With or Without You

I was born and raised in Columbus, Georgia. I briefly was in Germany as a toddler but I don't remember it.

My parents bought a house the summer I turned three and I graduated high school with some of the same people with whom I went to kindergarten. I married some guy I graduated high school with and he joined the military and I finally left home, moving to Texas as our first stop.

We fought a lot and I hated it. We blamed it on the fact that his career frequently took him away from home for anywhere from a few days to a few months.

Over time, his job gradually became more like a nine-to-five office job. And the more he was home, the worse the marriage became.

Many years after the marriage ended, I realized I was much more a brunette during my marriage than any time either before or after and it implies I didn't get out much during my marriage.

It can be hard to get perspective on yourself or your long-standing relationship. If a situation persists long-term, it can be hard to identify what is "you", what is "them" and what is situational.

This can be true in a best case scenario when everyone is trying to do right, be honest etc. If one party is actively lying or hiding things and intentionally up to no good while their SO makes a good faith effort and assumes good intentions -- like you SHOULD if you don't have REASON not to -- it can be nigh impossible to figure out what is really going on and why x, y or z happens.

From an article about the song With or Without You:

“I was at least two people: the person who is so responsible, protective and loyal and the vagrant and idler in me who just wants to run from responsibility,” Bono wrote in the book U2 by U2. “I thought these tensions were going to destroy me but actually, in truth, it is me. That tension, it turns out, is what makes me as an artist.”

A different blurb from a search result says it's 

A song by U2 from their 1987 album The Joshua Tree, inspired by Bono's conflicting feelings about his personal and musical life. 

He's a musician. He went on tour to support the family which likely frequently took him away from the family for anywhere from days to months.

A lot of careers require long hours and travel, so this is a very common experience that one or both parents feel obligated to travel to support the family and then conflicted about being away from the family. Like in my marriage, the couple may blame the job for their marital problems and that may have no basis in reality.

It can be hard to conclude with certainty why you don't spend time together and don't get along. It's easy to say that we don't spend time together because someone needs to earn a living when there's a great deal of truth to that statement and it can be hard to test if it's really true or not.

I've told a lot of stories over the years about various contributing factors to why I divorced and they are all true. It wasn't any one thing.

One of the many nails in the coffin of my marriage was realizing that my very introverted career military husband who has so little to give to me after dealing with people at his job all day was PLANNING to recreate that pattern in his post military life.

He LIKED having a lot of intellectually intense relationships in short bursts that weren't too emotionally heavy and LIKED having an excuse to tell his wife "I need an hour to myself. I'm wrung out."

He wasn't going "I'm extremely introverted. I don't want to keep doing this. I want to put more of my limited sociability into my marriage! I'm going to become a programmer."

I was a very sociable homemaker losing my marbles from the social isolation. I wanted and needed more people in my life. Me being the little wifey chained to the stove and him being introverted and used up at the end of the day meant I had no means to get my needs met.

And if he didn't WANT to rearrange his life to give more to me, it wasn't reasonable for me to try to insist on making him my bitch. So it became obvious two things needed to happen:

1. I needed more of a relationship to the public -- aka a career -- and he was never really going to support that, for all that he claimed he was pro women's lib while expecting me to be a 1950s style homemaker.

2. I needed to leave him because he would never really be what I needed in a relationship.

I got absolutely everything I wanted out of my marriage EXCEPT feeling loved. Because he didn't WANT to spend time with me or bond with me or even THANK me for cooking his favorite foods and supporting his career etc.

He very much took it for granted that everything I did for him was just "my job" as his wife -- AKA chattel property -- and absolutely not some indication of affection.

I STOPPED making homemade pudding from scratch and he once commented on how that had been really good or something and he missed it and said not ONE word about how NICE I had been to endlessly dote on him early in the relationship.

I stopped cooking ANYTHING for him special. I made dinner for the family and that was it. That was MY JOB and I did absolutely nothing extra.

He never noticed at all.

I stopped taping all his favorite TV shows while he was away because he would come home, spend his entire weekend watching TV shows I taped for him and he never once so much as THANKED me. I felt like I had made dinner for him and his girlfriend and got to watch them eat and coo over each other while I went hungry and got barked at like a servant.

His career choice got me away from my hometown and allowed me to see the world. I got to have and raise two kids. I had excellent medical benefits.

Being married to him was a wonderful experience, other than the HIM part of the equation.

I stayed as long as I did to sort out what was my crap, what was his crap and what was our crap -- some alchemical creation where me plus him somehow added up to crap even though individually neither of us was being shitty.

I did that to have some hope of figuring out how to make a relationship work. Because I think most people have little to no idea what they really need in a relationship or why this works for them or doesn't work for them.

And that's probably a primary reason this song is so iconic and popular: Most couples seem to think they can't live with or without their current relationship.

They don't know how to sort their own problems, much less the relationship. Often, they aren't really trying.