Forever is a Long Time, Part 3: Aunt Mia and Uncle Paul

The idea of a lifetime commitment can feel impossible, when it can still fall apart in year 20, or year 30, or 35. My own parents’ marriage never made it that far, but some of my aunts and uncles did, only to find that after all those years, they too were better off apart.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:29Speaker 01

  This is a CBC Podcast.

• 0:32Speaker 02

  My name is Ian Cosse, and you're listening to Forever Is A Long Time on CBC's Personally. This show is a collection of songs and conversations about every marriage in my family that ended in divorce, which is most of them.

• 0:55Speaker 02

  My wife Kelsey and I met in college, the fall of freshman year. I was 19, she was 17. It sounds kind of cliché as I recount it now, but we lived in the same dorm. I was upstairs, she was downstairs. We'd seen each other around in the halls or on the quad. Then one day, we found ourselves talking face to face in the room of a mutual friend. And that same friend would later officiate our wedding.

• 1:28Speaker 02

  What's kind of interesting, though, and the reason I share this now, is that those years when we were dating and inching closer to the idea of getting married are the same years when all the remaining marriages of my childhood finally ended.

• 1:47Speaker 02

  These were the marriages of my aunts and uncles, marriages that I had known my entire life and completely took for granted. They didn't seem perfect, even from the outside, but they had lasted so long that in a way, I think their collapse shook me even more than my own parents' divorce.

• 2:08Speaker 02

  I remember talking about it with Kelsey at the time, about how impossible the idea of a lifetime commitment felt, when it could still fall apart in year 20, or year 30, or 35. My own parents' marriage, of course, never made it that far. But some of my aunts and uncles did. I want to start with two of their stories. My mother's oldest siblings. Because these are the marriages that lasted the longest. Only to find that after all that, they too were better off apart.

• 2:52Speaker 02

  Forever is a Long Time. Part Three. Aunt Mia and Uncle Paul. Feels like one of those last fleeting days of fall.

• 3:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:05Speaker 02

  Have you had a frost out there yet?

• 3:08Speaker 03

  Well, I have some things that I think might have been very, very lightly touched. And the yellow jackets are acting like there's been a frost. But like, I still have marigolds and astersions. And that means that for the most part, no frost.

• 3:23Speaker 02

  Right.

• 3:25Speaker 03

  But you're right, it's coming.

• 3:28Speaker 02

  First, my mother's older sister Mia. We have a special relationship. Because when I was born, my family was actually living in a cottage next door to the house where she and her husband Robbie lived. As I understand it, they basically let us stay there for free while my parents were figuring things out. Plus, Mia and Robbie had kids about the same age as my brother and I. And so for a few years, we all lived kind of like one big family unit. This was on Cape Cod, where my Uncle Robbie was from. And in the summers, we would go out to a barrier beach on the eastern edge of the Cape called Nosset.

• 4:11Speaker 02

  The whole beach was protected from any development because it's part of the National Seashore, created by Kennedy in the 60s. But there was a little piece of property out there that had been in Robbie's family for decades, and so was grandfathered in. There was a house up on pylons that were driven deep into the sand because the original house there had been wiped out in a storm.

• 4:38Speaker 02

  Could you just describe the beach house? And because it's not just like a pleasure home. It's it's something much more than that.

• 4:46Speaker 03

  It was really when I first met Robbie. It really was essentially wilderness. You could drive out 12 miles on that spit. And you could go days really and see nobody but the few people who lived there and some fishermen. And so the house itself was just a ramshackle collection of, you know, exterior walls and old junky furniture. And the water was no good and everything ran off of propane gas. And it was it was really beyond lovely. And the degree of isolation and just closeness to the ocean. You know, if you just heard the ocean every moment and felt the ocean every moment and the wind. And it's really it's it's something just a lot of people never, never get to experience.

• 5:31Speaker 03

  Just sitting there and watching the storms come by and the cloud formations you can see. And oh, it was beautiful.

• 5:41Speaker 03

  We would go down there, you know, for weeks at a time.

• 5:44Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 5:45Speaker 03

  It was it was really divine, yeah.

• 5:48Speaker 02

  So it's like you fell in love with that lifestyle.

• 5:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:51Speaker 02

  As much as anything.

• 5:53Speaker 03

  You know, I do think that I approached the entire thing from a very selfish point of view. And I'm not really sure that if you really weigh out, you know, sort of like what each partner gave to the relationship. I don't really know where I'd fall on that scale. I think I I don't really know that I I gave as good as I got in terms of what I actually got out of that beach house.

