That Day I Went Crazy and Ended My Marriage

The all-too-familiar story that denies women their fury and pain

Watch out, world… crazy woman on the loose! Photo by sdominick/Getty Images Signature

According to the man I married, I went crazy and that’s why our marriage is ending. I went crazy on April 20, 2024, the night I couldn’t sleep.

By the way, I recommend going crazy in April. By then, the days are getting longer, the weather is finally improving, and you can go on long walks, perhaps occasionally muttering to yourself for the full effect.

It wasn’t on my to-do list to go crazy on that particular night in April. I couldn’t sleep because I was furious, and I wanted a hit of cannabis to calm my nerves. The cannabis was upstairs, where my husband was either listening to music or sleeping on the couch.

He often fell asleep on the couch. Usually the music was still blaring from his headphones when he faded into unconsciousness. If I awoke after midnight and felt the coolness of the sheets beside me, I used to go fetch him. It was the wifely thing to do. I didn’t want him to get a crick in his neck and I wanted his body next to mine, even though that same body often awoke me multiple times a night with its snoring — simultaneously erratic and incessant.

Erratic and incessant — like his fury.

Lately though, I’d stopped fetching him from the couch. It wasn’t my job to protect him from cricks in his neck, and even though the notion of a warm body next to me was comforting, the truth was, I slept better without him in the bed.

On this particular night, I was hoping he’d be asleep so I could snag the bag with the cannabis unnoticed and scurry back to bed. If he’d been asleep, would everything be different now? Probably not, perhaps just the timing of it all — kind of like that movie Sliding Doors. The ending is sometimes inevitable.

Was the ending always inevitable? It’s easy to spot foreshadowing in retrospect. As our 20 years together were unfolding, it was all just happening, we were both just reacting. Maybe that one fight was the beginning of the end, or maybe it was just a fight that happened because we were both tired and the day had not gone as planned.

There are so many possible hills to die on. It’s hard to know, in the moment, which ones are worth our blood and tears and which ones are just harmless, grassy slopes.

//

My husband wasn’t asleep, not yet, and he could see I was upset and he wanted me to tell him why. I had been trying to explain my fury for years. It was so sprawling, I did not even know where to begin.

Also, and more crucially, there was no room in our relationship for my fury. It was his fury that was louder, more demanding, more deserved. He’d had a harder life, and he was therefore entitled to yell at me and call me names and occasionally throw things.

For a long time, I’d told myself that this entitlement made sense, that I’d enjoyed a more privileged childhood and it was therefore my job to zip up my fury and attend to his. It was my job to learn all his triggers and avoid them at all costs, it was my job to pick up the pieces when a family member inadvertently stepped on a landmine.

A few times, these pieces were literal pieces of matter. There were the shards of a craft project made of hard plastic, filled with water and glitter. The shattered plastic was easy enough to dispose of, but the glitter lingered, glinting under the kitchen lights, taunting me with its obstinance.

I wouldn’t describe myself as a meek wife. I tried to stand my ground. My fury leaked out in ways that sometimes scared me, even in our early months of dating. Back then, I chalked up the intensity to love. I’d just emerged from a three-year relationship during which neither I nor my boyfriend had ever raised our voices. That relationship felt muted by comparison; this one was full of color and spark.

I ran into this ex-boyfriend a couple months after I’d started dating the man who would become my husband. I lived in Rhode Island at the time, and Rhode Island is a place where people are prone to run into one another. The man who would become my husband didn’t like how close I stood to my ex-boyfriend when we said hello. He said I’d embarrassed him in front of his friends.

I was in my mid-20s then, it was a Saturday night, and I’d had some drinks. Maybe I had been standing close to my ex-boyfriend because people who have had some drinks do that sometimes. But the fight my new boyfriend was picking with me made me furious. The accusations were unfounded. It was ridiculous to claim I’d embarrassed him because his friends hadn’t paid any attention to me all evening.

I wasn’t furious because I was drunk, but because I was drunk, I was careless with my fury. I let it flop around our whole car ride home and when we got back to my house, I took the clothes he had in my closet and threw them off the balcony.

