Skip to main content

The Couple

The life of H and S (a couple I knew a long time ago) is one I have followed over the years because there are so much to learn from it. They met when he was a TA in her undergrad class. She was six years younger than him. They made an exceptionally good looking pair and seemed to have everything that mattered in common. In short, a match made in heaven. Her parents were disappointed in her choice of husband because they thought she deserved a lot better than H.
The proverbial serpent in their marital paradise was socio-economic disparity between the two families. Her parents were tenured professors at a well-known university. They were also independently affluent. His father was a high-school drop out and worked with a traveling theater group. His mother had no formal education and worked odd jobs where she found them to support the family. They were both artistically gifted (a quality they had passed on to H) but had very little material success. 
H for his part, had always excelled academically and was working his way up in the corporate world. However, his overwhelming sense of inferiority to S (and her family) along with the constant need to prove his worth to them, ended their marriage ten years and two kids later. H has since re-married a woman who is nothing like the beautiful and exceptionally talented S. Indeed, he made a concerted effort to find someone who did not remind him of S at all. They have another child together. His career has taken off in a way that even he may not have imagined possible even five or six years ago.
S continues to be a single mother to their two kids. H has detached himself from their lives to focus on his new family. The endless bickering over parenting style was draining them both out and not doing the kids any favors either. S had to slow down career-wise despite her considerable talents, to be able to mother them without a partner. Fifteen years later, H is exactly where he may have wanted to be to prove to S and her family that she could not have found herself a better, more qualified or successful husband. His accomplishments are spectacular by any standard. She was to him the epitome of the perfect wife, the soul-mate he had sought and found.
Theirs was the perfect union that came apart before it's potential could be fully realized. I often wonder if they don't regret having parted ways much too soon or maybe the end of the marriage gave H the drive to achieve what he has. Even though they are not together anymore, the need to prove himself to S and her family must be a driving force in H's life. I wonder if such a marriage can then be called "over" - if S is still not the what inspires H to achieve and excel each day. I wonder if they are still not a couple in the heart and soul.In such a vicarious union, does one party win at the expense of the other. H got his impetus to be wildly successful but S could not achieve anything close to her potential. I wonder about the fairness of it all - specially for S. If however, one removes material measures of success (and failure), would S have appear to have emerged a winner as well.

Comments

davinleo said…
Wow! great post... made me all contemplative. I've been reading your blog since the past 2 days and I must say that you have a great flair for writing. Even though the voyeuristic thrill of reading a blog, of living vicariously is missing, the blog posts are extremely engaging.
Waiting for more... :-)
Anonymous said…
i'm a similar case. Thought that love would overrule the disparities but it did not. There is no method to madness, nor to the way people choose to act. It's irrational and i personally find it foolish to rationalize it, as you can't solve the other person's problems. What winner and loser?. You watch a relationship disappear into nothingness, it simply ceases to exist.

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques