When Silence is Golden

November/December 2009 Issue | Posted by Tom and April Hoopes in Marriage

If you turned on a radio in 2003, it wouldn’t be long before you heard Kelly Clarkson’s song “Miss Independent.” Charlotte (she asked that we change her name for this article) was living the song that year.

She was in an expensive Chicago apartment. She was 30. She had a successful career at an art gallery. Marriage was vaguely in her plans — but she was in no hurry.

Then — ooo! — she fell in love.

Justin was stylish and kind, and shared her love for art. He was Catholic, too, which was practically a prerequisite for Charlotte. They met in January at the art gallery and started dating in August 2001 — a month before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks drew everyone closer, including them.

Two years later, everything about the engagement and wedding was picture-perfect.

They got engaged on the feast of the Visitation and set the wedding date for the feast of the Immaculate Conception.

Justin did his proposal the right way: At Rique’s, Charlotte’s favorite restaurant, with flowers and candles and a ring. The two reserved CharlotteWedsJustin.com and gave the website their own elegant design, adding registry information, directions, and photos.

The young priest who married them was a long-time friend of Justin’s. People came from miles around and filled the church. A storm that was predicted for that night held off, and the evening was brisk but beautiful. After the reception, the two were whisked off to O’Hare airport for a flight to Paris for their honeymoon.

The honeymoon lasted 10 days. And not a day longer.

“We weren’t the kind of married couple who had a year-long honeymoon,” says Charlotte.

Things were difficult from the beginning, and they just continued to get worse.

“By our fourth anniversary, we were talking divorce on a pretty regular basis,” she says. “Shouting, I guess, is more like it.”

They shared a little house outside Chicago, and it just kept seeming smaller.

She remembers a time when almost anything would set off a fight.

“For instance, we’re driving somewhere and we get lost,” she says. “So he starts snapping.”

Charlotte’s response: to snap right back. If Justin had a clever put-down, Charlotte — using a sharp wit she had been developing since college — could cut back, even deeper.

A huge fight would ensue, and “all hell would break loose.”

Says Charlotte: “I never let a snide comment go. I always spoke my mind. I made my disappointment and frustration clear to anyone in earshot. I was miserable, and everyone knew it.”

Their faith held them together, but only barely.

“I believe 100% in the Church’s teachings, and in the promise I made at the altar,” says Charlotte. “I don’t believe in divorce — whatever that means. But it’s so easy to say those things when your life isn’t in constant upheaval. A disappointing marriage is, I think, one of the saddest things ever.”

It got pretty sad.

“It didn’t help that I am naturally a more open person with my feelings, and he tends to keep everything in until he explodes, Mount Etna-style,” says Charlotte.

Charlotte was facing a syndrome popularized by modern women writers. Virginia Woolf once wrote sneeringly about the “Angel in the House” expectations society of the time put on housewives. In honor of her essay, contemporary authors recently collaborated on a book about “The Witch in the House” — though the book’s title uses a harsher word for “witch.”

“I think the title helped capture people’s imaginations,” Cathi Hanauer, who headed the project, told the Literary Mama blog.

The book was born from her experience as a working mother.

“I was stretched so thin and I had these high expectations of myself that I’d be a full-time mom and a full-time writer, equally pulling in income,” she said. “I was angry all of the time.”

“Men are clearly baffled by women’s anger,” she said. “This is women’s dilemma: how to be a mother, work, fulfill oneself.”

As one of the essayists in the book puts it: “I had wanted to get married, but I realize now that I had never wanted to be a ‘wife.’”

Charlotte can relate. She has noticed a tendency for professional women to have their claws out at home.

“I can hear women of today saying, ‘I’m going to explode,’ or becoming resentful because ‘I’m just becoming a doormat,’” she says.

But shouting didn’t help.

“I was miserable and, clearly, so was my poor husband,” she says. “We hated each other. We didn’t talk. We spent very little time with one another.”

They both knew that they needed help — and quick. The two sought out a Catholic therapist in the area and scheduled appointments.

“We went to marriage counseling for a while,” says Charlotte. But “I don’t know that that helped because my husband always thought the counselor was ‘on my side.’”

Charlotte also prayed for her marriage.

“Now, granted, I don’t think I was completely turning over my marriage to God, either,” she says. “The majority of discussions I had with God on the subject consisted of, ‘Why is this happening to me?’ and ‘Why can’t I have the type of marriage I always read about in books or saw in movies?’”

But angry prayer is nonetheless prayer. Justin at one point stopped going to Mass altogether, and that just made Charlotte angrier.