• 6:32Speaker 02

  In my memory, those trips to the beach house were pretty much the only thing that Mia and Robbie ever did together. They didn't really sit down for family dinners or even talk all that much, at least that I saw. Robbie was very terse and practical. He worked the same job at the local highway department that his father had worked. Mia was whimsical, even philosophical. She listened to Deepak Chopra tapes and went to Zen Buddhism retreats.

• 7:05Speaker 02

  These were two very different people who stayed married for over 30 years.

• 7:12Speaker 02

  In those decades of being together, when did you first begin to think, maybe this will end at some point?

• 7:23Speaker 03

  Hmm, I hate to tell you, I probably thought that even before I got married.

• 7:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:30Speaker 03

  But then there was a piece of me that really believed we could both grow enough to be more like each other. I had no idea how, you know, how inculcated Robbie was to a very different, very different worldview.

• 7:45Speaker 02

  What do you, what do you mean? Can you say more about that? Like, how does that actually play out in a day-to-day way?

• 7:54Speaker 03

  Let's say, this is a perfect example of the story. It's really insane. So I wasn't really living with Robbie yet at this point. I was living with my friend Tricia. I'm over at Tricia's house and I tell Robbie, this is before I stopped telling him things, that my girlfriend's brother and a guy that I had known in England were gonna come by and that he, you know, he certainly was invited to come. And so his take on that was that not only would he not come, but he didn't want me to do it. And I was like, well, that's ridiculous. And of course, I'm gonna do it and blah, blah, blah. And so during the dinner, Robbie comes over to the house and I kid you not, actually uproots two trees that are

• 8:39Speaker 03

  in the yard.

• 8:41Speaker 02

  I'm laughing stupidly here because I don't know what to make of this. My uncle, as a way of voicing his disapproval, pulls two small trees out of the ground and then leaves.

• 8:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, okay. And we discover it when we're going outside to say goodbye to people. We're like, oh my God, what happened to these trees? And then, of course, Robbie later on tells me what happened and. That's just like, that's just it in a nutshell.

• 9:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it seems like kind of a red flag in hindsight.

• 9:10Speaker 03

  Doesn't it?

• 9:13Speaker 03

  So like this stuff is going on and I'm still certain enough that my worldview will triumph here. That I don't say, okay, this is just enough. I don't, I don't want anything to do with you anymore. And I, when I look back on it, I'm like, wow, you know, it really was the beach house that seduced me. I, I wanted the beach house. And I talked myself into the rest of it.

• 9:36Speaker 04

  Wait, wait, wait, wait.

• 9:38Speaker 02

  Wait, wait, hold the wedding.

• 9:41Speaker 04

  Ask you a question.

• 9:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. Just like before, my wife Kelsey has been listening along.

• 9:46Speaker 04

  Oh, okay, okay. What I want to say is that I think that we as humans are like very good at, we like want something and convincing ourselves that everything else is okay to like line up to get that thing. That's a really not eloquent way of saying what I'm trying to say, but like, we're really good at like justifying our bad choices, I guess is what I mean.

• 10:11Speaker 02

  And that's exactly what Mia is saying, right?

• 10:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, that's what she's saying. Like with that story with the uprooting the trees, like,

• 10:19Speaker 04

  you know, like in retrospect, it seems like so ridiculous that you would ever stay with someone who would do something like that.

• 10:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, but that's maybe what it exposes is that like, the fact that we can make a conscious, willing, deliberate choice that is so at odds with our own knowledge about ourselves and our needs and those closest to us.

• 10:46Speaker 04

  Yes. The question I have for you is that had we, like, let's say we got married and there were like all these red flags that we're just like blatantly ignoring, like, would we know?

• 11:01Speaker 02

  Mia, she had a very clear take on it, which is that the seeds of the future are always here in the present.

• 11:09Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 11:10Speaker 02

  And we just don't want to know it.

• 11:12Speaker 03

  We don't want to know the future, or we would. Like, it's not out of our grasp. It's just too horrible to contemplate.

• 11:20Speaker 02

  Mia and I actually spent a while circling around a version of this question.

• 11:25Speaker 03

  Regarding the endurance contest is a perfect example of that.

• 11:29Speaker 02

  Of whether the warning signs are all visible from the start, or if they only become clear with time.

