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PURCHASE THE BOOK
A Conversation with Laura Munson
Q: This book had its origins in a “Modern Love” column you wrote for The New York Times in 2009. What was the column about, and what was the reaction to it?
A: It was about a rough patch in my marriage and how I responded to my husband’s proclamation of dis-affection – his telling me that he wasn’t sure he loved me anymore – by saying I didn’t buy it. I felt instead that it was his own crisis of self, and that my work was to get out of his way, to control what I could control, commit to non-suffering, and let go of the rest. My job at that time, and all the time really, is to be responsible for my own well-being, regardless of what’s at hand. The column got a huge, instant response from people of all kinds, from all over the world. I heard from women, men, married people, unmarried people, older people, young people, divorced people, straight and gay people.
Q. So do you see this primarily as a book about marriage?
A. Marriage is the entry point into my book. Ultimately, however, I feel that it is about my personal journey. You can plug the philosophy I write about into any relationship, especially one’s relationship with one’s self.
Q: How did you respond when your husband told you he wasn’t sure he loved you anymore? What happened after that? Did you separate? How did life change for you and your husband and your family?
A: We did not separate. We spent the summer being distant from one another. Sometimes we handled it well. Sometimes we handled it like scared people in crisis. But I was committed to non-suffering, and so I did my best to live in the moment. Distance is a normal part of every relationship. My question to him was, “How can we give you the distance you need without doing damage to our children?” For him, that meant there was a lot of camping and fishing. We live in Montana, which is its own kind of therapy. I realize that people are interested in what was going on under our roof, but my message is more about what was going on under my mind's roof. My heart and soul's roof, if you will.
Q: At the beginning of the book, you challenge yourself and the reader not to take sides. Why do you make that challenge?
A: I loved my husband. I knew he was in crisis. I recognized where he was in his life from my own past experience. It’s very dangerous when you align your sense of self-worth with career success. Which we both did. Each of us knew better, but we still somehow managed to arrange our minds like that. I knew that taking sides in that time in my life wouldn’t do anything but cause more suffering. We have always been on the same team, even in our hardest times. So when I saw him stepping off our team, I didn’t want to meet his actions with more of the same. That would have had me instantly in a place of anger, fear, and opposition. I wasn’t interested in vilifying him. Again, I love him. Even though what he said and did was intensely hurtful. It is possible, however, not to take things personally, even when they’re meant personally. We don’t have to own what other people say to us or about us. In order to have a comment affect us emotionally, we have to agree with it. It’s a choice. There’s intense freedom in that. And that was my choice: freedom. Every relationship has breakdowns of sorts. I saw what was happening, and knew that he had to find his own way. And that my being reactionary would only make things worse. It’s a powerful thing to live life without taking sides. Looking at our relationships with people in the world not as us/them, but us/us.
Q: How were you able to react as you did?
A: I was well-poised to react the way I did because I’d been working with pain and loss for a few years prior to my husband’s dis-affection. I’d suffered greatly after the loss of my father and years of rejections from the publishing world—particularly one that occurred just after his death, in which I had cut three hundred pages out of a book, at an editor’s request, and re-written another two hundred in their place. Still to meet with rejection after the revision. And it really rocked me to the core. It was a no-brainer. I slapped myself into therapy and started doing some intense spiritual work, not just seeking, but practice, and in it all, I was able to see where I was suffering, that it didn’t serve me, and how to climb out of it or thwart it.
Q: How do you work with suffering?
A: First, you have to be able to see where it is that you are suffering. That’s very hard for a lot of people, myself included. Suffering has become our normal, in so many cases. We don’t even know when we’re in pain sometimes. We just endure it. Or we think that it’s a small price to pay to get to the truth. But suffering is never worth it.
Q: You grew up with privilege. What do you say to people who say you don't know what real suffering is?
