A Love Letter to Our Marriage Therapist

Dear Doctor S.,

I can’t believe I wake up each morning thinking about how much I love my husband, instead of engaging in the mental gymnastics of how to avoid him for yet another day.

***

Henry and I were fifteen when we first met, two smartass suburban kids who’d been shipped off to boarding school in Michigan’s backwoods. We weren’t boyfriend and girlfriend. He drifted toward Midwestern blondes. I thought he was smart and funny, but way too full of himself.

We were forty-two when we met for the second time, each coming off a wearying divorce, each a parent of two children.

We’d spoken on the phone the year before. In the throes of separating from my husband, I’d flown to Michigan to burnish my rusty flirtation skills at my high school reunion. A few of us phoned classmates who hadn’t made the trip, Henry being one of them.

Awkward, having a conversation with someone you barely remembered:

“What are you up to?”

“Oh, couple of kids . . . getting a divorce.”

“Same here,” he replied. “Hey, if you’re ever in New York, give me a call.”

I went back to the home I still shared with my husband, and the maelstrom that ended our twenty-year relationship. I forgot all about flirting. I had no roadmaps for single parenthood or running a household on my own.

But after a year, I was ready to get out there: The Milwaukee Symphony (whose harpist was a high school classmate) was coming to Carnegie Hall, and I remembered Henry’s suggestion to call him.

We only spoke for fifteen minutes, but I found myself wanting more. For one thing, he talked. My ex and I had exchanged so few words in the last years of our marriage, my son was a sullen, monosyllabic adolescent, my tween daughter saved her heart-to-hearts for her friends. I was parched for conversation, so hoping Henry would call me back.

It took him a very long week to get up the nerve, while I, like some moonstruck teenager, paced the floor and willed the phone to ring.

“What do you look like?” I asked, remembering a skinny kid with reddish-brown hair.

“I have a beard.”

I dug out my yearbook and drew a beard on him. When I tried to erase it, the slick paper tore.

So, our first date was that Carnegie Hall concert (ergo, Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique became “our song”), preceded by several more calls.

“How will I recognize you?”

I described my dress, the length of my hair, and added:

“I haven’t decided whether I’ll wear glasses or contacts.”

“Wear the glasses. Brainy is sexier.”

He was urbane and charming, dressed in an impeccably tailored suit. He remembers me as elegant and confident. I remember me as breathless each time his hand brushed mine. I wore a flowy floral print, bought for the occasion. Henry called it “voluminous” when he slipped it over my head later that evening.

Afterwards, he wrapped me in his bathrobe.

“You know, I still have that valentine you sent,” he said.

“I never sent you a valentine.”

“It was addressed ‘To Whom It May Concern,’ I believe.”

Then I remembered. The boys’ and girls’ dorms were two wings of an L-shaped building, separated by a lobby. The doors between were locked and rigged with alarms. On February 14, 1963, this is what I’d penned, and slipped under the door to the boys’ wing.

“If you will be our valentines, we will be your concubines.”

I don’t think I knew the meaning of that word, but I sensed it was verboten, and it made a clever rhyme. It was signed “The Girls on the Other Side of the Door.”

“Oh, you knew what it meant all right,” said Henry. “I knew you’d written it as soon as I found it.”

He went to the basement, rummaged through a box of memorabilia, and came back with the incriminating document. I recognized the little circles I’d used to dot my i’s back then.

Every other weekend, I drove the 287-mile round trip from my house in upstate New York to Henry’s in New Jersey, while my ex stayed with the kids.

My twelve-year-old daughter, who’d gleefully joined my first-date-clothes-shopping expedition, balked when my love life became more than a dress-up party. I’d return home on Sunday nights to find her little notes on my pillow:

“I hope you get killed in a car crash!”

“I hope you both die from AIDS!”

And once, my picture, torn into bits and strewn across my bed.

My fifteen-year-old son just looked daggers at me, when he looked at all.

In the ensuing twenty-nine years, some of it good, some of it quotidian, not much of it great, and some of it just plain miserable, Henry and I broke up twice.

The first time, a year in, Henry dumped me: “This is heaven,” he said. “I just don’t think I deserve heaven.” And I heard that most-clichéd of breakup clichés: “It’s not you, it’s me.”

I won him back by leaving messages as “Harriet Smithson,” the Irish actress loved by Hector Berlioz, who wrote his opium-fueled symphony (replete with obsession, jealous rage, nightmares, ghouls, murder, a march to the guillotine, and a rolling head) after she spurned him.

We probably should have rethought that “our song” thing.

The “just plain miserable” started the day we moved in together, three years after our relationship had begun. The moving van had barely left our driveway when his two sons drove up in a U-Haul full of video games and sneakers.

“Mom says it’s your turn.”

My kids despised Henry’s on sight, and his despised mine.

The only time they interacted was to play the “Who has the worst parent?” version of “Can You Top This?”

My daughter, fifteen: “My mom’s only in this for the money. You’ll see, she’ll leave him when I get out of college.”

His twenty-one-year-old son: “My dad’s so abusive, he used to play ‘Reveille’ to get us up in the morning.”

