharing the outcome of their romantic story? Was I actually not able to see the difference between their story and mine? Or did it merely surface the existing anxieties I had about this next step in my relationship with my partner? Hard to say. But from this experience, I feel my porousness, how the vicinity of other people’s stories changes me, how other people’s vicinity to my stories changes them.
All that said, there’s fun to be had in being a story amidst stories. I relish being a character in many people’s stories. I love talking in circles with a person, affirming and reaffirming sanity, getting worked up into a lather about someone’s actions, they did that? That’s fucked up, I love all of it. Before the story settles, cements, before meaning has the appearance of being made, I love to be there for all of it.
As my divorced friend shared their thoughts and feelings, driving through slush during rush hour traffic, a metal merry-go-round clacked around on their rearview mirror. By the time we reached downtown, it was already dark. Then I hugged them, got out of the car and stood in the snow, waiting for a delayed bus to arrive.
Elina Zhang
Elina Zhang is a writer, educator, and organizer. She has written in LitHub, The Offing and elsewhere. She is based in Pittsburgh, PA, where she is a member of the JADED arts collective and where she runs a gossip sheet.