Ornoth

After several years in a long-distance relationship with Inna, I thought we might see more of one another after I moved in with her in Pittsburgh back in 2015.

But last winter I spent five months up in Maine, caretaking my mother. And now Inna’s job has sent her to the other side of the planet on a six-month project in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia!

The Petronas Towers at night, from Inna’s hotel room.

The first thing to be said is how proud I am of her career. After a complete reboot, she’s become an experienced procurement consultant, helping clients optimize capital expenditures ranging from a quarter million dollars up to a freaking beelion, without any fluster or fuss. It says a lot about her competence that—out of all her peers—she was chosen as an expert to kick off this absolutely critical project.

Two years since I moved in, with my baby 10,000 miles away: this seems like a good time to step back and reflect on how our living together has worked out, and our prospects moving forward.

But first, some context. We first met back in 1998, and have been dating on-and-off for the past twenty years (happy anniversary!). The early years were a little rocky, as we had very divergent expectations and equally poor skills at navigating conflict.

In contrast, our living together has been remarkably placid; there’s been virtually no conflict or drama. I guess we’ve learned how to tolerate one another’s idiosyncrasies, make workable compromises, and be respectful and supportive of one another, whatever the circumstances. It’s also helped that we’re both introverted homebodies, and we’re each financially stable on our own.

Oddly, our biggest challenge has been finding ways to spend time together. We have quite divergent tastes and interests, most of which are solitary, which leaves us both feeling a little bit unfulfilled. But we both love and need one another, which means we’ll continue to look for opportunities to share and integrate our lives.

After dating for two decades, and now living together, it might be time to reflect on whether this is “forever” and if marriage is in the cards.

This is not a straightforward question for me. Several lifetimes ago, I married a woman I was very deeply in love with, only to see it turn to shit over time. Once burned, twice shy; I’ll never be so unreservedly in love again, nor make a lifetime commitment so easily. That past experience has left me hesitant to even consider marriage, despite Inna’s and my happiness and obvious commitment to one another. For now I can still only say, “We’ll have to see…”

Having moved to Pittsburgh to be with Inna, now I face six months all alone in this foreign land where people structure their entire lives around professional sports, and haute cuisine is stuffing soggy french fries inside their sandwiches. It feels really strange being in her city and her apartment without her, since she’s my only reason for being here at all.

On the other hand, I feel a strange sense of freedom by not having her peering over my shoulder. I’ve got the opportunity now to cultivate a larger sense of ownership of the apartment, and the impetus to go off and explore the city and the region on my own. Living alone—even temporarily—requires fewer compromises and consensus-building, and that’s refreshing after the challenges of sharing one’s life and living space. It also engenders less laundry, fewer dirty dishes, and no more messes around the house!

But setting the laundry aside for now… Being apart has only made it abundantly clear that we each make the other a much better person, and I’ll be very happy when she finally comes home, and we can resume figuring out what a future together will look like.

And if you’re not aware of it yet, you can see ongoing updates by following her new blog: My KL Life—A 6-Month Adventure.

Twenty-five years ago was my wedding day. I wasn’t going to write anything about it, but I suppose a few off-the-cuff thoughts would be appropriate.

It was the best of times; it was the worst of times: our relationship was the proverbial two-edged knife. I’ve always tried to treasure the amazing joys it provided; and these days I look back on the intense pain it ended in with a lot more compassion, both for myself and for the woman who accompanied me.

Lord knows neither of us were emotionally mature enough to manage that relationship very well. In that sense, the marriage was a crucible of self-learning. There’s nothing that will reveal your own faults more starkly than sharing your life with another person. But it also showed us our potential and our worth, as well.

Marriage caused us both to experience a lot of growth… it’s just sad that so much of it came as a result of our relationship’s unforeseen and rapid collapse.

For me, one of those lessons was that some questions will never have adequate answers. Why did it fail? How much was my fault? How much hers? How much was real and how much was fake? After the divorce, I found it difficult to deal with not having any answers; as a child I had wanted to live forever just so that I could see and know “how it all turned out”. With my marriage, I saw it and lived it, but I will never fully know what happened.

