When Martha met Harold, she was a small town girl who captivated the heart of a handsome traveling salesman. After a quick courtship, and marriage in front of the local justice of the peace, Martha joined Harold as they traveled to places she’d previously only read about.
It should have been an idyllic marriage, but, while Harold was an honest and hard working individual, Martha wanted more. She wanted social status. She needed to belong to an exclusive country club, live in a large house, drive a fancy car, travel first class.
Despite advancements, Harold’s hard work, and the high regard his employers had for him, nothing he did was good enough, nor did he ever earn enough money, to please Martha.
As the years went by, Martha ridiculed his lack of education, his rough hands, his poor grammar, his blue collar status. “I should have married a doctor,” she’d sigh to him. When the children were born, she blamed him for selfishly tying her down when she needed to make something of herself.
Throughout their marriage, Martha wished she’d married a “white collar man,” a man who could have provided the finer things, someone who would have known the importance of social status. Instead, she was stuck with Harold, a handsome, gentle man who forgave her every fault, who didn’t complain when she spent more on a dress than he made in a week. He loved her. And with each passing year, she hated him even more.
By the time Harold died, they had spent fifty years together, locked in a love-hate relationship in which neither one was happy. In the last years, the “golden years,” Martha was openly displaying hatred for Harold. She never forgave him for wasting the best years of her life.
Terry and Sharyn
Terry and Sharyn were high school lovers. He was the handsome football player and she was the star cheerleader. Both were physically beautiful, tan, fit, blonde-haired and blue-eyed. It was expected they would get married, they were so perfect together.
Their wedding was exactly the way Sharyn dreamed it would be, with all her girlfriends as attendants, and a luxury honeymoon in Las Vegas. She loved Terry more than life itself. This was the way her life was supposed to be. She was blissfully happy. Each day was better than the one before it. When their daughter was born, three years after their wedding, it made everything that much more perfect.
They had been married five years when she got the first phone call. The woman told her Terry didn’t love her any more, that she should give him up, that she should realize she couldn’t hold him when he wanted to go. Sharyn was devastated.
She confronted Terry and he said it was one of the hazards of his job, cops were always running into crazy people, he said, people who wanted to make trouble for them and the best way to do it was to tell tales to the spouse.
Sharyn finally met one of the “crazies” and found her to be a basically nice person. Sharyn had trouble finding fault with anyone, even someone who posed a threat to her marriage. She didn’t approach Terry about this newest woman, she knew he would come up with some plausible story and she wasn’t ready for an either-or confrontation. She waited, watched, and planned for her future.
If Terry didn’t shape up, she was going to be prepared to get along without him. A waitress, she held back some of her tip money, putting it into a savings account Terry didn’t know about. When Sharyn was ready, she confronted Terry. He denied his affairs but Sharyn had gathered her facts well. Terry begged and pleaded and Sharyn gave in, believing that he would change. He didn’t.
They had a stormy several years through legal separation, reconciliation, counseling, several more affairs, another split, and finally divorce. When it was over, Sharyn knew she had done everything she could to keep her marriage from failing.
Not every marriage should last forever.