Mark

Seems only fair to tell you something about the fourth main player in this drama. Even though he is my ex, he is fourth because, really, he has had less impact on Steve's and my relationship than Ann has. Steve might disagree. Mark is not a bad person, but he is one of the most frustrating people I've even known. And not just frustrating to me. I met Mark at work, years ago. He worked in the back office, on my accounts, when I worked in sales and marketing. People warned me about him---"You have to stay on top of him or he won't do what you need him to do." No truer words were ever spoken. So for the last twenty years, I've been trying to "stay on top of him." And he's rarely done what I needed him to.

This is all my fault, of course. Think about it: people were warning me about him before I ever met him! Yet we ended up having one of the earlier cyber-relationships. This was before chat and IM; e-mails were just something you used at work. But since Mark worked on my accounts, we e-mailed and used the internal messaging system, first to discuss work matters. We then started having more personal conversations.

Second red flag: He was a thirty-year-old man who lived with his parents. Don't do it, ladies! I thought I was being unreasonable. It's not like I emancipated myself from my parents as a teenager or anything, but when I got out of college, I found a job and a (tiny) apartment, and then found a night job when I needed to to make ends meet. Mark, on the other hand, had a really nice car and stereo system; he had a state-of-the-art VCR. And his mommy did his laundry. He told me that no one could afford to live in NJ for what he was making---well, that's true if what you want to afford is a four-bedroom house in Morris County, but of course other people were living on their own, even raising families on that salary.

By the way, the third red flag is: He was thirty and I was thirty-three. Doesn't seem like much of an age difference, really, but combine it with the experience difference, and the IQ difference, and you have a recipe for disaster.

So why did I do it? Well, I thought I was just going out with him for a while. We were like Liz Lemon and Dennis Duffy on Thirty Rock. Mark was easy to go out with, and it was nice to be going out with someone. Then a whole bunch of things happened. My father died. Best friend A (Jenna) moved to California after meeting her future husband at a wedding out there. And best friend B (Will) got laid off and decided to move back to Texas. Then my on-again, off-again boyfriend of many years, Nikos, decided to marry a Greek girl and move back to Greece. (He is now high up in his family's shipping business---talk about a cliché!) Now I'd never thought of Nikos as husband material. He was fun to talk to, I had great stories, and I had great sex. But his leaving at this point made me look around and realize that I was in my thirties and had always assumed that someday, I would have a family.

Mark was much more likely husband material. Most of this was not conscious, by the way. It was just a series of path-of-least-resistance decisions. So, we married. Because by that time I was thirty-five, we decided that we would start trying to have a baby after six months. I got pregnant the first night. So much for women over thirty-five having fertility problems! And so much for any, and I mean absolutely any, sex life. I tried. It started when I was pregnant with Mark saying I could miscarry. Of course, this was nonsense, but I am superstitious. So once he said it, I thought, What if I argue this and then I miscarry? It was only nine months! Hah! The next "problem" was that Mark didn't want to let Tom sleep alone in his room, so we had him in a bassinet until he started having a permanent tilt to his neck because the bassinet was shorter than he was. I still didn't get that this was sex avoidance, but it became sort of obvious over the years. What had happened was that, once I had Tom, I became Mark's mother, too. Really. Ask Jenna. She will tell you the creepy way he called me "Mom," or the way he acted like a kid. And over the years (still), it's gotten worse. This is why the age difference was so important. I was older than he was, more experienced than he was, and better at taking care of myself. But most of all, this was a marriage of laziness and convenience. Had he left me before the wedding, I'd have been a little hurt, but it really wouldn't have devastated me. And that's the problem, and that's why it's my fault. I feel affection for Mark on some level still, but I was never in love with him. And I think he was never in love with me; he just wanted someone to take care of him. Marriage is a difficult thing under any circumstances. If you are in it in a halfhearted way, when things start to go wrong, you will not weather the storm. What went wrong, besides the lack of sex? That's a topic for another day...