It got to the point that Charlotte made an appointment to meet with a divorce lawyer. Then, she called her parents and made arrangements to move back in with them.

Like many Catholic couples who walk up to the edge of divorce, though, Justin and Charlotte stopped at the brink.

Sometimes it’s the children that make a couple hesitate to divorce. Sometimes it’s the stigma of divorce. For them, it was something else.

“Who wants to start dating again in their 30s or 40s?”

Besides, says Charlotte, “I liked my house. And what would happen to our dog?”

Those reasons may sound selfish, she says, but they were enough to make them reconsider.

Their tempers had gotten them into the mess. Sweetness would have to get them out.

Charlotte’s plan was to abstain — from fighting back.

“I married a stubborn man. I am a stubborn woman. That doesn’t make for a happy anything. Something had to change, and the only thing I could think to change was me,” she says. “So I started praying more.”

She felt that her marriage was under attack, spiritually as well as emotionally.

So she sought spiritual help.

“The St. Michael prayer comes in very handy whenever the desire to say something snotty, spiteful, or rash comes into my head,” she says. “St. Michael is one of my closest companions, and he never lets me down.”

That helped her change her expectations.

“Marriage is hard,” she says. But “I stopped whining — both to God and to myself — about what my marriage was and why it wasn’t the fairy tale romance I had always dreamed it would be,” she says. “To be honest, I don’t know if those types of marriages exist.”

Finding the killer comeback gratified her before. Now, she found another source of gratification.

“Over the days, God gave me more and more awareness of when I was about to do something that would just make things worse,” she says, “and he also gave me the strength to avoid doing those things. A peace has come over our family, and it has essentially come from my not fighting back. Not saying the things I’m dying to say in anger.”

When she wants to shoot a barbed comment, Charlotte does what she had learned to do as a child: She offers it up.

“If I weren’t able to offer up my sacrifices to God — all of the pain, humiliation, anger, resentment, annoyance, and disappointment,” she says, “would all be pointless.”

In his 2007 encyclical Spe Salvi (Christian Hope), Pope Benedict XVI himself recommends reviving the old practice of “offering up the minor daily hardships that continually strike at us like irritating jabs.”

“In this way,” he writes, “even the small inconveniences of daily life could acquire meaning and contribute to the economy of good and of human love.”

Dr. Gregory Popcak, author of Exceptional Marriages, says Charlotte is taking a wise approach.

“It’s good to pick one’s battles,” he says.

He hastened to add that sometimes there really are reasons to fight. He named two: when a spouse refuses to address ways to meet your needs or when a spouse behaves in a manner that is offensive to your dignity.

“If attempts to bring the issue to the fore fail, then the person who is being treated poorly needs to either set boundaries, use consequences, or both,” he says.

But short of those serious issues, “getting into an argument about a missed turn is silly and is a good example of a time to practice the old virtue of ‘offering things up,’” he says. “I think that couples can get into a kind of ‘death spiral’ where every issue takes on equal importance and generates the same kind of heat and energy. That’s definitely a tendency to protect against.”

Charlotte has done more than protect against it.

She says offering up the little irritations “makes all those feelings of hurt go away, and the only feeling left is love. It really is a miracle.”

What would happen now if Justin were to take them off the map on a trip?

“If he starts snapping, I stay quiet,” she says. “I make some conciliatory comment — ‘You know, I really should learn my lesson and print out the directions the night before!’ Which is entirely true, albeit humbling and painful to admit. And then — peace.”

Justin and Charlotte are still married, and are now collaborating closely on a project at the art gallery.

Charlotte says, “I know for a fact that, without my faith, I would have gotten a divorce soon after I got married. I know for a fact that my faith is what is keeping me from depression, anger, resentment, and feelings of disappointment.”

“God gives us the tools to survive carrying our crosses,” she says, “but they’re so humiliating to accept — self-denial, lack of self-love — that so many of us would rather accept the man-made solutions — divorce — instead of making the sacrifice that will move us closer to love, in every aspect of our lives.”

As it was, she didn’t keep that appointment she made with the divorce attorney.

“I emailed her to say we were going to try to reconcile,” says Charlotte. “She was happy for us. It was cute.” C

Tom Hoopes is writer in residence at Benedictine College.

He and his wife, April, are former editorial
directors of Faith & Family magazine.

“Miss independent

Miss self-sufficient

Miss ‘Keep your distance’

Then — ooo! — she fell in love.”

“Something had to

change, and the only

thing I could change

was me.”

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