The Snowman

A friend of mine put this status on Facebook today and it spoke to me so much it inspired this blog. As a trainee counsellor, it was important for me to talk through my current troubles with a counsellor of my own. This is always a good thing to do anyway, but as a trainee it also makes sure you process all those emotions and hopefully stops them affecting your own work with clients. One of the thoughts that kept going through my mind after my husband left was whether I really knew him. He had seemed to change so much over the time we’d been married that I knew something was wrong. However, the ‘new’ man he was becoming was only new to me. I kept hearing stories and assurances that far from being a totally changed man from the one I married, he had simply reverted to who he had been all along. I told my counsellor I felt like I’d been in love with some sort of phantom.

I loved someone who simply wasn’t there.

I used writing to explore this and help me face a reality I had clearly been denying for a long time. During our time together as this started to go wrong I kept asking myself the question:

‘Why would someone behave like that if they love you?’

This is where being a counsellor can sometimes work against you. I analysed and rationalised his behaviour to the point where I probably had more excuses than he did. I found myself defending him to friends and family and trying to make them understand that there were reasons, and that he was not what they thought he was. It was only recently, when things became clearer, that I could answer my own question.

He behaved like that because he didn’t love me.

This was hard to accept, but it was the obvious answer. Of course there is a context and background to anyone’s behaviour, but once he admitted he did not love me it was a huge relief. I could then put aside all the questions swirling round in my mind – the answer to every one of them was a lack of love. It was like taking a deep breath and feeling all my tension and stress float away into the air.

Then another question surfaced. How did I marry someone who so clearly did not love me? Again, the answer was simple – I saw what I needed to see. Yes, I had been deceived by someone who was clearly so good at it he managed to take in friends and family too, but also I had needed so much to be loved.

I had been alone for only a year, but that year was a lifetime. It was very hard to be a widow. I couldn’t understand why God would give me someone so perfect for me, my soul mate and my other half, just to take him away again. I thought that maybe this was my chance to be happy – that this was my reward for going through the most difficult experience of my life. I genuinely loved my new husband and believed we would be together for life, but now I have to face that the man I was in love with did not really exist and the world I had built around us was a sham. The photos of holidays, our wonderful home and pets mocked me because now they seemed like a desperate attempt to show everything was perfect, that life does have happy endings.

My lifelong partnership was only temporary. Just like we build snowmen to help us enjoy the snow, I had built a marriage to help me face my life. We build a snowman in the knowledge he is temporary, but yet there is still something melancholy about their melting. It is a reminder of the losses we have in life. I married a snowman and wept when he melted away.