The Night My Marriage Fell Apart - The Atlantic

I couldn’t sleep. I sat in the big leather chair in our den in the dark, my brain buzzing with jet lag and worry, listening to the sounds that our beautiful, crumbling house made in the night. It was the manse for a long-fallen church, and I’d been taking it apart and putting it back together piece by piece. The spine of our house was a 60-foot beam that ran the length of the basement ceiling, hand-carved from the trunk of an ancient Douglas fir. It was magnificent timber. For more than a hundred years, it had held the weight of however many families. Now it held the weight of mine, and it groaned like a wooden ship.<br>It was the summer of 2016, and I’d just come home from covering the European Football Championship in France for ESPN, a glorious assignment. I’d been based in Paris, and they’d put me up in a boutique hotel that lent its guests bicycles with baskets on the front for their trips to the boulangerie. When I had a game to cover farther afield, I’d take a fast train to Lyon or Toulouse and maybe stay a night or two and eat outdoors somewhere, and then I’d return to Paris for a few more days in the capital’s sun. I’d take long walks along the Seine and tell myself how lucky I was.<br>I did not feel lucky. When I had said goodbye to Amy—the crush of my teenage dreams, my wife of 14 years—we cried and hugged and said we’d miss each other, the way we’d done when I’d left for work a thousand times before. But that goodbye felt different. Our marriage was in a bad place, snared in a tangle of resentments. We each had our share of grievances and believed our complaints were more valid than the other’s. Neither of us shifted from our positions, so nothing got fixed. (Amy is a pseudonym.)<br>We had two young boys: Charley was 10 at the time, and Sammy was 8. Amy thought I wasn’t spending enough time with them, because I wasn’t. I had lost my job at Esquire three months before. It had been my identity as much as my work, and I was feeling a mounting panic, hustling to keep my grip on an industry that was less than robust. I also had our renovation to finish. Amy faulted me for my lack of achievement there, too, complaining about how long I spent restoring a bit of trim or a pane of bubble glass. But I felt like I was going full out, never had enough time in a day. “What do you want me not to do?” I asked when she complained again that I was coming up short, especially as a father. Amy didn’t have an answer, except to tell me that she was tired of living with someone who was always tired, always in a grump. She had me there.<br>The fall before I’d gone to France, I’d been raking our yard, which was mammoth and took me a week to clean up. I was filling another bag with leaves when Amy opened the door and asked if I’d walked our dog, Kismet. I hadn’t. I’d been raking.<br>“Can you take her?” I asked.<br>“Why don’t I just do everything?” Amy said, slamming the door.<br>I snapped like I never had before, swinging my rake as hard as I could against our fence, breaking both, everything in splinters. I stood in my yard, still surrounded by leaves, and now with a fence to repair and half a rake in my fist. I flung it away and got into my battered little pickup to drive to the hardware store. Two blocks from home, I made up my mind that I didn’t like Amy very much anymore. Another couple of blocks, and I realized that she must have come to the same conclusion about me, a little sooner than I’d arrived at mine.<br>After that, our marriage limped along, somehow surviving another Canadian winter and an up-and-down spring, and then I left for France. During those long, lonely walks beside the Seine, I had conversations with myself about my state of mind, trying to reason myself into a better place. One afternoon, I stood beside the river and looked up at the Eiffel Tower. It was a perfect day, cloudless and warm. The tower looked almost black against the sky.<br>Amy and I had fallen in love in Paris. In the summer of 2000, I covered the Tour de France, chasing cyclists through the Pyrenees in a motor home. A few months into our late-blooming romance—we were friends for years before I first kissed her in my apartment kitchen—Amy decided to join me in Paris. I went to the airport to pick her up, excited as a little boy.<br>I hadn’t been there long when a wildcat strike closed the airport and Amy’s flight was diverted to Brussels. I waited in Arrivals for news, and when it came, it was delivered over loudspeakers in French. From what I could gather, the plane had already deboarded in Brussels when suddenly there had been a window to sneak into Paris after all, and the pilots had called for everyone to scramble back on and then made a break for it, meaning that about half the passengers would arrive shortly in Paris and the other half were stranded in Brussels. I had no way of knowing which half Amy had found herself in.<br>The passengers were released through sliding glass doors, and the sun filled the...