Hard things

You tell people, no, you didn’t see it coming.

Some of them look at you suspiciously when you say this, wondering if you stood on the train tracks with your eyes squeezed shut.

You’re not lying when you tell them you didn’t see it coming. Whether or not you should have seen it coming, well, that’s a trickier one.

Sometime in the middle of 2025 you and your husband are seeing a couples’ therapist. She is a young, earnest woman named Whitney who has outfitted her tiny office with a rainbow emotions wheel pillow and fidget spinners and worry stones she’s harvested from the shores of Lake Superior. You and your husband usually make a date out of it: Wednesday therapy hour, then lunch and a chummy debrief at the Thai restaurant, then Costco for supplies and gas, then home. Later, his men’s soccer team would play, at 8 or 9 or 10 pm. It’s the competitive old-man’s league. Fights often break out, which you really enjoy. All that fuck you man that was in and play the fucking game and ref are you blind, all the chest-to-chest silverback posturing while they hold each other back dramatically.

You think it’s one of those Wednesdays. You’re already hoping they win tonight so maybe he’ll agree to stop for caramel sundaes at the McDonald’s. You love a good caramel sundae from McDonald’s, but he won’t stop for ice cream unless he feels like he’s earned it. He is always worried about earning or not earning things, particularly food or rest.

But that’s not what you’re talking about with Whitney. Today you’re chatting about blended family communications, the love languages, the usual. So you are surprised when your husband says,

We’re just so different.

This is not exactly news to you, but you don’t like the tone of it. You had been under the impression that you complemented each other rather nicely. The kids often told you that, that you were good for their dad, and that he was good for you.

But here is their dad, getting worked up.

I mean, I like going out, I like seeing people.

He looks at you with exasperation.

I mean, do you even LIKE people?

You realize you and Whitney have both cocked your head to the same side, at the same curious angle.

Of course I like people, you say, which will not be the only sentence that you say for the very first time in your life today. I like my people. I love my people.

Yeah, but you didn’t want to go to the work pool party.

You know what he is talking about. You genuinely like his work friends. They’re funny and smart and no-nonsense. You like hanging out with them. What you don’t like is wearing a bathing suit in front of his work friends and their spouses while he gets rip-roaringly-drunk and wants to stay for 17 hours only to come home and vomit into the kitchen sink and tell you he really wasn’t that drunk.

Sometimes I’m just not up to a big thing. It takes a lot out of me. That’s all.

I’m just saying, we’re really different that way.

I like people. I know all your soccer friends. They tell me I’m their number-one fan. I go to the bar with you guys and do pull-tabs. I have been drunk, stuffed in a minivan with your entire work team, at a Taco Bell window in Green Bay. I know all your best college friends. I know your whole extended family. I show up.

But your heart sinks because he is still exasperated.

We’re just really different, he continues, presenting his case to poor Whitney, who is really regretting not taking Counseling 533: Really Different Couples.

His mouth twists, like it knows better but he does not.

She doesn’t do hard things.

You think you must not have heard him correctly. Whitney is leaning forward slightly now, picking at her thumbnail. She looks worried.

You stare at the side of your husband’s face and wait for him to fix his sentence, to come correct, now.

But he doubles down.

I like people who do hard things. I respect people who do hard things. She doesn’t do hard things.

And just when you think you can’t take much more of this Wednesday (and you realize there will be no tom kha gai soup in your future), he unburdens himself completely:

She’s hard to respect. She’s hard to love.

Under your tush, the stiff office loveseat drops away, taking your bowels with it.

I don’t do hard things?

I’m hard to love?

You hate the sound of your voice. You will come to hate it more when these words play back in your head a year later. The nakedness of it will be hard to recover from, and you don’t do hard things.

Of all the things you never wanted to hear your spouse say, you now know that she’s hard to love is at the very top of that list.

You will find it hard to recall what happened next, exactly.

You’re pretty sure he notices your expression then and tries to tidy up the mess a little, sweep the words into a corner. He says something like marriage is just hard or it’s hard to love your spouse because you see everything up close.

But your throat closes up and the tears screech into the station anyway. You say something like You don’t know what’s hard for me or maybe You don’t get to say what’s hard for me or, the very, very worst of all, the thing you hope no one you love will ever find themselves saying:

I do lots of hard things all the time.

Now you are crying like a heavyweight, big gulping sobs. Your husband and Whitney both look scared of you, so you leave, whimpering as you ope, excuse me, just gonna squeeze by the people in the waiting room who stare at you like there but for the grace of God go I.

You sit in the passenger seat and consider your life choices, all of which have seemed like good ideas at the time but never seem to turn out that way. Maybe you were hexed at birth. Maybe it is generational trauma of diabetic Polish shepherdesses or guilty Scottish horse thieves. Maybe it is your moon in Aquarius and your sun in Cancer. Princess Diana had the same placement and look how all that turned out.

You stare out the windshield at a tree and wonder if it, too, thinks you are hard to love. You wonder how many people in your life have thought that you are hard to love, but who never had the cojones or the poor decision-making skills that it would have taken to tell you.

You realize staring at the tree, that for you, hard to love is the worst possible thing you could be. It’s worse than bitchy, worse than difficult, worse than annoying, worse than stubborn or arrogant or stupid or lazy or out of shape or even ugly. The one thing you were pretty sure you were, before 11:43 am that Wednesday morning, was moderately easy to love.

Your husband appears by the passenger side window, sheepish.

Can I give you a hug? he wants to know.

You are still breathing funny and making strangled little rodent noises and your nose is running but you get out of the car and let him hug you, a hug that makes you feel worse rather than better.

I’m sorry. I’ll go back on the Zoloft, he says.

Because before 11:43 am that Wednesday morning, you’d thought that his Zoloft withdrawal was maybe the reason he’d been so short with you, so dismissive of what you had to say of late.

It had occurred to you that no one else seemed to be getting the short, dismissive version of him: not his colleagues, not his soccer buddies, not his kids, not even the servers or the cashiers. But you chalked that up to your being special, the one closest to him, the one most likely to draw fire. And the Zoloft seemed to help a little.

When you go on a girls’ trip to Lake Vermilion, you tell your close friends that your husband thinks you are hard to love and don’t do hard things. They get very, very quiet. Their faces — faces you know almost as well as your own — are telling you something you don’t want to know: Something very, very bad has just happened in your life.

But you’re not sure what it means yet.

Because maybe the Zoloft will help. Because maybe there will be another pool party where you can prove yourself. You can just wear a cute floral sundress and your green sunglasses and say, Oh, I’m feeling a little under the weather, you guys dive in! while everyone splashes and people tell you how wonderful your husband is, how amazing, and you smile like someone who likes people all the time and in every situation and you count the minutes until 17 hours have passed and you can convince him to let you drive him home.