A: During that time in my life, I chose a few friends to share my situation with. The one I shared most with was raised in abject poverty and has met with devastating tragedy and several near-death situations. And it was she who gave me the best advice. I prefaced my story to her with shame, saying that I knew my pain was nowhere near what she’s experienced in her life. And she quickly taught me that it’s not helpful to compare pain. Or discount our pain because there’s worse pain out there. She helped me to see that suffering is only relevant to your own experience. And pain is pain is pain. In fact, sometimes people with privilege can do a better job hiding their pain, choosing to suffer alone. I hope my book will help give people permission to identify their suffering and move away from it.
Q: Would you have been able to react as you did if you had discovered your husband was having an affair?
A: Well, I don’t know, because that’s not my story. I asked him if there was a third party involved, he said no, there were no specific arrows pointing me to that conclusion, and so rather than enduring the suffering it would take to doubt him and try to find out definitively whether or not he was having an affair, I chose to believe him. I think highly of my husband.
Q: If you did find out he was having an affair, would it have been a deal breaker?
A: It’s a good question to ask yourself when you take your vows: what is your worse in for better for worse? For me, announcing that your love for your spouse is in question is already a betrayal of your wedding vows. So it makes me wonder how many people are in unloving relationships, abusive even, who are willing to stay in them just because there is no third party. To me, dis-affection and an affair are both betrayals. Both inspire a person to suffer. Both bring pain with them. But I haven’t experienced that particular kind of pain, so I don’t know what my reaction would be, in all honesty. You never know until you’re there.
Q: So where do you draw the line then? How long do you endure dis-affection?
A: Well, that’s entirely up to the individual. I think it helps to make rules for yourself, and to speak them aloud to someone whom you can trust, who can help to keep you on track should you fall into denial or some sort of dangerous situation—preferably a therapist. But I don’t look at them like deadlines. Or cliffs. Or guillotines. I look at them like check-in points. A time to really ask yourself if you are willing to go further. But in my situation, I was relying on my instincts. And my years of knowing this man. So, while I made a six-month check-in point for myself as a protective device, the work was not to focus on the future or the outcome, but rather to focus on what I could own and be responsible for in the moment, and that was largely me and my children. My instincts said to get out of his way, if he was to do the work I felt he needed to do to start caring for his soul and stop blaming me for his unhappiness, which I felt came largely from his relationship with his self.
Q: Why did you want to write a memoir during such a hard time, exposing yourself and your family?
A: That’s what we writers do. We write what we know, hopefully with some discretion when it comes to our loved ones. I had rules about how much I would share, especially about my children. I try to write for the greater good. That’s my artist’s statement: I write to shine a light on a dim or pitch black corner in order to provide relief for myself and others. In memoir, finding that balance between discretion and story is sticky. I worked hard to strike that balance in my book. And I feel that I achieved it.
Q: Aren’t you generally a fiction writer?
A: Yes. I’ve always said that fiction is distilled reality. Realer than real. But in this case, I needed to be the protagonist for my own process. And I figured that since I needed to write from the trenches, there were many others who would appreciate a voice that felt very real to them. That they could trust to be vulnerable and raw, like a good friend. That they knew really existed in the world. So they didn’t have to feel so alone. I look forward to getting back to fiction though. It’s my first love.
Q: What do you say to people who criticized you for being a whipping post just so that you could remain a married person? And to those who criticized you for being a bad role model to your children?
A: This was not a strategy to keep myself married. This was a philosophy I used to commit to my own well-being. And there’s never a better time than a crisis to practice what you know to be true. I think that’s a powerful message to teach to your children. Crisis happens. It’s who you are in crisis that counts.
Q: How about the people who say that you buried your head in the sand?
A: Burying your head in the sand is denial. Burying your head in the moment is freedom. I’m not interested in denial. I’m interested in freedom.
Q: What do you say to people who think your actions were anti-feminist?
A: What’s more feminist than being strong in your own skin? I chose to be strong in my convictions and instincts and that’s an empowering message for women. I didn’t believe the marriage was meant to end. If I did, I would have taken him up on his request to separate. Or I would have initiated that conversation myself.