Another lesson has been that you can’t go back. I daresay we both lost a lot of our innocence when we separated. Many years have passed since then, but although time heals, deep wounds also leave enduring scars. The simple, complete faith I had in her—and she in I—isn’t something that I could ever extend again. You never love as deeply and vulnerably as you do before you’ve had your first heartbreak.

Looking back, the flaws we never saw seem obvious now, and trivial when compared to the connection and potential that we shared. If I were to remarry (an extremely unlikely event), would I make better choices now and avoid the mistakes that destroyed the most precious thing I ever had? I’m wise enough now to know that, no matter how much I’ve matured emotionally, it’s impossible to say. But certainly I’ve stopped believing that any woman is Snow White, and no man—even me—is Prince Charming.

The joys… they were amazing, fulfilling, and I will treasure them every day of my life. They haven’t invented words to describe how happy I was on that day 25 years ago. But those few years of joy came at the price of many more years spent bearing the pain of the breakup.

You might find it unsatisfying that I can’t resolve those two extremes and synthesize them into a single emotional state—positive, negative, or neutral—but that too is the complex nature of marriage and divorce. There is no unambiguous “bottom line”. It was what it was: the most amazing, the most painful, and possibly the most educational experience I’ve ever been through.

And that’s really all I can leave you with.

Last time I was up in Maine, my mother handed me an old book my aunt had salvaged from the library where she works. “Boston Ways: High, By, and Folk” by George Weston.

The copyright is 1957, so in addition to being half a century old, it predates all the changes of Boston’s modern era: the razing of the West End to make way for “urban renewal”, the emasculation of the Charles River embankment by running Storrow Drive right through the middle of it, the erection of the brutal Government Center where Scolley Square once stood, and the swath of destruction created when the elevated Central Artery cut its way straight through the heart of the city.

It provides a slightly distant perspective on some familiar landmarks, and I thought I’d share a couple things I noted. I won’t vouch for their veracity, save to say that these are what the book said.

Boston was named after an English town of the same name in Lincolnshire. The original name was “Botolph’s town”, after St. Botolph. St. Botolph’s feast day is June 17th. That’s also the same day as the Revolutionary War’s Battle of Bunker Hill, and the 1972 fire at my condo (the former Hotel Vendome) that killed nine firefighters.

According to the book, in Puritan times, marriage was considered a purely civic affair, to the extent that it was illegal for clergy to officiate at weddings. Which provides an interesting contrast to the whinings of the religious right about marriage being primarily a religious institution.

Even in 1950 people were falsely saying that Boston’s chaotic streets were paved-over cowpaths. In truth, the few streets that are descended from actual cowpaths are among the straightest in town: Winter Street, Park Street, Bromfield Street, and High Street.

John Rowe, for whom Rowe’s Wharf is named, was part owner of the Elanor, one of the ships looted in the Boston Tea Party, and was also one of the instigators of the infamous act of revolt.

I used to work on Canal Street. Canal Street is called that because it was the site of a canal that ran from the old Mill Pond (North Station) to Dock Square (where Faneuil Hall is).

Boylston Street was originally named Frogg Lane, after the frogs that lived noisily along the shoreline.

The Boston Public Library, the oldest such institution in the United States, has the names of famous artists running around the outside of the building. Originally, these were ordered in a way that their initials spelled out the names of the building’s architects: McKim, Mead, and White.

The First Baptist Church (aka Brattle Square Church) at the corner of Comm Ave and Clarendon was informally known as the “Church of the Holy Bean-Blowers” because of the angels with trumpets at the corners of its tower. The frieze that includes the bean-blowers was done by Frederic Bartholdi—the same man who designed the Statue of Liberty.

The campanile of the New Old South Church (just outside my bay window) used to be 260 feet high. However, by 1920 it was more than three feet off plumb, and had to be rebuilt. In the process, its height was also reduced by 14 feet.

There was a fountain in Post Office Square dedicated to George Angell, founder of the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Not sure if it’s still there or not.

Finally, in a fine example of how language has changed in the past fifty years, consider this citation.

The typical Bostonian is pictured as cold, remote, and unemotional. Never believe it! […] Sometimes the most staid and proper citizen will become involved in an orgy through no fault of his own. This is always unfortunate and frequently amusing.

Amusing, indeed! Don’t you just hate when that happens?