Apparently, I had become a woman who throws things off balconies — in other words, a crazy woman — and I didn’t like that woman at all. I didn’t know that version of myself lived inside me. I spent several days repenting. Apologizing, groveling even.

The other issue — my new boyfriend’s furious accusations — went unaddressed. Because of course, the real problem was me and my craziness.

//

I was, for the most part, able to tame my fury, and I got better at it over the years. After all, I was responsible for my fury; my husband was not responsible for his. I managed both of our respective furies and did a pretty good job of it. I didn’t want us to be the couple the neighbors whispered about, and I especially didn’t want the neighbors to fear or villainize my partner, the Black man.

We were the interracial couple everyone was rooting for. Our love was true — because yes, love and fury can co-exist — and everyone told us what beautiful children we were going to have. They were right about that; our children are beauties, for better or for worse.

When did I know I wasn’t going to be able to contain either of our furies much longer? It’s hard to say. One could argue I’d already failed multiple times. There was the glitter still embedded above the kitchen stove to prove it.

I did everything I could think to do to understand my husband’s fury. What can be understood can be controlled. I also made excuses, asked the kids to give him grace. He got to yell, show up late to the dinner table, but they were held to different standards. “Do as I say, not as I do.” It was my late father-in-law’s favorite saying, and my husband, apparently, was picking up the mantle.

Sometimes I was able to convince myself that everything was fine — for days, weeks, months, even years at a time. That’s because my husband wasn’t a monster. Like I said, the fury was both incessant and erratic. Always there, simmering beneath the surface, but only occasionally unleashed. The drama lay in the unleashing. I could usually tell it was building, but I couldn’t predict exactly when it would be triggered, or exactly what would trigger it.

It was so much easier to contain his fury before we had children, back when I was the primary variable. It was even somewhat manageable when the kids were little—back when they could get away with things because they didn’t know any better, back when they were still cute. But as they entered their pre-teen years, things got difficult. Nefarious motives could be assigned, conspiracies and plots constructed. Now they could be held responsible for triggering Dad; now they were old enough to know how not to.

The containment of my husband’s fury demanded more of my time and nearly all my energy. It was a job that had spiraled into dozens of subtasks, a complex project with multiple moving parts. I had to try to contain my children’s emotions because their emotions triggered his, and I had to ask them to gloss things over and tamp things down and let things go. Of course, they didn’t always want to gloss things over and tamp things down and let things go. They said it wasn’t fair, and of course, they were right.

Like I said, I wasn’t meek. I tried, on multiple occasions, to express my frustrations. We saw multiple counselors, did multiple exercises. I told him I felt like his emotional punching bag. I told him I needed us to make some space in our relationship for me. I told him how much empathy we all had for his trauma, but that it wasn’t fair of him to expect the kids to navigate his triggers, to put the onus on them.

I also frequently told him I loved him, and I meant it. I’d seen his softness, his tenderness, his tears. We were physically intimate up until the very end — kisses goodbye, hugs in the kitchen, cuddles on the couch, sex twice a week.

In bed, he was his most vulnerable and most generous. This is the way I really feel about you, he’d tell me sometimes. If you ever question anything, just remember this.

I tried to hold onto that tenderness, like a stone clenched in my fist. But at best, sex accounted for one hour a week and there were over 100 other waking hours to account for, 100 waking hours that were inching further and further beyond my control.

//

On April 20, 2024, when I ventured upstairs from our finished-basement bedroom and found my husband still awake on the couch, when he asked me what was wrong, I said we could talk about it in the morning.

But he wanted to talk about it right then.

I knew it was a terrible idea, to talk about right then. He was insistent. Would we get in a fight over not talking about it, or would we get in a fight over whatever it was we were going to talk about? At this point, the fight was inevitable. I opened my mouth.

I was mad about a lot of things that had happened over multiple years, things that kept happening, things that needed to stop happening.

I was mad about the dishes he hadn’t washed, but not really. I was mad about everything the dishes symbolized — his promise broken, my labor assumed, no acknowledgment granted.

