THE MONDAY MEMOIR #10

Honest Reflections — My Role in a Failed Marriage as a Priest

Let’s pause the narrative and reflect on the journey so far

Welcome back to The Monday Memoir, where we have reached the second half of 2012.

We are now in the weeds of my marriage break up and its place in my ministry as a priest in the Church of England.

Last week, I discussed how I found out that my wife wanted to leave and set herself up in the independent life that — unbeknown to me — she had wanted for a long time.

Thanks for the feedback on that piece. I think I shed a few readers, but there we go — honesty and reality don’t always go over well for some people.

How did it come to this?

I want to use this instalment of the Monday Memoir to press a pause button on the hectic narrative we’ve followed so far and reflect on what happened in those early months of 2012.

Before we progress any further along the timeline, I want to be honest and not sugarcoat my mistakes.

It takes two people to make a marriage.

A successful, thriving, growing marriage needs two people who are both willing to put in the time and commitment to overcome obstacles and solve problems.

The events we discussed last week showed our marriage didn’t have that. And I regret that and fully accept my part in those shortcomings.

There wasn’t a moment that I could pinpoint where things started to ‘go wrong’. It’s not like I can pluck a date out of the ether or a specific set of events that triggered the downward slope.

It happened gradually.

We were happy in those early days. Well, I believed we were. My ex-wife might have a different view — frankly, I wouldn’t know about that.

I discovered in the months that ticked by in 2012 that my wife had been thinking of leaving for a long time.

For example, she mentioned that when her mother was approaching the end of her life, she looked into keeping her flat as a potential bolt-hole or perhaps as a place to move and break away.

That would have been in the mid-90s — her mother died in 1996 — some ten years after we got married and well before I had even the vaguest clue that there was anything amiss.

So, who knows? Perhaps the cracks were appearing long before I spotted them? Was I deluding myself, even then, that things were okay?

The two life changes that seemed to make a vast difference in the trajectory of our relationship were having children and my ex-wife’s career ambitions.

Anyone who wants to have a family and — at the same time — pursue an upwardly mobile career option will need a considerable amount of external support. I honestly believe that I offered that support, although it never quite seemed to be enough. And she did not reciprocate.

When I look back now and think about our marriage, we were living as two separate people in one marriage. I’m sure that many couples do the same.

It’s not what people intend, and there isn’t a day in the calendar when a marriage morphs from being a positive experience into something more unhealthy.

Bit by bit — over a period of years — we gradually started to live in our separate bubbles.

My wife began to go out one evening each week to meet with friends in a social club over the other side of town where she lived before we met.

Then, it became two nights each week.

A few years later, she was not only going out three or four nights each week but became resentful if church commitments meant it wasn’t possible.

Sometimes, I’d scrabble around for babysitters because I had an unavoidable meeting in church, and she wanted to go out with her friends to play bingo in a grubby social club over the other side of town.

And so we inadvertently slipped into that place where two people in a marriage are essentially going along parallel tracks that rarely meet.

They don’t want to break up — whether it’s “for the children” or financial reasons, or perhaps it’s just too much hassle.

So they stick together and find an “accommodation”.

I guess that’s what we did.

There was also the spiritual aspect to this entire story. We both believed that getting married was to enter a covenant before God, that when we stood before the priest in July 1986 and intoned “I do, “ we were entering something lifelong.

Indeed, that was my view and would have remained my view regardless

I had no thoughts of ending our marriage and would have stayed not because we had the perfect marriage (far from it) but because that’s what Christians commit to when they get married.

That’s what we mean when we say “for better, for worse.”

For a long time after the breakup, I tortured myself with questions about whether I could — should — have done things differently.

Whether I should have lived a different life, exercised my church ministry differently, or been a better and more attentive husband.

I always came to the same conclusion: I did what I could with the hand that was dealt to me.

Of course, there were things I could have done differently or better. There always will be in any marriage. But I don’t think it would have made any difference. From what my ex-wife said in 2012, she had decided that our marriage was essentially finished a long time ago — shockingly before we conceived at least a couple of our children.

I just never got the memo.

Weirdly, our marriage ‘worked’.

We both had relatively thriving careers. I was leading two churches and — if I say so myself — regarded as a respected Christian leader in the diocese. She was heading up a preschool nursery on a tough housing estate, doing excellent work in the community.

Our children were doing well in their education and social lives. We had plenty of money coming into the house — four cars were parked in the drive, and we took overseas holidays when we wanted.

We were “doing well” as a family by all worldly measures.

Paradoxically, it was that relative affluence that pushed our marriage beyond breaking point. Again, going back to those post-break-up conversations, it emerged she had been keeping a beady eye on the finances for some years.

Naively, I assumed that our steadily growing savings were for our future rather than — as was actually the case — part of an evolving plan. She had ascended to the manager’s role in her job and was earning more than me by that point. There were no avenues for promotion — her salary was as good as it would get.

The time had come.

The combination of her salary and ‘her half’ of our investment pot meant that she now had the financial means to strike out independently. Stupidly, I believed our investment funds’ life savings were for us to buy our eventual retirement property.

What a fool I had been!

For the past decade, at least, I’d been topping up the savings funds to enable my then-wife to have the means to leave.

On December 1st, the hired transit van turned up and removed everything she wanted to take to the new house she’d bought with our money.

I was left with no bed to sleep in, and we had nothing to sit on as a family. I had to arrange for my youngest daughter to do a sleepover at one of her friends for a few days, so I had somewhere to sleep while awaiting the delivery of a new bed.

Somehow, I made it through to the end of 2012 — looking after five growing children whilst leading two busy Anglican parishes.

The support from both churches was tremendous, with a high level of practical and spiritual support offered by a raft of kind and thoughtful people.

Their love and support — and a generous donation from the Bishop’s Discretionary Fund — helped us make it through Christmas that year.

But as 2012 rolled over into 2013, I soon discovered that the story was only getting started.

To be continued.

Need to play catch up? If you missed any of the previous nine instalments, they are all in this curated Medium List.