The Things We Do for Love: My Past Wife Experience
“In the long run, we shape our lives, and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.”
― Eleanor Roosevelt
Our twin flame burned bright. We’re talking supernova bright. We lit up the world around us — and everyone who came into our orbit — as we joy bombed our way through a life we lived on 11. We were going to infinity and beyond, baby! Ours was a love that was meant to be forever.
And then, 10 years ago, after a long, slow, disheartening burnout that I was powerless to reverse, I left the world of Barbarella behind, exiting this rocket ship of a relationship and ending a 15-year journey that I’d poured my whole soul into. An epic adventure that featured the greatest joys and the deepest sorrows. No one was more surprised than we were when I chose an escape pod and began my descent back down to earth.
So what the hell happened?
Leave It to Beaver Meets Girls Gone Wild
Well, right from the very start, we were an unlikely pair, the very definition of opposites attract. He was raised by international jet setters and grew up partying in Ibiza, dancing in foam. I was your typical good girl raised by parents who bore a striking resemblance to Ward and June Cleaver and made us go to church by subway every Sunday without fail. Our version of a hot Saturday night was going to Al Buon Gusto, our local family-style Italian, for New York pizza. The only foam I experienced as a girl was Mr Bubble.
I was raised to be the perfect wife. But when I met my match, it was like I got a golden ticket on a starship headed to a galaxy far far away, one that bore no resemblance to my life growing up nor to the one I had prepared for. My mother raised me for Leave It to Beaver and I went and married into Girls Gone Wild in Outer Space.
Classical Training Meets Modern Love
My domestic training started early on. Some of my first memories are of my mother teaching me how to cook, sew, iron, and clean. Oh how we Greers love (sometimes live) to clean! I was so good at it, my family took to calling me the white tornado in honor of the classic commercial and my magical ability to transform domestic chaos into order. My mother was so pleased with my performance, she paid me to clean my sister’s room, a fact that really pissed my sister off when she found out about it years later.
I embraced the lessons of Mom’s home cooking school with even greater fervor. I spent hours in the kitchen at my mother’s side, watching and learning as she masterfully executed complex recipes from Julia Child and Dione Lucas and witnessing both the joys and the frustrations of fancy French cooking. I loved being her diminutive sous chef, scraping cooked mirepoix through a sieve for the perfect brown sauce, stirring the pots simmering on the stove, taking sneaky bites every chance I got.
Mom was a consummate pleaser which made her an exceptional wife, mother, and hostess. She took anticipating and exceeding the needs and expectations of everyone around her to another level. I was her star pupil and I learned my lessons well. When I married into an alternate reality, I simply adapted my classical training to suit my beloved husband’s over the top lifestyle and chose to keep calm and party on, Wayne. My gifts for cleaning up on aisle 12 and intuitive wish fulfillment definitely came in handy.
Ironically, as I was doing my best to be the perfect wife my mom had raised me to be — to be just like her — I was simultaneously doing my best to be anything and everything that she was not. As I had came of age and started to individuate from the woman who gave me life, I made a radical pivot away from the good girl archetype she embodied so completely. I wasn’t wired to be a bad girl but I did my best to appear cool with casual sex, smoking, clubbing, and other practices of female liberation and empowerment that I saw around me growing up in the Manhattan of the 70s and 80s. Good wife plus bad girl created a perfect storm and led to my embracing the foreign customs of my husband’s home planet with blind enthusiasm.
A Two-Person Love-A-Palooza
We quickly became this mythical couple, a turbo-dynamic duo spreading our signature animated joy as we loved on the world. We were so in love and everybody knew it. They cheered us on and eagerly joined in the fun, saying yes please to all that we were having — and all that we were serving at lavish parties we hosted where “party favors” flowed freely and abundantly.
The sweetness and intensity of our two-person Love-a-Palooza glamoured me, blinding me to the cracks that appeared early on in our relationship due to fundamental differences in how we defined a life well lived. He was 7 years younger than me so I thought the whole partying like a rockstar thing was just a phase of youthful exuberance and experimentation he’d grow out of. It was just harmless hedonism, right? Plus I’d missed out on all the fun when I was younger because I was your classic good girl. Never a partier in high school or college, alcohol, tobacco, and marijuana were the hardest drugs I’d ever tried and only sparingly because of my father’s warnings about his family’s history of alcoholism and my deep-seated fear of losing control.
It was only on the weekends, I told myself.
It was light and animated and fun.
It was out in the open, shared with a veritable glamorati of fabulous humans at our legendary parties. Everyone was doing it and somehow that made it okay.
Babe in the Woods Barbie
In reality, it was anything but harmless, silently eroding our love from the inside out and somehow, I didn’t know. Or perhaps, I didn’t want to know. Or perhaps, I knew it in my heart, but that wounded heart, which had never known a love like this — never been loved like this — chose to ignore it. She was blissed out, floating up amongst rosy golden love clouds, having way too much fun. Experiencing an unconditional love that was secretly conditional on keeping up with the jonesing, maintaining a lifestyle that was so not me.
I know that this is hard to believe. As I write this, I have a hard time believing that I could be so naïve to what was happening quite literally underneath my nose. I’d seen the movies and read the tabloid news stories. I knew that rockstars didn’t age well. That stories of unbridled hedonism rarely if ever had happy endings. How the hell did I not see what was coming? How did I not know what would happen to us if we kept going down a long and winding road paved with an abundance of love but only minimal restraint?! I’m a smart, well-educated woman and I realize that this makes me seem like Babe in the Woods Barbie. I should have seen the truth for what it was long before I actually did.
