Why I Changed My Narrative

The stories we tell about ourselves can say more than we realize

I had a conversation with my mother the other day. We video call once a week because we live in different hemispheres, and she said something that really stuck with me. She was reflecting on her relationship with my dad – they’ve been divorced 20 years now – and she said that despite their relationship ending quite awfully, they had had a good marriage over the 28 years they were together.

It got me thinking.

It got me thinking about the narrative we tell ourselves. For a long time, my mother often focused on the ugly, painful events that led to her telling him to leave. Of course, it was devastating to find out the person you’re married to, have children with and have spent years with, has been unfaithful. And it wasn’t even the first time. But it was the limit for her and so she ended it. And the narrative was set – he cheated on me, we split up, we divorced. It was supported by other narrative threads – “it wasn’t the first time,” “he was selfish,” “he was a workaholic.” All these threads helped embroider a picture of a relationship that was very much broken. And that was the narrative we reinforced.

But was that really the whole picture?

In our conversation, she confided that it was her new partner who had asked why she had stayed in this broken relationship for so long. A reasonable question. Her answer was “because it was, on the whole, a good relationship.” Perhaps her new partner was surprised? I’m not sure, but she had mentioned this to me previously— that it wasn’t all bad despite the numerous points in the marriage that had been painful, difficult and heart-wrenching. The reality was that my parents had worked well together, in life and literal work. They had a great physical relationship (yes, she told me this!), had two (amazing!) children, we did fun things like camping, traveling, weekends away as a family and with other families. For many of their friends and mine, they were ‘the perfect couple.’

So where did this narrative go? This ‘fun family life’ narrative rather than the dominant narrative of over twenty years of the ‘broken relationship.’ It had been swallowed up by this second ‘truth’, a narrative thread that had been re-stitched over and over. She then told me that she had now decided to include this other perspective into the story she tells herself and others. A shift. Quite a profound shift. Another set of threads, if you like, to the embroidery of her life.

And so the self reflection began…

So what about my narrative? What do I tell myself and others about events in my life? I too have a failed marriage in my past. A marriage that just petered out rather than ended explosively. I am now re-married. And I remarried fairly quickly after the divorce. So how do I tell that story? The story of ‘growing in love’ with someone all the while being still married to someone else? How do I tell others about the end of something that had been good but just wasn’t any longer?

Telling the ‘truth’ can leave you open to judgment, to ridicule, to more pain. I was scared of what others would think of me. We tend to want to protect ourselves from that, it’s a built-in instinct, self-preservation, and I am no different. So how do I tell this story? Do I show vulnerability? (I have Brené Brown’s TED talk on high repeat). Do I admit I am a human being with weaknesses and fallibilities or do I protect myself, adapt my narrative?

During the process of writing this, I happened to read Jordan Shapiro’s ponderings on family life, “Who Gets to Decide What’s True in Family Lore.” He writes that “humans excel at constructing narratives of the past that conform to their preferred understanding of the now.” And that is exactly what my mother did. It was exactly what I was grappling with.

My mother is no longer with my father and she had twenty years of embroidering a narrative that conformed to and confirmed her situation. One that supported the destructive ending of their life together. What kind of narrative was I now going to embroider? Would I choose a pastel, painless, glossy narrative and hide the truth? Would I punish myself and choose a darker range of threads that might paint me with a scarlet letter?

The fact is, I have tried out various versions of my own narrative.

Testing the waters. Dipping my toe in. Or selecting a range of embroidery threads from the rainbow collection available (to keep the metaphor going!). People would ask me how my partner and I met. (It’s a beautiful story, involving decades and different continents and hemispheres, and one that I might have to write about another time). The ‘truth’ of it is that we ‘grew’ in love while I was still married to someone else. And that made me really uncomfortable. Sometimes I still feel uncomfortable about it. But it happened.

So I told a few people that I separated from my ex then started having more contact with my current partner. I glossed over details and just said we’d stayed in touch after he visited me, then, after I separated, we ‘got together.’ I was vague on the detail. I made it sound like years or months between my marriage break up and meeting this new man. But it wasn’t.

Why this narrative? Quite frankly I didn’t want to be judged. I didn’t want to be condemned. I was scared. And when my partner commented one day that he thought it was interesting I told ‘glossy’ versions of our ‘meeting’ I knew I had to construct a more honest narrative of what happened. For myself, if anything.

And this is where the dominant family narrative that I had been a part of perpetuating with regards to my own parents had made me scared enough to alter how I talked about what happened in my life. I didn’t want to be branded a cheat, a liar, an adulterer. Because this is what happens when marriages end. Family and friends make judgments, sometimes take sides, try to figure out why things ended, lay blame. They try to make sense of what has happened with the little they know, the little they’ve seen. At least, that is what I had experienced previously when it happened to my parents.

Now I am letting go of that fear. I feel stable and loved in my not-so-new relationship. I have a respectful relationship with my ex. It’s no “Gwyneth and Chris” but we can talk, we are amicable, we don’t argue. We have twenty years of shared experiences and two children. We were really good friends in the past. We have shared tough times and good times. But the reality for me is that the tough times took its toll and I just didn’t feel the same about him anymore. And so another relationship developed. I let someone else into my heart and this was the catalyst for me to make a change in my life.

Maybe it would have taken more time if I had not had this solid, man-shaped catalyst?

I think it would have, but it was inevitable. Unhappiness, resentment, and stress built up over a long time erodes relationships. And that is what happened to me.

So what is my narrative now?

I was married, with two children, living in a city I didn’t like and working in a job that was ‘ho-hum.’ I developed a relationship with someone else. We sent messages to each other, yet we lived on opposite sides of the world. We shared our thoughts and feelings. It was an emotional relationship before it was physical. I grew to love him.

Then I ended my marriage. There was an overlap. It’s why I said earlier that my marriage ‘petered out’ and that I ‘grew’ in love again. The petering out took years. The growing in love took months. The splitting up took minutes. This is why I now live in a different country, with a different language and my children live on the other side of the planet.

I have chosen a different set of threads. That is my narrative. What is yours?

~thanks for reading!~

Lisa moved to Finland for love. She enjoys observing life, living life, and writing about it. She loves writing poetry. It saved her life!

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