“Did you do that?” I asked Henry later, envisioning him blowing his grandfather’s bugle—the one played in the service of General Pershing’s expedition to capture Pancho Villa in 1916.

“Nah,” he said. “I sang ‘Reveille.’ It would have been abusive to wake someone by blowing a brass instrument in their ear.”

In any case, the kids reached a consensus on one thing: Henry and I deserved each other.

I failed miserably at trying to meld four angry kids and two overwhelmed adults into the Brady Bunch. Henry’s sons retaliated by ignoring my requests and making misogynistic jokes. They saw me as wicked stepmother, even though I was neither. My kids mocked Henry behind his back and cruelly rebuffed his attempts to connect. They saw him as interloper, even though they were living under his roof. I cried (often) and Henry retreated to his books. We lived unhappily for four years until, one by one, the kids left our thorny nest.

We were just two again, but so much had been lost. I don’t know what kept us together for the next six years: history, inertia, the fear of being alone, or the shame of admitting to another failed relationship? Perhaps it was just Miss Emily Dickinson’s “thing with feathers,” hope, perched in both our souls.

I couldn’t find the charming, devastatingly funny man I’d fallen in love with, and the warm, optimistic person I used to be had morphed into a sad, hypercritical woman I no longer even recognized. Love and desire seemed irretrievable. We broke up, I moved out, we tried on the mantle of “just friends,” and dated other people. But when we found each other’s pseudonymous, photo-less profiles online, we carried on a steamy correspondence using aliases (mine was Ishtar), but knowing exactly whom we were wooing.

“Seeking a woman who loves serious music and appreciates good food. Perfect date: walking hand in hand on the beach at sunset, followed by an evening of Scrabble and laughter.”

Busted, you bastard!

He’d mocked “walking hand in hand on the beach” as trite and treacly; Scrabble was a sore point, as I relished the competition, and he either refused to play or engaged in a passive-aggressive game using three-letter words; and the word “laughter” made him gag.

“I’d love to learn more. Tell me about your Scrabble strategy and sunsets on your favorite beaches. And what most provokes your laughter?”

“I was such a liar,” he says now. But back then, his emails to Ishtar were becoming sweet and vulnerable.

“I knew someone like you once,” he wrote. “I wish I’d loved her better, appreciated her more, and told her what she needed to hear. You remind me so much of her.”

We saw our first couples’ therapist thick in the middle of all that separation and steaminess and married three months later.

But now, sixteen years after that second breakup, we were on the verge of a third.

Why? Sex was still okay, we laughed sometimes, but we were mostly unkind to each other, and true intimacy had eluded us. I could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times he’d said “I love you” unprompted. He was wounded and defensive because I pathologized his behavior (“passive aggressive” and “narcissistic” being au courant).

But both of us loved the little house we’d moved to on the coast of Maine, so we weren’t going to divorce. We’d live under the same roof, but lead separate lives, which Henry envisioned as dating other women and I envisioned as not having to keep score of how many times he’d let me down.

It seemed like such a hassle. I floated one more option:

What about seeing a marriage therapist? Again.

I didn’t have much hope, but at seventy-one, the idea of looking for love with someone new left me queasy. Men my age were seeking younger women, which left older men looking for caretakers. A last-ditch effort to find happiness with the oldish man I already had seemed a safer option.

Henry agreed to therapy, as long as all he had to do was show up. I was surprised he was so amenable. Was he having doubts about all those women flocking to an aging academic with arcane interests, whose favorite companion was himself? I found Doctor S., whose voice message said he wasn’t seeing new patients. He took us on anyway. Henry and I drove to our first appointment in separate cars; he was seven minutes late.

***

When did you know we could be okay, Doctor S., when I thought we’d never be? That first day, when Henry and I were so hurt and angry? We sat as far away from each other as possible, and did not make eye contact, not even once. And then he said something hilarious, and the corners of my mouth started twitching. You looked at me and raised your eyebrows.

“He can still make you laugh.”

You knew then, didn’t you?

And when I first dared to hope? It was a few weeks in, our session was over, and we were almost out the door. I mentioned that sometimes Henry and I used to dance in our kitchen.

***

We came of age in the 60s, but feel more at home in the music of earlier eras. When Henry broke up with me, I wept into my pillow, listening to Ella Fitzgerald’s version of “They Can’t Take That Away from Me” over and over again. Years later, when I left him, he consoled himself with Brahms.

***

“You dance in the kitchen,” you said, turning past into present tense. “That’s nice. Sometimes my wife and I dance in the kitchen.” And you smiled so sweetly, I could see how much you loved your wife. That smile reflected how I’d felt in Henry’s arms, dancing to our favorite Gershwin melodies. And joy and contentment nudged anger and disappointment over just a little bit, to reclaim a small piece of my heart.

***

But progress isn’t linear, and marriage is messy. Sometimes I was able to look right through Henry’s childish behavior to find that little boy so excited by life’s promises, before the world started breaking him, and I could give him a pass. Other times, he made me so mad I wanted to deck him. Sometimes Henry was able to see his assessment of me—narrow-minded and self-righteous—as a symptom of his own arrogance, and his heart was softened. Other times, he couldn’t get past it, and probably felt like decking me, too.