• 11:36Speaker 03

  I remember Pick, which who was a friend of Robbie's, saying to Robbie, "If you're fighting now, don't get married, you're gonna keep on fighting." And I think, if I was to give marriage advice, that would be the advice I would give. And whatever you're doing now is what you're gonna keep on doing.

• 11:54Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 11:55Speaker 03

  I'm sorry.

• 11:56Speaker 02

  But then sometimes she would come down on the other side of it.

• 11:59Speaker 03

  The only things that I really think about marriage is that, to remember, it's really just a leap of faith.

• 12:03Speaker 02

  Like, maybe you do just have to wait and see how it plays out, even if the basic patterns of a relationship are pretty much there from the start.

• 12:12Speaker 03

  No, I really think they are both true.

• 12:16Speaker 02

  For Kelsey and I, we still do a lot of the same things we did when we first started dating, like eat ice cream in bed and argue about how often I should call when I'm away. The part that keeps changing and really still feels uncertain is me, what I want from life, and how I feel about the patterns that we continue to act out all these years later. For me, that's the leap of faith. It's not about trusting that I know my partner, it's trusting that I know myself and what I want in a partner.

• 13:05Speaker 03

  You really can see it in life that there are so many things that we do that we think we have good and sufficient reasons for. And then as time goes by, you know, I mean, some of it might be growth, some of it might be the opposite of growth, but as you go along, you sort of start to feel like your good and sufficient reasons, maybe they really weren't so good and sufficient for who you actually become.

• 13:42Speaker 02

  About 10 years ago, the National Seashore decided that due to erosion, the house on Nauset Beach had to be removed. The government reclaimed the land, demolished the house, and carried away the pieces before another storm could come and wash it all into the ocean again. Just a couple of years after that, Mia and Robbie finally divorced.

• 14:09Speaker 03

  But I think we would still be doing it if the beach house was still there. I think that when the beach house went, Robbie had to get rid of something. Like, I always knew it would happen. I didn't know that it would be me that he was getting rid of, but I knew there would be some kind of huge upheaval to just be able to bear that.

• 14:36Speaker 02

  It's so interesting how the beach house is really the through line.

• 14:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, it is the through line. It totally is.

• 14:44Speaker 02

  It's like this magical place where you could sort of like live this life that you both wanted for yourselves. And then, you know, when that era came to a close, it's like the relationship had run its course.

• 14:58Speaker 03

  Right. I really do think that.

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• 16:18Speaker 06

  Season one of Sold a Story hit a nerve. It was about teaching kids to read. We have gotten this wrong in New York and all across the nation. Now we're back with a new season. This time, we go beyond reading.

• 16:31Speaker 07

  I've literally been told by my district that I should not be teaching math. I should be facilitating math.

• 16:38Speaker 06

  I'm Emily Hanford. Go to your podcast app and follow Sold a Story.

• 16:43Speaker 03

  One of the things I've learned as a firefighter,

• 16:49Speaker 03

  it's rarely one thing that goes wrong.

• 16:54Speaker 03

  It's usually five or six things that are going wrong. And nobody realized that the slide has started.

• 17:04Speaker 03

  You know, the patient had lab work that was abnormal that nobody looked at. And then the patient got dehydrated. And then the patient's medication got transcribed wrong. And then the patient had an emergency.

• 17:20Speaker 02

  And a marriage is the same?

• 17:22Speaker 03

  Exactly, exactly.

• 17:25Speaker 02

  You have to keep an eye on the charts.

• 17:26Speaker 03

  You have to keep an eye on the things that are stacking up. And what can I do to stop it?

• 17:38Speaker 02

  This is my mother's older brother, Paul.

• 17:42Speaker 02

  As a young man, he went to nursing school and worked in an ICU. Somehow, from there, he managed to work his way into sales of medical equipment, to the point that when I was young, he was traveling all over the world to China and Germany, making deals with hospitals. He was a very cool uncle. He was into scuba diving, and he would put a tank of air down at the bottom of his pool so the kids could swim down and breathe out of it. He drove a silver BMW and kept a set of turnout gear in the trunk so he could show up to calls as a volunteer firefighter.

• 18:22Speaker 02

  He's someone who knows what he wants, goes for it, and always has a good story to tell about it. His wife Sharon was a total contrast. She was extremely quiet, to the point that I remember Paul would always be drawing her into conversations, or stressing to us that this present was from both of them, as if we all needed to be reminded that she was there at all.

