The front door slams and my husband’s heavy footsteps stomp through the hall.
I’m in the TV room, meditating, but my heart has started pounding. The serenity of our small home has disappeared.
I feel all the dark, angry energy he’s brought into my life these past couple of years. I open my eyes and get up from the sofa, knowing he’ll want to talk, knowing there’s no way to sink back into blissful nothingness while he’s in the house.
I hear the freezer open and the chink of ice in glasses. He appears in the doorway with two drinks, one for me, diluted with tonic, one for him, neat. Both are filled almost to the brim.
I was not a big drinker before I met my husband, but I understand now that, after twenty years, drink has been the only thing keeping us together, a shared ritual at the end of every day.
How I used to love this time.
When our three children were living at home, cocktail hour meant the beginning of the evening – and all the joy that came with it: rustling up dinner for the children as they sat at the kitchen table doing their homework, watching them dash outside to play before the sun set.
We had a beautiful family home in Santa Monica and our lives, from the outside, looked charmed. For a time, they felt charmed.
We had a beautiful family home and our lives, from the outside, looked charmed. For a time, they felt charmed.
But after the last of our children flew the nest three years ago, everything changed – and that charmed life now feels like a distant dream.
I thought I couldn’t wait for the children to leave. It would be the start of new adventures for me and my husband.
We hadn’t been on vacation for years (all those children are so expensive!) and I sorely missed the traveling I’d enjoyed when I was young.
I thought we’d take off for Europe, maybe visit Bali, India. I imagined doing wild things together, growing ever closer without any children to take care of.
I never dreamed the opposite would happen.
About 13 years ago, with the children still young, my husband lost his job.
I have always worked and have long made enough to support the whole family. I’ve been lucky, forging a path as a successful screenwriter, with tens of millions of people enjoying my work.
Sure, we couldn’t do the expensive vacations after my husband’s income dried up, but we lived in a beautiful five-bedroom house close to the ocean in Los Angeles – we’d bought it for $2million after I’d written a hit movie and I’d spent a further $300,000 turning it into my dream home.
And my husband turned out to be an amazing Mr Mom. He left me to write and bring in the money, while he did the school run and drove the kids to baseball practice, doctor’s appointments, playdates.
When he wasn’t doing that, he was meeting other out-of-work men in our wealthy suburban town, daydreaming over endless cups of coffee about businesses they could start together, businesses they could invest in, businesses that would never turn into anything.
Looking at our life, everyone thought it was perfect. Our friends and neighbors knew my husband didn’t work, but they presumed it was because he’d made a fortune working in venture capital and retired early.
The truth was, although he had indeed worked for venture capital company, his firm never made real money. By the time he lost his job, he had nothing in the bank.
But my husband would rather have died than have anyone know that his wife was the one providing all the income.
So, for many years, we made our secretive role-reversal marriage work. Until the industry changed.
The advent of streaming put pay to traditional movie budgets, and everyone started tightening their belts.
Suddenly I wasn’t being paid anything like what I had once earned. But, naively perhaps, we didn’t adjust our lifestyles, presuming that I was always one script away from another big feature, that the money would come back, that we would be able to carry on as we always had.
This life of reckless denial, of burning through all our savings, trudged on for several years. And then came the 2023 writers strike, and it all dried up.
I have always worked and have long made enough to support the whole family. I’ve been lucky, forging a path as a successful screenwriter, with tens of millions of people enjoying my work.
Our house was looking shabbier and shabbier. We needed a new roof and a new furnace. My husband urged me to try different kinds of writing, other things to bring in money. I urged him to get a job. He refused.
Instead, he rented an office and tried to set up a practice as a consultant, but he failed to produce any paying clients. He would sit and chat with friends all day, never bringing in a dime. When we fought about it, he’d tell me it takes time to set up a practice.
He had that office for two years, but never a single client.
Finally, we were forced to sell the house in which our children had grown up, and downsize. It was devastating, but I told myself it was just a house, and that we would be fine.
My husband still wasn’t making any money yet blamed me for not being able to keep the house. I was furious at him for not working, for leaving me to provide on my own. I felt I had been abandoned when things got rough, and I had no idea how to forgive him for that.
I tried not to care about our tiny new two-bedroom house on a side of town where no one we knew lived. But our friends – or the people we thought were our friends – did. As soon as we moved, the invitations dried up. When we weren’t running into our neighbors while walking the dog, the neighbors forgot all about us.
And the house was too small to be able to have people over to ours. I told myself it didn’t matter – even when the children wanted to come home for Thanksgiving, Christmas, summer, and there weren’t enough bedrooms.
They slept on sofas and air mattresses, and instead of those big family dinners around a huge kitchen table, we ate off our laps while squeezing together on the living room sofa.
But the biggest change was in my husband. He had always been gentle and fun-loving. Now he was simmering with anger. He barked at me and the kids whenever they were home. Once supportive and encouraging, he was now bristling with criticisms.
Everything I did, or said, was wrong. What I wore; how I acted. He started berating me in front of our friends – and I grew quieter, withdrawing into myself, not knowing how to get my husband back.
We started arguing more. When I bought up the fact he needed to bring in money, how I couldn’t do this on my own, he would get defensive and start pointing out how I wasn’t ‘supportive’, how I wasn’t interested in his latest fanciful business plan.
The fight would end with him storming out in anger, before the inevitable return a few hours later conciliatory, apologetic – until the next time.
I started going to bed before him. He would stay downstairs drinking and scrolling on his phone. Eventually, he would stumble up to join me, drunk, or pass out on the sofa downstairs, his snoring throbbing through the house.
Of course, our sex life had all but disappeared. When we did have sex, I hated every second, wanting it to be over quickly so I could be alone again.
It was around this point that we both fell into a depression.
Women are said to internalize their sadness, whereas men externalize it.
There were days when I could barely get out of bed. The children had gone, I stopped seeing friends, and rarely left the house. I tried to write, but the words wouldn’t come.
His depression, meanwhile, manifested itself in anger and alcohol. He was constantly furious and drowned it in massive glugs of vodka.
I became afraid of his temper but hoped desperately things would change.
You see, I still loved him, and had always thought we would be married forever, never letting myself contemplate divorce, even though I knew I had never been so unhappy.
My husband would rather have died than have anyone know that his wife was the one providing all the income.
I suggested we see a couple’s therapist, but he refused. I urged him to try antidepressants, but he refused.
Then one day, as we launched into the same old fight, I found myself telling him, simply, coldly, that I couldn’t do it on my own anymore.
He grabbed his keys and slammed the front door. And while this routine was no different from the hundreds of other arguments we’d had, everything was different. A small switch had flicked inside me.
When he returned, hours later, and stood in the doorway with those two glass tumblers, full to the brim with alcohol, begging my forgiveness, I couldn’t look him in the eye. A shutter had come down around me; I knew it was over.
So this is how my marriage ended. I still wish we had seen a therapist. I wish we had learned how to talk to each other and, more importantly, how to listen.
I wish we had each dealt with whatever demons prevented my husband from working, and me from being unquestioningly supportive.
But I know I did the right thing.
Now single in my 50s, my career has come back, with a new TV show that keeps me busy.
As for him, he’s fallen straight into another relationship – with a wealthy widow, naturally. I hear he’s moved in with her, and she’s funding their glamorous life together.
They say a leopard can’t change his spots.