I was mad about a question he’d asked me on the porch earlier that day. Why are you so angry? The implication was clear. I had no right to be angry and I knew there were no words I could use now, after midnight, to convince him otherwise.

It didn’t really matter what I said, though, because as soon as I started speaking, he cut me off. He heard my fury in the quavering tenor of my voice, and my fury made him furious, and his fury took precedence.

He said maybe he should leave, and I said okay, and that made him even angrier. He stood up, puffed up his chest, put his face in mine. He was yelling now, never mind the sleeping children one and two rooms over. In all likelihood our daughter wasn’t even yet asleep — it was a Saturday night and she’d always been a night owl.

He took a framed picture off the wall and put it in his backpack. He left his wedding ring. He drove one and a half hours to an apartment he’d recently started renting during the week to be closer to his new job.

I’d told him to get the apartment for his own sake, to save on commute time, help him focus on his work. But I knew, deep down, the apartment was more for my sake than for his.

//

“You’ll work it out,” my daughter said. “You always do.”

We’d had our share of fights before April 20, 2024. Was this one different? I can’t really say. “Working it out,” as we always did, generally entailed me letting it go while undergoing rigorous mental gymnastics to convince myself that letting it go was the right thing to do, all the while clinging to a sliver of hope that maybe this time, I’d been heard. Maybe this time, he’d understood my fury and seen my pain.

But now my husband had another living space to retreat to, and all I could think of was how much lighter I felt after his departure. They say you’re only as happy as your unhappiest child, and my husband had not only become the family member who required (demanded) the most tending and care, but for years had been spiraling deeper and deeper into his own unhappiness. For years, I felt like I’d been flailing in deep water, unable to take a full breath. Every time I got my head above water, I’d get sucked back under.

I started researching “healing separations” because I have always taken it upon myself to research my family’s salvation. Parenting books, relationships books, endless articles, frantic Google searches, and multi-tabbed spreadsheets dedicated to therapy options — marriage counselors, EDMR therapists, cognitive behavioral therapists, 12-step recovery groups, Internal Family Systems therapists, trauma retreats, psilocybin facilitators, rehab centers, anger management courses, culturally responsive therapists…

…. shall I go on?

All the therapists recommended books and articles, and all the books and articles recommended different therapeutic techniques.

Even then, I still thought our marriage could be saved. Maybe we could try a nesting approach that gave each of us time to ourselves. Maybe we could go all in and “live apart together.” Maybe we could try a five-year marriage.

Yes, I researched “unconventional marriages,” too.

I knew that for my part, I had simmering resentments to untangle, unproductive behaviors to examine, deep-seated fears and triggers to explore. With my replenished well of emotional energy, I was eager to get started.

But the key to a healing separation is that both parties need to agree to work on their own healing. I couldn’t force healing on him. I’d already tried that. All I could do was focus on my salvation and hope for the best.

//

There is my story, the story I’ve just written and shared with you. Is it the only story that can be told? No. It’s fashioned from my memories and truths. Is it factually accurate? I’d vouch for it. Is it supported by evidence? There are email exchanges and text threads and multiple eyewitness accounts that would back it up. (When you’re on the precipice of divorce, you need to think about these things.)

Then there is my husband’s story. It is much more succinct:

She went crazy. She kicked me out.

It is not just my husband’s story. It’s a cliché story, really, one that has been told by many blindsided men before him. It’s a tidy story, one with a clear villain and a clear victim. It’s a convenient story, one that chalks it all up to female hysteria.

And hey, what can you do about female hysteria? Everyone knows our pain is theatrical. Everyone knows our fury is absurd. It’s probably just those perimenopausal hormones, man.

I know the pain and fury that burn within my husband, white hot embers that refuse to extinguish themselves no matter how many walls are built or how much alcohol is consumed. I’ve spent years studying and researching and nurturing his fury and his pain. I’ve been singed, scorched, seared.

But my pain and fury are foreign to him. They are not even real. They are something I invented, something I inflicted upon him to make his pain even worse.

He remembers April 20, 2024 as the day I went crazy. The day I kicked him out.

I remember it as the day he said, “Why are you so angry?” The day he said, “Maybe I should leave.” The day I said, “Okay.”