I was waking every morning by myself, and I was going to bed every night by myself. He did a triathlon every morning and taught classes in the evenings, and would stay at the school until late at night to prepare for the next day. I knew this about his life already. What I didn’t know was that when he came home, he needed transition time that didn’t involve being with me. He needed to catch up on the sports news of the day, eat a huge bowl of popcorn, eat a huge bowl of cut-up fruit, and finally hit the hay around 1 a.m. That was the routine. I didn’t figure into any of it. Not even a little affectionate pat on the hiney in between things.
I began to realize that I was an accessory in his life. Time with me, intimacy with me, conversations with me, and love with me had no routine slot in his days, whose hours had long-ago been scheduled out and followed to a T. I was a bystander in a marriage to a man whose entire focus was the effective usage of his hours for his own sake.
During the only times we saw each other at home, he didn’t swoop me off my feet, or grab me around the waist and pull me close. (The evening of our wedding, he told me he would not be carrying me over the threshold because it could hurt his back. All 125 pounds of me.) He didn’t look in my eyes and whisper sweet nothings in my ear. He didn’t kiss my neck and work his way down. He didn’t even stop and ask how my day was. He didn’t have time for anything intimate, interpersonal, or even remotely conversational. What he did have time for—in fact, abundant time for—even if he claimed to be in a hurry, was voicing any number of his fears about superficial minutiae.
Minutiae is a word I never used much in life. Until marriage. Unfortunately, it was the beginning of a lifetime in which minutiae became the anthem of our days together—the subject of his myriad fears. Concern over slightly-bruised bananas led to practical mono- logues on how I should go about choosing fruit at the store. Make sure to go through all the options and find the best bananas. Put them in a separate bag. Don’t place the bananas straight on the metal cart because it will dent them. Don’t let the store clerk put the banana bag in with the other food bags.
I knew he couldn’t fathom the idea that I’m the kind of person who doesn’t mind buying bananas with a few bruises so that they don’t get thrown out by the store when no one else buys them. Slightly bruised bananas don’t matter to me. He wasn’t ready to hear that kind of thing yet. It would be too shocking. Yet it was shocking to me to spend any kind of mental or conversational energy on a topic that, to me, was totally insignificant.
Walls were also of utmost importance. He didn’t want us to touch the walls, lean against the walls to put our shoes on, or accidentally brush the walls as we walked by. Then they’d look like the walls at the college. There was no in between, only one extreme or the other. He was always afraid that if we didn’t do everything a certain way, the result would be the extreme opposite.
The floodgates opened the first days of our marriage, and there was a speech and a guideline for every single thing about living in and around our house. It’s all he did when we were together: go over the rules, as I began to call them. He never spoke viciously, just calmly and continuously. Every little thing mattered. Yet somehow he always overlooked what should’ve mattered infinitely more, the human being in front of him.
It didn’t matter that all of our time together that we could be using to talk about the bigger, deeper things in life was being usurped by concerns over thousands of tiny, meaningless details (well, meaningful only to him). It didn’t matter that all of our airspace went to the maintenance of inanimate stuff instead of the loving of each other. Conversations didn’t happen. Care wasn’t communicated. Love was bypassed.
Don’t let a door stay open; a fly will come in. Do you know where flies have been?
Don’t sit on the bedspread; my mom never did that.
Don’t let the corners of the comforter rest on the carpet; they will eventually wear out.
Did you take a shower before you got in bed tonight?
Please clean the house every week on the same day; then cleaning will never get away from us.
Did you leave that lone spoon in the sink last night without cleaning it?
What’s that little (near-invisible) spot on the floor from?
You left the light on in that room.
Did you pick a few stems of lavender from the lavender bush?
(And it was a gigantic bush.)
Oh, no, you can’t sit on my lap; it will make creases in my pants.
In bed? Now? But we haven’t just showered. Let’s put a sheet on the floor instead and go there.
Is this the change you have left from that dollar yesterday?
Shouldn’t there be another dime?
Don’t come in the garage. If you need something, let me know and I’ll get it; that way, I won’t have to sweep after you leave.
Put the car cover on every time you pull in the driveway, even if you’re going back out in an hour. (Even though we had swapped the Beemer for a Ford.)
Have someone over? What if they spill something?
The rules went on endlessly. And these sorts of things were all he talked about.
When I called my mom, heaving and crying over the idea that I might be trapped for life in a rigid, shallow relationship, she ached for me. “Come home, come home!” she pleaded.
At that, I was doubly saddened. As much as I needed to hear that, I also needed to be encouraged to stick with it. “Mom, you promised at our wedding to say things that would keep me in this!”
Days of constant consternation went by. When I was feeling especially frustrated, I would turn his precisely-placed shampoo and conditioner bottles around in the shower so the labels faced different directions. He’d dutifully turn them back around when he got in. Kind of like Sleeping with the Enemy minus the violence.
But more like the daughter in The Joy Luck Club who marries a man who has to have everything a certain way. Their life is lifeless. It’s all about how everything around them is calculated, literally. Finally, her visiting mother gets so fed up at the sadness her daughter has to live with that she shatters a flower vase in a thousand pieces on the floor. The couple eventually divorce and the daughter happily remarries. I began to wonder who would be shattering a vase in our house—or the glass in one of our many off-white picture frames—to sound the call for a new plan.
After many months of depthless tedium and oblivious neglect, I decided there had to be a name for his state of being since there were too many connected aspects—extreme cleanliness, extreme anxiety, extreme frugality, extreme self-care, extreme attention to detail, etc. I went searching on the Internet, thinking it would take weeks to find. Within moments, I found it. In a list of nine personality disorders, there was the exact description of the type of person I was experiencing: someone with Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder, or OCPD. The P is important, distinguishing it from OCD, which is when people need to do things in a certain order or repeat something like washing their hands 20 times. OCPD also goes by Anankastic Personality Disorder.
I immediately felt a rush of relief wash over me. This thing I had been forced to experience was real. It wasn’t just a person who was going to eventually make me feel like I was going crazy. It was a disorder that had nothing to do with me at all, except for the fact that I had to tolerate its presence in every single interaction I had with my husband, perhaps from now on. For some reason I couldn’t articulate, I felt better. I noted that it said almost every marriage in which one spouse has OCPD will end in divorce. That was the last thing I wanted. I determined to do the best I could, hoping and praying that love would eventually overtake his focus on minutiae. Showering before bed and staying out of the garage were nothing compared to the idea of divorce. I determined then and there to be the exception.
Neglect’s Toll on a Wife: Perfection’s Grip on My Husband’s Attention © 2023-2024 Lila Meadowbrook
