My wife was sitting across from me, and there were two partial margaritas sitting between us. I hadn’t been too fond of margaritas until I met my wife, she introduced me to higher quality margs. You want to look for three basic things when searching for the right margarita; top shelf tequila, only lime juice- no sour mix or any of that, and that should be the majority of the ingredient list. A good marg should be a pretty short to do list; top shelf tequila- your choice, I’m partial to repasados, squeezed lime juice, an orange liqueur like Grand Marnia or Cointreau. If you’re ordering from a hip little taco joint you might find this on the menu as their ‘Cadillac’ margarita, and under no circumstances should it be blended. On the rocks, salt on the rim is up to you and your long term cardiac health. As we were sitting here talking I could feel that our conversation was not so slowly turning into a disagreement. This meant that I was desperately searching for ways to de-escalate. I wanted to enjoy this dinner and this marg and us getting uppity with each other was not going to facilitate that goal. I tried to re establish our common ground and step away from the would-be-fight before it got started. I don’t remember now what the catalyst was for all of this, but that was not unusual for me at this point because it was rare that I fully understood what moved our friendly conversations from amiable to ‘tear each other’s throats out’. I know for me it always felt like it happened pretty fast; one minute I was standing or sitting across from someone I loved dearly and wanted to spend the rest of my life with, and the next we’d be yelling and slinging threats or insults. One minute it felt close and intimate. The next it would feel adversarial and dangerous. Laughter. Then madness. Love. Then loathing. And so it went during our union. It wasn’t always like this. When we were dating we laughed and rarely argued. All forms of intimacy came to us easily; holding each other, laughing, joy and presence with one another. Followed by sex and pillow talk and lazy mornings when I used to enjoy making her an espresso and hanging out in bed together while we pondered our day and the infinite possibilities. By now what had felt like a minor disagreement was escalating to an argument. I couldn’t tell who was winning and honestly I didn’t care- we were both losing. Losing our fondness for each other, losing track of why we did all of this together, and losing our minds, from what I could see. I’d never been in a relationship like this where the passion was as readily available in both the love and the fighting. As a younger man I was fortunate to love a similarly passionate woman/have a similarly passionate relationship with a woman that I loved… coincidentally they both share the same name. During that relationship we rarely fought. I’m not entirely sure we properly reconciled our differences or communicated openly, but we didn’t fight like this. When that relationship ended I cried and eventually got a tattoo as a reminder of the lessons learned. It’s still there, and I still remember. But this was a new set of lessons not stamped on me yet. Now we were definitely in an argument. I still felt compelled to de-escalate and try to bring us back closer to one another… but I could feel that possibility slipping away, like it had so many times before. I could feel myself starting to get angry as well, about the fact that the fight was about to happen. I am not a fighter by nature, I’m a lover. I will avoid fights like the plague whenever possible. But this one was not to be avoided… As our argument turned into a fight I started thinking about the recent events that had led us to this place. I had moved out of our house about 5 months earlier in order to get some space. We couldn’t seem to stop fighting and I was exhausted and scared. Scared that we were both falling into a pattern I didn’t want in my life, and exhausted from living with someone that I was not on the same page with. After I had moved out more fights had ensued, but from the safety of my cell phone, which at least helped me to stay a little calmer while we were taking shots at one another. After my wife realized that fighting with me wasn’t going to bring me home, she took a new approach- she tried loving me again. It felt so good when it happened I barely noticed that just a couple days earlier we were fighting worse than ever. I completely forgot how she had told me that she hated me and I made her life shit. I had forgot that we went months at a time without sex or intimacy. I felt loved and I was so starved for love that small feeling was enough to drown out the recent noise(heartbreak?). Due to this love we both agreed that we’d go to couples counseling. We had worked with one therapist for almost two months before switching to another therapist, and somewhere in there I had decided it was safe enough to come home. I had been home for close to two months as this fight was unfolding and we had spent a couple of thousand dollars on therapy so far and while some things were getting a little better, this fight was making me think only of what continued to go wrong and how we were always precariously close to going from friends to enemies. I didn’t have the language to describe it at the time but I knew our fights were following a pattern. If we escalated past a certain line - they would unfold in a way that was so similar it was insanity inducing. As I remember them now they blur together in a mash up of feelings and visuals of my wife in different parts of our home, rage on her face, yelling, crying, screaming, slamming doors and tearing me down. Every fight we had I left feeling a little less like myself and a little more like a piece of shit. I’m not saying that I was blameless. Frankly I was pretty sure that all of this was my fault. For one, my wife kept telling me that. In addition, even though I didn’t know this at the time - as the scapegoat of my family, I was used to carrying the blame for nearly everything. I wasn’t ever quite good enough and I just couldn’t ever seem to behave right. So over the last two years - through our engagement and our subsequent marriage- I had spent an incredible amount of energy trying to bend myself into a shape that my wife could tolerate. When we would fight I would overanalyze my own behavior leading up to the fight and try to understand what I needed to do differently to keep the peace. When my wife would tell me that I made her life shit I just took that as a factual observation about me and my behavior within our relationship. Even though I didn’t agree, I also didn’t really trust my own judgment so if that’s how I made her feel, then that must contain some modicum of truth. On it went, us fighting, and me trying to communicate later that I couldn’t keep fighting like this. I had been saying this for quite some time, and now that we were in couples therapy I was saying it pretty fucking loudly - that I was approaching some sort of breaking point, some sort of mental wall where I just couldn’t have the same type of fight ever again. I didn’t care if it was entirely my fault, something had to give and this needed to stop. While our disagreement, then argument, and now fight was unfolding these are the thoughts that were rattling around in my mind. The all too familiar feelings and the visual flashbacks of all the other fights that felt exactly the same flashing through my mind. The transition from friends to enemies. The digression from real communication to whatever this was. I hit a breaking point. I didn’t snap, or freak out, or scream. But internally something snapped inside of me. Or maybe something broke free. As I was participating in this fight I was also realizing that when I said I couldn’t do this anymore, that was me being honest. I just couldn’t participate in this. My fault, her fault, our fault - I didn’t care at all. I only knew that someone on this planet needed to make it stop. The therapists didn’t seem like they understood the urgency of my pleas. My wife didn’t seem like she appreciated at all that when I said words I was attempting to communicate with her. Nothing seemed to properly convey how serious this was for me. These fights were killing me. I was drinking myself to death and smoking weed nearly 24 hours a day. That’s when I knew that we were getting divorced. I didn’t know how it was going to happen, or what would happen next, I just knew it was over. Someone needed to make this fighting stop and even though my wife would tell me she hated me and that I was the cause of any of the bad things in her life, she didn’t seem to be in agreement that we needed to get the fuck away from one another. As I paid for our last meal together, my wife angrily walked out and I glanced at the empty Margs, I didn’t even remember eating my food. I only felt awful, some sort of fundamental failure had occurred - we had loved each other and spent a lot of time, money, and energy building a life together, and as I was about to tear it down I became intensely cognizant of the fact that we were in public right now. This had all unfolded in the small bar area of a local Mexican restaurant. When I walked out I felt the tension in the room come with me. Not only had we ruined our marriage but we definitely ruined lunch for all of the folks eating in the small room around us. I naively thought “This is what rock bottom feels like” as the door closed behind me. —— Three weeks later I swiped my credit card for a retainer fee and my lawyer filed for divorce.