A previous therapist, one we’d seen the last time we’d sought help for our discontent, had finally lost patience when Henry made everything a joke. She told him he was full of shit. We never went back.

Yes, Henry can try the patience of a saint—clearly, me—or a therapist.

Apparently, so can I.

We had been seeing Doctor S. for three months and had fifteen minutes left in our session. Henry was hogging the conversation with something irrelevant. I tried to steer him back, but to no avail. Finally, the doctor threw up his hands and said, “Okay, I’ve had enough!”

I turned to him: “See?”

I knew he was equally aggravated by Henry’s therapeutic transgressions.

“Not with him, with you! You’ve tried to shut him down twelve times in the last twenty minutes!”

I started to cry and wondered if I needed to find another therapist.

Oh me, of little faith. A shrink pointing out I was equally culpable, not the innocent, long-suffering spouse I envisioned myself to be, led to a breakthrough. And not just for me.

That night, Henry was watching the news while I did the dishes. Suddenly, I was seeing lightning flashes and developed a searing headache. I feared a stroke. I sat down next to my husband and asked him to turn off the TV and hold me for a few minutes. He reluctantly reached for the remote. After about thirty seconds, he said, “You probably just pulled a little muscle.” This was not to comfort me, I knew, but to get himself off the hook and retreat to his study, where his books and music were offering him comfort and solitude. And his doctorate is in musicology, not medicine.

But I didn’t go to my default: deeply wounded, blaming him for being an insensitive jerk. Instead, I cajoled as he reached, once more, for the remote.

“Oh, c’mon, just hold me a few minutes. I’m scared. Please?”

He sighed and put his arm back around me. I felt his body relax, we started to talk—and to listen. We talked about our house, how I’d fallen in love with it because it reminded me of my grandparents’ bungalow, and my childhood summers curled up in a hammock, devouring Nancy Drew mysteries, and walking barefoot down the path to the lake, with ten cents in my pocket for the Good Humor man. Henry remembered summers in the woods near his house, catching frogs and toads and being free to explore on his own from dawn to dusk. We expressed how grateful we were to be able to give our grandsons summer memories, birthed in this house by the sea. Then we peered into the future and saw these two young boys as grown men, helping their children make memories of their own.

And my headache was gone.

“I feel like you finally have my back,” I said.

“I’ve always had your back. But now I have it willingly.”

***

We feel so transformed, like in that penultimate scene in A Christmas Carol, when Ebenezer Scrooge exclaims: “I am as light as a feather, as happy as an angel, as merry as a schoolboy.”

Fortunately, we didn’t need nocturnal visits from Dickens’ ghosts to open our eyes. Instead, your skillful, respectful, and gentle guidance has helped shift our priorities. Sometimes what you said, or pointedly didn’t say, led to one of those “aha” moments where we knew, on the spot, what was true all along, but other times the magic was harder to identify. We just knew it had happened when we experienced a seismic shift at home.

***

“I think I’m nicer now, don’t you?” I inquire as we’re doing the dishes. Together.

“Oh, you’re a zillion times nicer,” he replies.

A zillion times! Dear Lord, what must it have been like for him before?

But we’re not dwelling on past transgressions. We’re learning a new language, instead.

“I’m sorry I was insensitive,” he says, realizing my tears are not from slicing onions, but from an error of omission on his part.

And a few days later: “Maybe you didn’t see the frying pan was greasy when you put it away?” I ask gently, instead of launching into a critique of his character.

“I need to hug you,” says the man who for years only embraced me as a component of foreplay.

“I love you.” Sometimes he says it first, sometimes I do. No one’s keeping score.

***

And, here’s Henry’s contribution to this missive. He’s played against type and become a man of few words. But, oh, what words, what transporting words:

“Thank you for our new life.

I adore and cherish my wife, whose loving qualities and beauties I have rediscovered, thanks to you.”

So now, Doctor S., we’ve wrapped up. At our last session, we tried to convey the depth and breadth of our thankfulness for helping us find the key, nudging us, calling us out on our bs, and cheering us on as we did the hard, painful work of resurrecting our moribund marriage. And then, you thanked us for sharing so much of ourselves with you and with each other. That sharing, you said, became your roadmap for helping us rekindle the love that was there all along.

Then you said, “Shall we put a bow on it?”

And we did.

With love and gratitude,

Deb and Henry

-Deborah K. Shepherd

Deborah K. Shepherd is a former newspaper reporter and retired social worker who spent much of her career focused on the prevention of domestic violence and sexual assault, and the provision of services to survivors. Her COVID-19-themed essay, “Snow Day, Maine, April 10, 2020,” was a recent winner in the Center for Interfaith Relations Sacred Essay Contest. Her first novel, So Happy Together, will be published by She Writes Press in April, 2021. She lives with her husband and two dogs on the coast of Maine where she writes two blogs, deborahshepherdwrites.com and paleogram.com. She is currently working on a memoir.