Chaos became our comfort zone

Chaos became our comfort zone

During our family’s year from hell, a brandnew
crisis would arrive at our doorstep every
4 weeks or so. It was almost as if we had inadvertently
enrolled in the tragedy-of-themonth
club. The hypervigilance that sustained
my wife and me through these crises was not
so conducive for relaxed date nights and handholding.
And when the end of the world
becomes your comfort zone, each new crisis is
actually a relief from the stress of worrying
about what will befall you next.
It reached the point where I felt closest to
my wife when we were racing to the hospital
together. That was our date night.
According to Joseph LeDoux, Ph.D., a neuroscientist
and the author of The Emotional
Brain, fear-based memories are encoded in a
part of our brains called the amygdala. So
while my more logical hippocampus and prefrontal
cortex understood that the year from
hell was over—and that my wife was a person
distinct from that horrible experience—the
story was less clear down in my amygdala.
Eventually, posits LeDoux, my wife and I
came to associate each other’s presence with
stressful situations. Not good.hormonal level. “Men and women do have
‘chemistry,’ ” he says. “A woman gives off pheromones
when she feels taken care of by a man.
What men fail to realize is that on an interpersonal,
chemical level, it’s the small stuff
that really does matter.
“If you want to score 36 points, you don’t
give her 36 roses,” he says. “You give her one
rose on 36 separate occasions.”
When I landed my fi rst book contract, I
viewed it as a chance to fi nally contribute in a
signifi cant way to my family’s bottom line.
More important, the book documented our
family’s year from hell and spoke directly to
the challenges my wife and I had faced as a
couple. In my mind, going off to work each day
was a romantic mission to save the sinking
ship that was our marriage. All my wife knew
was that I was gone. Completely caught up in
my work. For close to a year.
When I fi nally looked up from my work, I
discovered that the marriage I thought I was
saving was gone.

I THINK LOVE DIES IN MUCH SAME WAY THAT
a heart does. Over the life of a relationship, all
the little resentments and tiny disappointments
can accumulate like plaque in an artery,
imperceptibly choking out the intimacy—the
lifeblood of any relationship.
As much as I wish I could blame Rose for
that, I can’t. She’s a wonderful person—intelligent,
idealistic, passionate, and devoted to her
children. It would be so much easier for me to
move on if she were a worthless human being.
And unfortunately for her, despite my lengthy
list of faults, I’m a decent enough guy.
No, I think the ultimate cause of our uncoupling
lay not in all the little things we did wrong,
but in the unanticipated eff ects of all the big
things we did right—from falling madly in love
to having kids. That’s why it’s diffi cult to move
on. But understanding this allows me to look
back at the relationship and appreciate its
meaning and beauty, despite its imperfections.
Rose is, and always will be, the best mistake
I ever made.