Q: Do you see anything that links the relatively few responses to your essay that were negative?
A: Mostly I got very positive, beautiful responses. I think that the people who criticized the essay are people who make it a habit to focus their energy on making other people wrong. The payoff to that is that they can feel right. I’m not interested in right and wrong any more, in that context. Living in a mind that’s focusing its energy in that direction causes suffering of the worst kind. I’m not saying that there isn’t baseline right and wrong in society. I’m talking about a different kind of right and wrong. The kind that arranges things so that people can play victim to other people or institutions so that they don’t have to take responsibility for their own well-being. The kind that perpetuates myths.
Q: What kinds of myths are you talking about?
A: Oh, there are many that came up for me as I wrote the book. I think that even beyond my book’s message, there is a greater foundational design to it that is very intentionally interested in showing the reader (and me) how we set ourselves up for pain by believing in myths, and then when they prove to be just that—myths—we feel powerless. I’m saying that our power comes from within. So…the myths that came up for me when I was writing the book were:
- The happily-ever-after myth (a great cautionary tale for young people)
- The career success defines your self-worth myth
- The I’m golden myth
- The happiness or misery come from things outside your control myth
- The societal institutions will save you myth
- The rebel is free myth
Q: Do you think that your own crisis of sorts after your father died brought on your husband’s dis-affection?
A: Well, I used to spend a lot of time thinking like that—rewinding tapes in my head. But I’ve learned that it just brings suffering, and as I’ve said, I’m not interested in suffering any more. I’m not always good at it, but I’ve learned to really put on the brakes when I catch myself looking to the past. Because usually when I’m doing that, I’m trying to punish myself for something. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t take ownership of our mistakes. We do need to take ownership. And then we need to move on. If someone has a problem with us after we’ve taken ownership, that’s really their business, not ours.
Q: Your husband was able to spend a lot of time with his sister and her children when she was going through a very difficult time – dying of cancer and dealing with the end of a long marriage after her husband left her for a much younger woman. How did her death inspire your husband’s returned devotion to your marriage?
A: He had the opportunity to really see what matters in life. And that’s not your career success. It’s your relationships. Including your own relationship with yourself. That was his sister’s gift.
Q: Ultimately you and your husband decided to continue in your marriage. Where do things stand between you today?
A: We’re proud of ourselves. We made it through a hard time and we didn’t break up what we’d spent so many years creating. It is amazing how when you live your truth, in a careful, positive way, the results can be abundant. Which is how it’s been for my husband and me.
Q: Do you subscribe to any particular religion?
A: I have always been a seeker—ever since I had my first metaphysical thought at a very young age. I do have a deeply spiritual life. But I left the specifics of that out of my book. And will continue to do that for the sake of the message. I don’t want to attribute this philosophy to any one religion. I don’t want people to be alienated or be made right or wrong. I’m sick of that in our society. That’s how we’ve become so reactionary. You can plug in this sort of philosophy to any and no religion. My favorite comments on the original essay are from religious practitioners, because there’s such an interface going on between their beliefs and my story. A minister who used my essay in his Sunday sermon, a Buddhist retreat center that passed it out to 350 attendees. A woman in Lebanon whose therapist gave it to her. Lots of therapists. Divorce mediators, lawyers…. I’ve heard from Buddhists, Christians, Muslims, atheists, Jews. The gamut. And there’s nothing that makes me happier than to think that something I’ve written transcends social groups and religions and lands on a universal message.
Q: What would you say is the message of your book?
A: That it is possible to commit to non-suffering in a time of crisis. To let go of outcome. To truly live in the moment as a way of survival, not just as spiritual preference or practice. When we are living like that, we are living in freedom. I can honestly say that even if my husband and I had split for whatever reason, I would still consider that time in my life a success because it is so powerful to live like that—being responsible for your own happiness. I needed that book on my bedside table, and couldn’t find one like it, so I wrote it. I hope it will help people.