• 18:50Speaker 02

  Beyond that, there's very little I know about her or their relationship. She and Paul married long before I was born. They never had kids, and they lived in a beautiful old house in a suburb of Boston. When we came to visit, the place was immaculate, and that's all I ever saw.

• 19:12Speaker 02

  Maybe as a place to start, what lessons did you draw from your parents? Like, what kind of model did they present for what it meant to be life partners, or to be husband and wife?

• 19:28Speaker 03

  So, you know, the lessons learned at a very high level, I believe they taught us to be capable of loving and being loved, but I also know that they didn't demonstrate that very well at all. Am I going in the right direction for what you're sort of asking about?

• 19:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, say more about that.

• 19:51Speaker 03

  So, you know, one of the questions that I worry about, and I don't share this easily or often, but I say, is, am I capable of really...

• 20:06Speaker 03

  Being in love and being loved in return. Um, you know, can I develop that sort of relationship? Um, the, or, or all my relationships contractual or to some extent, you know, that, you know, give and take thing. Now, maybe all relationships are that way and I'm just worrying about something that doesn't exist.

• 20:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's, um, it's really interesting that you raise that question of just, you know, innate capacity.

• 20:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:42Speaker 02

  Because I think in some ways that's what drives a lot of my curiosity in this subject.

• 20:48Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 20:48Speaker 02

  It's just part of me wonder sometimes if, if I was given a, a good model to work with or if I'm sort of trying to cobble something together, you know, from disjointed pieces.

• 21:03Speaker 03

  So you, like me, like most of us, have wounds or bruises or empty places that affect and modify our behavior.

• 21:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:25Speaker 03

  You know, I watch how I behave when I am stressed or angry. I get very cold. I was, I get, I withdraw and I know that these are unhealthy habits that I have that are a direct result of not having, um, good, good role models growing up, you know? Now, having now said a lot of negative stuff, I think that we are highly functional dysfunctional people.

• 22:02Speaker 02

  As a group.

• 22:04Speaker 03

  As a group.

• 22:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:07Speaker 03

  And I'm actually highly okay with that. For years, I drove cars that were just barely cobbled together. Mia used to call my tires, you know, she described my tires as may pop, might pop, and should have popped. Um, because they were crappy tires. I, I, I bought tires that other people were taking off of their cars to put on my cars because my tires were so bad. Um, and, you know, but I got around and, and did okay.

• 22:38Speaker 02

  I was wondering if, if you could tell me the story of your relationship with Sharon, of how you guys came together.

• 22:47Speaker 03

  So, we met in, um, nursing school. And she had a roommate that I was interested in. And, um, she turned me down. And Sharon thought I was an asshole.

• 23:04Speaker 03

  Um, but at some later point, I asked her out. Um, and so without getting overly complicated, um, Sharon is, and, um, capable of being a wonderful person. She grew up in an angry relationship. And so, our relationship, early on, started out with her being angry at me over many things. And because I grew up tolerating anger, instead of correcting behavior and modifying behavior and saying, okay, we need to fix this,

• 23:48Speaker 03

  I tolerated it and it just kept getting worse and worse. Um, Sharon and I went to therapy early on in our relationship. And the recommendation of the therapist was that we get a divorce. That the marriage could not be saved. That there were too many fundamental issues and that we, we, we lost respect for each other. Although that happened probably five or six years into the marriage, but we stayed married for thirty something years.

• 24:21Speaker 02

  I never saw the anger, of course, or the coldness, the loss of respect. It's still hard for me to picture these things and even harder to imagine living with them for more years than I've been alive.

• 24:36Speaker 04

  Well, like, I understand, like, you know, you're unhappy and you, like, don't get divorced because you're like, well, maybe we can fix this, like, let's work on it. Like, right? Like, that's kind of the deal you're agreeing to when you get married is that you're not just gonna walk away without trying to fix it. But at some point,

• 24:58Speaker 04

  you have to know that it's not gonna get better.

• 25:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:03Speaker 02

  It's like divorce is one of these few decisions in life where you very kind of like openly admit you were wrong.

• 25:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 25:19Speaker 02

  And maybe that stigma is unnecessary and it shouldn't feel that way. And it should be as simple as like, this isn't working, let's go a different way. Okay, sure, no harm, no foul. But I think, you know, it's like, we do so many things in life that are stupid, that we know are wrong, that we know are wrong in the moment we do them and do them anyway. And we just rarely have to reckon with that or even acknowledge it to others.

• 25:51Speaker 04

  It's like you don't want to admit to yourself or to others that you were wrong.

