Lunch honesty.

Yesterday I had lunch with a dude in my creative industry, just expecting to talk and tell him about my plans for the future. I opened up /a touch/ about how life has been fairly hard the last 3 years, work, and passion dying and being reborn, and children and feeling my youth leave.

For whatever reason, that opened him and he told me about his marriage that was falling apart. He said he hadn’t told really anyone at all, but for some reason he was telling me. He’d been separated for 3 months, her wish, and they now shared their kids 2 days on, 5 days to the other person — and the 5 days switches every week.

He is miserable. Tired. Heartbroken. Alone. His wife seems to hate him, and is happy(er) now that they’re separated.

He’s a normal dude. I don’t know him that well (have known him over lunches since 2013 but not deeply) but he’s just a creative guy, a touch older than me, and his life is shambles, out of control.

I then opened up to him about my marriage falling apart. 🙂 And we talked, and there were some serious similarities. A biz dev meeting turned into weird commiserating. He wants to hang out more. 🙂 He barely has answered my texts in the past. He’s obviously lonely. Actually reaching out.

I drove home, and called my wife and she asked how the meeting went and I said “well, he opened up to me about how his marriage is falling apart, and then I opened up to him about how my marriage is falling apart.” I laughed.

She said “I…didn’t know our marriage was falling apart.”

I said, “huh? What do you mean?”

She said, “I…thought things were getting better.”

She generally has 2 states of being, blind to reality, or blind to reality. What I mean: either she’s blind to the good reality in front of her, stuck on the bad and hopeless. Or I guess she overcompensates, and she’s blind to the bad reality front of her, acting like it’s not happening.

I said “(her name), on the way to this meeting we were in a fight where you are still struggling to even want this marriage, to even say you want to be married. That’s falling apart. I’d say our marriage is still on the edge.”

SOMEHOW, this dude randomly opening up to me, I was able to to allow her to see what will happen to us if we continue without changing. That’s us, soon.

I got home, and again I don’t know the alchemy of it, but somehow she…said that she had stopped caring about me, made a choice to stop caring about me, 9 years ago (I laugh out loud and also feel the pain) and…she will make an effort to care again.

She wants the marriage, she said. And for the next few hours, she….was the old version of her. Who I married. It was nice. She liked me. Yeah.

We will see.