How Snooping Helped Me Survive Divorce

by Jane Warshaw

Then it got worse. He wrote about our lovemaking. How during sex with me he was impatient about how long it took me to have an orgasm. The thought of him mentally drumming his fingers, angry about the timing of my responsiveness was horrifying. How long did his mental timer allow me? I couldn’t believe that the man I married and had a child with had actually written, much less thought, that. I closed the diary and put it back on the shelf with an entirely new understanding of the expression, “Ignorance is bliss.” What he had written was worse than anything he’d ever said to me. Actually, he hadn’t said much to me at all. He’d certainly never complained about anything in our marriage, and now I felt more betrayed by his writing than anything he could have ever done with another woman.

I recalled a recent Sunday afternoon walking the few blocks home from a museum to our New York City apartment when I said to him, teasingly, “You know, if this were our first date, it would also be our last.” He didn’t answer.

“Either you’ve turned into a really boring person or something is bothering you,” I prodded. “Is something bothering you?” He still didn’t answer.

“Is there something the matter with us?” I ventured. No response.

Finally he said, “I guess I just don’t have enough time to myself. Like time to really read the paper.” We had a 14-month-old daughter who had been born seven weeks prematurely. Between getting her settled in and working full-time, neither of us had enough time to ourselves.