• 25:57Speaker 02

  Right.

• 26:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think when I came to this set of interviews, the question I had is like, why did they end after all those years? But I think I now, now I think it's the other question that maybe is more pertinent is like, why did they last that long at all?

• 26:21Speaker 03

  But the problem is neither one of us is really being honest with each other. And at some particular point, you get far enough down the road that there's really no way to, you know, how do you correct what you've said or done all along?

• 26:41Speaker 02

  Right. It's amazing how that dishonesty is, it's always compounding, you know, whether it's little white lies about how somebody looks or how you're feeling about something, or, you know, a bigger lie. It's like, as soon as you withhold something, then, then there's never a right time to say it again. Because then you've held it back. And then suddenly, the very act of withholding that thought or withholding that feeling becomes something else that you have to hide. You know what I mean?

• 27:13Speaker 03

  Absolutely. Right? And so, you know, you know that game jungle where you pile stuff up and then you pull stuff out?

• 27:23Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 27:23Speaker 03

  You know what I'm talking about?

• 27:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, the Jenga blocks.

• 27:26Speaker 03

  The wooden block game? Yes. So the challenge becomes, all right, you know, what particular point am I willing to pull one more block out?

• 27:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:49Speaker 02

  Relationships are supposed to take effort. They're supposed to take compromise and patience. And so it's a matter of deep, personal intuition, I think, to know when you've crossed that line between maintaining a healthy relationship and propping up a flawed one. Basically, a line between two people who are better off together or better off apart.

• 28:17Speaker 02

  I don't think anyone can draw that line with total clarity. We have to feel our way to that conclusion. But I can't help but think that my feelings and instincts don't always serve me well, that they're not calibrated right, that my own sense of what's reasonable, what's tolerable, and what's desirable, might be entirely out of whack. That I wouldn't know when to pull the block out if the time came.

• 28:49Speaker 03

  We are highly functional dysfunctional people.

• 28:58Speaker 02

  I'm curious to hear what, about what sort of, you know, did finally break the cycle for you and Sharon, do you think?

• 29:07Speaker 03

  So, what, and I've shared this with other people, it's not a secret. One day Sharon said to me, is that the only reason we still are married is because you don't have the balls to leave me.

• 29:19Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 29:21Speaker 03

  And that was pretty true.

• 29:24Speaker 02

  So she just called it out at some point?

• 29:26Speaker 03

  She just called it out at some point.

• 29:29Speaker 02

  And that was pretty much it from there, you guys?

• 29:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, we were, it was, the fuse was there.

• 29:47Speaker 02

  It's amazing to me how Mia and Paul see their marriages with such clarity now. They have no hesitation or shame in pointing out these basic problems that they either couldn't or didn't want to see forty some years ago. And as I listen back to these conversations now, including the ones with Kelsey, I'm struck by just how hesitant I am, how quick I am to veer away from the same questions that I'm asking of others, yet still can't answer for myself. Would I know if my own relationship was built on false convictions? If I just talked myself into thinking it was a good idea?

• 30:31Speaker 02

  Would I have the courage and honesty to admit that to the world? Or would I hang on until the pretending and compensating just couldn't hold anymore?

• 30:43Speaker 02

  Of course, I don't think these things are true, or that my marriage could be so misguided. I just don't know that I would know if they were true.

• 30:56Speaker 02

  I envy Mia and Paul's clarity, and I fear that is one kind of clarity that can only come with time.

• 31:22Speaker 02

  In Part IV, the divorce in my family that surprised me the most, and also perhaps, the one that took the greatest toll.

• 31:38Speaker 02

  One, two, three, four.

• 31:54Speaker 02

  Baby, don't you wait on me. Baby, don't you wait on me. Baby, don't you wait on me. Wait on me, wait on me.

• 32:07Speaker 02

  Maybe we should wait and see. Maybe we should wait and see. Well, it could be a year, or it could be three. Do you remember, do you remember, do you remember? How close we came? Do you remember, do you remember, do you remember? How close we came? Do you remember, do you remember, do you remember? Do you remember, do you remember, do you remember?

• 32:50Speaker 02

  I think about you all the time. Think about you all the time. Think about you all the time, all the time, all the time.

• 33:03Speaker 02

  Sometimes stars align. Sometimes stars align. Maybe it's wrong, or maybe it's right.

• 33:18Speaker 02

  How close we came. How close we came.

• 33:47Speaker 01

  For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca/podcasts.