I think I know why I picked him

As I reflect on the journal entries I wrote in the early years of our relationship and his focus when it all ended, considering all that in the context of how I was raised, I think I have figured out why I initially chose him to marry.  Something just clicked in the last day or two.

Growing up, I felt like my parents (especially my Dad) bought my love.  And although they did occasionally say "no", I generally was given all the material things I both needed and wanted.  They also made sure to support me in all the practical things I needed for life.  I was the freshman sent off to college with a toolkit, a medicine cabinet, financial literacy skills, and the computer knowledge to set up the entire wing's computers (and problem solve the computer viruses my dorm mates managed to get and pass around).

My parents weren't all that affectionate.  They weren't particularly good listeners.  There wasn't a lot of depth to our relationships as a teenager/young adult.  It's not that they didn't try to provide those things but they just weren't very good at them.  So I turned to my friends' parents for those things.

In my ex-husband, I found the same familiar relationship, although it was masked as something more that first year.  When the mask fell after we moved in together, what was left was the familiar type of relationship I had with my parents.  And that was all I knew about relationships.  So even though it felt like something was lacking, I didn't know I could expect more.

He got a good job right out of college (one that made far more than my measly first year teaching salary) and consistently stayed employed in good paying jobs.  This allowed him to manage our money to make sure we could afford material things.  We never couldn't pay our bills and with very few exceptions, there was money for extras.

And then even as the marriage was ending, he easily agreed to a fair property split, left me all kinds of notes and instructions about my car, and made sure I had all the material things I needed to set up my own apartment.  I remember the way my pain seemed to be amplified with how he was worried more about whether my car would be taken care of than whether I would be okay emotionally.

But that makes a lot of sense.  When a relationship ends, all the masks come off and we are left with just what was truly authentic to who we are.  And the one thing that is authentic to him is that he is a responsible adult in all the practical ways.  Even if he isn't honest about his emotions and feelings, he is honest with his money.

Now the difference between my relationship with my ex-husband and my relationships with my parents is that my parents have evolved and grown over the years.  They aren't the same people who raised me in their 20s and 30s.  I'm not the same person I was over the various decades.  But it is that evolution and learning from each other over the years that has allowed us to create deeper relationships.

With my ex-husband, that evolution was missing.  He wasn't interested in growing or us learning from each other.  Instead of experiencing curiosity, he seemed threatened when I had knowledge in an area he didn't.  And he hated to explain his thinking so that I could learn from him.  So we never got to a level of depth.

But back to the point of this reflection, he was a familiarity in the face of an uncertain adult world that I was newly stepping into so it was easy to ignore when the mask of something more slipped.