divorce ain’t all it’s cracked up to be

from eternal sunshine of the spotless mind:
joel: if only i could meet someone new. i guess my chances of that happening are somewhat diminished, seeing that i’m incapable of making eye contact with a woman i don’t know.
that’s such a great line. or at least i understand it. but half the time i don’t feel like i deserve to meet anyone and have anything good happen in my life. (the other half i hope like hell otherwise.) tamara had an affair and left me. and we had our problems in our marriage. there were times where i felt like i didn’t know how to make things better, and what we could possibly do. but sometimes our marriage seemed okay, sometimes good. sometimes i am so angry at her for having an affair, then getting me to go through counseling while she kept backing away and having the affair. obviously it wasn’t right for her to do that.
but i’m not one to pass on an opportunity to beat myself up over something repeatedly, and my failings at dealing with some of the infertility stuff and especially the miscarriage sometimes completely overwhelm me and tear my heart in two. not that i didn’t do good and positive things during this time as well, it’s just that mistakes i made seem so different than the person i like to think i am. things were screwy and there was so much hanging in the air during all those times, it’s easier to sit back now and concentrate on the stuff from this distance. but i tend to remove myself emotionally when i’m confused or hurt or angry, and a lot of times i had no idea how to deal with the things that were going on in our life. so i can look back now with horror on what a thoughtless, heartless, evil person i appeared to be from this one isolated perspective, during certain times. i can’t believe how i behaved (or more accurately, didn’t behave) during some of this stuff. but like i said, this is from a more detached perspective. in the midst of it, it seemed to make sense to me. but when i think about how poorly at times i handled my wife that i really did love and was given to me by G-d, it makes me think i should never be given that much again. i don’t think the events that played out afterward needed to happen — i don’t think tamara choosing to turn on G-d and me (in her words…i still don’t understand exactly what happened and why) and have an affair was a fair response. i never wanted to make her feel abandoned, i never didn’t care about her or what happened to her, i never tried to hurt her emotionally. but there were times where obviously i failed in doing the right things for her emotionally, and some part of that played a role in the current status of things, where as far as i can tell she prefers to believe both i and everything we were and had never existed. this all is so far from anything i ever wanted for her or my life.
sometimes i think this world, this life, is too much for me to bear.