I described my dogged desire to be a healer. Something I loved equally as much as that was the image of being a father and having a loving family. I wanted a “Father Knows Best” life where every evening there’d be a meal on the table cooked by “Mom.” That was a compelling image. I always thought I would love that kind of loving, nuclear family. That image was strong and the desire to have children was what got me to get married. I was not particularly in love with the woman. She fit the bill. She was a wonderful person, warm, attractive, intelligent.
She came from serious poverty. She was physically and sexually abused as a child, and she was never crazy about having kids, but she was madly in love with me and willing to do whatever I wanted. She was too nervous and too tense to give our kids emotional caring. I knew better than she how to love the kids emotionally, how to provide for their emotional needs. There was a strong Pygmalion nature to the relationship. I saw myself as a Prince Charming who rescued her from a terrible tragic situation.
For ten years, as she would later describe, we pulled “Father Knows Best.” We really did it for real. I was the epitome of the wonderful loving father, wonderful loving husband. We had three kids who looked like that you would want to paint and have as your own, physically beautiful, and I was making a lot of money, and they all went to private schools. We lived in a nice large house right near my office, a beautiful house, big lot, lots of trees, nice neighborhood. That was my life for ten years.
During the period of time when I was starting to go through a radical transformation away from the clinical role, toward getting the model and its political implications clear, I started to do an analysis of my marriage. I realized there was a big gap between what I was teaching and what I was practicing. I would be more honest in one afternoon in therapy or in running groups than I would ever be in my relationship at home.
I started having a recurring dream. I was in a dark, cold cell, and it was a gorgeous day outside. I could see filtering through the bars what a zippity-doo-dah-Walt
Disney kind of wonderful day it was out there. I see my friends having a ball. I’m stuck in jail. And who was the jailer? My wife.
I began to realize that the image I was carrying off was not anywhere meeting my needs, but I had no channel to even talk about it, to say there is something profoundly wrong in the relationship. We never really explored what we wanted from each other. I was striving for congruence in all areas now. I wanted to get away from charging for my services, and to work on a way of working for money that felt good to me. I was making a great sweeping out of the cobwebs and taking big risks in a lot of areas, and I just extended that to my marriage.
I started to explore some feelings, a nagging depression I had—marriage was not fulfilling, and I felt like a prisoner. My wife reacted to this with such intense pain that I backed off very quickly, and took months to get the courage to talk about it again. Then we went through four years of extraordinary pain. It was horrible.
The more I got into it, the more I realized the cost I had been paying to maintain an image. It wasn’t all image—it was good stuff, too. I liked being a father, and I did like our happy little house, but there were tremendous things about our relationship that we never dealt with. She had everything she ever wanted. She was so content being Mrs. Marshall Rosenberg, there was nothing else she wanted ever in life, and she had no inkling whatsoever that this was going on, none. So it was a catastrophe for her.
After four years of being as honest as I knew how to be and some real soul searching between the two of us, she and I separated. I came out of all of this with an awareness that it was critical for me in any relationship that both parties be aware that our time is 100% our own. None of it is to be owned by the corporation of marriage. In any new relationship, it would be the ironclad premise that 100% of our time was our own. Spending time together is what needs to be contracted for, not the time we spend apart.
That’s why when I married Gloria, we didn’t live together for the first several years we were married. It was important for me to me very clear that the relationship could sustain itself with two separate lives. Getting the caring and the connectedness and the separation together is still an elusive goal. There are times when Gloria and I get pretty close to one another if the time is there, but we are still working on it and not knowing too well how to do it. But at least I don’t have the dream of being in this jail cell, and at least my life is my life now. I went through a lot of pain to get that.