But as I said, I was the perfect little good girl, raised to be the perfect wife and, despite growing up in Manhattan, going to Studio 54 at age 15, and returning post-Stanford to a world of “Less Than Zero”, I managed to be blissfully ignorant of the darker realities of the party scene and their soul-erasing, joy-stealing effects. I was raised on a steady diet of Shakespeare, the Bronte sisters, and Little House on the Prairie and somehow missed all that was going on all around me in 80s NYC. Apparently, unlike Brittney, I was that innocent.
And in all honesty, our life was fun. Really, really fun. Until it wasn’t.
A Rude Awakening
My first wake up call came when we started to talk about having kids. All of a sudden, I was trying to reconcile how I could be the perfect wife and the perfect mother I was trained to be and maintain our It’s-Burning-Man-Every-Weekend lifestyle which was showing no signs of slowing down despite my attempts to reign it in. My twisted version of a modern day woman having it all really twisted my melon and that future I was picturing in my head suddenly became one I could not sign up for.
With time, things turned darker and began to leach away our joyful aliveness, dimming our light and eroding our love, distancing us from those we loved including ourselves and each other. It took its toll on us physically and required an exhausting level of excuse making and appearance upkeep. My shame increased as the concerned whispering began and judgement flowed from those who’d once joined in — all of whom had grown out of it while our bullet train kept going. Resentment and reactivity came to replace rapture and resonance. It stopped being fun long before the music stopped.
For most of our 14 years together, it was his thing and I just went along with it. At least that’s how I chose to look at it. Which still amazes me because I am nobody’s groupie! And in my innermost thoughts, I blamed him for bringing it into our lives. Then I received what was quite literally the mother of all wake up calls. My mother jumped in front of an uptown A train at 42nd Street on Mother’s Day in 2008 at the age of 71 and woke me up to my own misery.
This tragic step for her catalyzed a giant leap into the unknown for me — the vast unknown of my inner landscape where I had a lot of work to do. A trust fall with the universe to seek out the thieves that were stealing my joy and reclaim it in a now 14-year journey of radical self examination.
I started with things I could change in myself. Losing 50 pounds, getting out of chronic pain and into the best shape of my life at 42, getting a values-aligned new job, but still I was miserable. After 4 years of trying to find and fix the problems in me — at least the ones I was willing to see — I came to face the problem in we. The problem I had not wanted to see. I finally had to admit to myself that our relationship was broken and, despite the attempts we had made over the years, we couldn’t fix it from the inside.
As I reflected on our journey, I came to see that it wasn’t just his thing, it had become mine. I wasn’t saying yes because I wanted to be the perfect wife and please him. I was saying yes because I couldn’t say no to the temptation to indulge anymore. The more we engaged in the fun that was far from harmless, the more tattered and torn the fabric of our love became, and the more hurt and heartache there was to suppress and escape from, adding more fuel to the fire of my yes.
Owning My Yes
I came to own my yes, taking my share of responsibility for all of it, rather than blaming him. This was not an easy shift to make as it went against my good girl programming and everything I believed about myself and presented to the world. It would have been so much easier to blame rather than to feel the depth of my shame and my heartbreak at the bursting of our beautiful love bubble. But it was the truth. Acknowledging and taking personal responsibility for it gave me the power to change it.
As Eleanor Rosevelt said: “In the long run, we shape our lives, and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.”
I am choosing to take responsibility for the choices I made — and kept making over and over again. They were mine and mine alone. They shaped me and have shaped my life and they continue to do so.
I made them first and foremost because of the otherworldly love we shared. I made them because I was raised to be the perfect wife, to perform for love in the greatest show on earth just like my mother had done before me. Driven by the core wound she and I shared — that we were unworthy of love. Add to that a dose of mother shadow — I’m going to be all that she was not — and it all makes perfect sense that I stayed, engaging in a lifestyle that was not aligned with anyone’s highest good for an astonishing 15 years.
I’m proud of the healing I have done and equally proud of his. I made a radical pivot after leaving the relationship, choosing to move up to the woods to reflect, restore, and renew and put distance between me and the habitual hedonism of my past wife experience. I am also incredibly grateful and recognize my privilege. Not everyone can get out and not everyone is so fortunate as they wrestle and come to terms with their shadows.
I have referred to this truth obliquely in previous pieces but was called to share it more plainly today. Perhaps inspired by an intensive monthlong detox cleanse that finishes today.
I share it with no blame or shame and no regrets. I have found in my nearly 56 years on this earth that one of the secrets to a life well lived is owning it all and having no regrets. Owning it all means I have agency — that I played an active role and was not a victim — and can therefore change my reality and my circumstance by making different, more informed choices going forward. Having no regrets is an acknowledgement that I wouldn’t be this person today, typing these words, having this precious gift that is my life, were it not for every single thing that I have experienced along my life’s journey thus far. Life is not dark or light, it’s always a mix of both.
On this journey, I am choosing to reckon with and make space in my heart for all of me — the light and the shadow, the wise and the wayward.
Reckonings that I share with you freely and transparently in these pages in hopes that they might be of service to you on your own journeys of becoming more fully, more authentically, and more unabashedly you.
Journeys of courageously going inward, exploring and witnessing what you discover with a lovingly curious and compassionate heart and an intention of acceptance and ultimately, wholeness.