Craigslist Confessional

by Helena Dea Bala

  The long answer is that I lose myself in work to avoid feeling like I’m being gulped up by an unexciting, unremarkable life. One of my biggest sources of anxiety is that my wife and I haven’t had sex in over six months. We’ve been married for eighteen years, and in those years—well, especially in the last five years—the space between us seems to keep growing. Any attempt I make at breaching the gap seems contrived; she thinks that it’s all a means to an end, the end being sex. But honestly, I want to feel that we’re not just roommates—that we’re not just waiting for the kids to grow up so that we can move on. It’s starting to become very apparent that maybe we’ve just changed, that maybe things are becoming irreconcilable.

  But it’s not all her fault. We have separate bedtimes, and she often stays up to study or catch up on work. I do, too. There have been times when she’s tried to initiate intimacy and I’ve turned her down. I tell her that I’ll be up in a minute, but then I get caught up with work, or I decide I need a shower. I realize I’m making excuses. And that worries me.

  We both work in the same field, and it’s a highly competitive one. I have a higher position, but she recently chose to go back to school and finish her MBA so that she can have access to better opportunities. She left her job and got a better position in management, so I think she feels that it was worth the sacrifice. My goal this year was to move up the ladder, to get a raise—and I did, so I feel better about my station, too. I supported my wife’s goal, but she says that I secretly begrudge her success. In a lot of ways, it does seem like a zero-sum game. We don’t directly compete, but you can see how our respective goals lead to each making demands of the other’s time. Any time that she spent with her schoolwork is time that I had to spend compensating—whether it’s for housework or parenting chores.

  It doesn’t help that we have entirely different parenting styles. She’s strict, and I’m more laid-back; the kids see this and, being kids, they pit us against each other. I let them get away with it, which upsets her endlessly. For example, it’s the fourteen-year-old’s responsibility to do the dishes after dinner every night. She reminds him, and he says (usually while engrossed in a TV show or video game), “I’ll get to it in a few minutes.” She gets aggravated, then firm, then she starts to nag. If that doesn’t work, she escalates the situation: “You better do it now, or I will take away the TV.” So then he appeals to me, and I take his side because he’s just a kid, and he doesn’t need to be so serious about everything just yet. I tell her to relax, to let him do it on his own time as long as it gets done. She tells me that I’m teaching my kids to procrastinate. And then the night is shot.

  I spend money on them—on us—money that she doesn’t think we have. I love taking the boys to baseball games, and I spend about $500 a game—seats, food, and transportation. That’s good family-bonding time and good entertainment. But she thinks that it’s too much money and the kids will feel entitled. She has a very firm grip on our finances, and we always fight about it. She has access to my bank account—what I make and what I spend, and she’ll often micromanage it. I bought some tools for a home-improvement project, and she wanted me to return them. I refused. It seems like we fight about everything lately because she assumes that I’ll contradict her for the sake of contradicting. It’s getting rough; being in this marriage is burning up so much energy that it feels like I’m holding down a second job.

  My growing detachment must have been pretty obvious because a few months ago, she looked through my phone and found texts from a woman I’d met on Craigslist. We had been corresponding regularly and having an emotional affair—I reached out to her for support, I guess. Marie was also married and had issues with her husband. Misery loves company, and you get to a place where you convince yourself that it’s part of marriage. It’s crap, and everyone is suffering. Even when people are holding hands and smiling, they’re miserable in their homes. You become very cynical about what marriage is.

  “This is not what normal people do,” my wife told me. “And if that’s what you want to do, then you’re on your own.”

  So it was an ultimatum of sorts. I needed to step up. I realized that we were trying to do too much. We were trying to have it all, and we got burnt out. We were like tinder—it only took one little spark to fire us up. My wife offered to put her MBA on hold to give us a fighting chance, but I had promised to support her, and I wanted to deliver. So things just got worse.

  Eventually my wife said, “If you want to be serious about us getting better, we need counseling—individually, but you probably need it more.”

  I told her that I felt anxious about so many things, and she said she felt it, too, but she had chosen not to take it out on our relationship.

  What struck me most was her suggestion that perhaps I was someone who wanted to exist in the context of a family but, when it all came down to it, I wanted to do my own thing. She told me that I needed to figure out what I wanted before we could move forward.

  She said, basically: “Even if you go to therapy and proclaim that you’re in a better place, what’s to stop you from going back to [emotionally cheating] once the spotlight is off of you?”

  At first, I thought, Wow, she’s throwing a lot on me. But then I figured, Okay, I’ll do it. I’ll commit to therapy. We’ll see what happens. So now I have a standing therapy session on Fridays from 8:30 to 9:30 a.m. This therapist provides me with tools to confront my issues without getting flustered and hopeless. It’s like religion. It only works if you believe in it and go through the rituals of it. I think that the practice of setting aside the time for my feelings opened up a little bit of my blocked emotions. I also realized that my wife saw I was putting in the time “to go to church” and making an effort. So it was a positive thing for us.

  It has helped me learn that love evolves over time. The romance and the emotional part become secondary. The practicalities of life—the obligations and responsibilities, the loop jumping—they take precedence. We’re in a better place now. With therapy, we’ve been able to get over the chasm that was opened between us. We’re not 100 percent back to where it was twenty years ago when we first met, but we have to have everything else working properly in order for us to get to the point of having intimate, satisfying sex. Right now, we’re getting our needs met. It’s not raging hormones and amazing, mind-blowing sex—we’re just working on repairing our relationship. So we keep jumping through the hoops, sticking to our routine.

  Around 6:00 p.m. every day, I usually get a text from my wife. Where are you? she wants to know. Sometimes, Are you avoiding us? Maybe I still am. I reluctantly get back in my car and for another nineteen minutes, I am on my own. There are no children demanding to watch just five more minutes of their TV show. There is no wife nagging me about money, or about working too much or not working hard enough. It is quiet and I get to visit with my thoughts, and for a little while, I feel all right.

  As I pull up to the third stop sign from my house, though, anxiety bubbles in the pit of my stomach and I slow the car down to a crawl. I keep going, little by little, meaning to stop any second now—but the driveway slips away, and then I can see it in the rearview mirror. I drive around the block once more, twice more, and then I finally park.

  Federico, twenties

  I was ten years old when we moved to the States from South America. We lived a comfortable life there—we were middle-class, and my parents owned several shoe stores. But we were drawn to the DC area by the classic immigrant dream: safety, a better life. My mom and dad came with me, and we left my younger siblings with my aunt back home. The plan was that we would try to bring them here once we got things in order. Or to make a little bit of money and go back. Eight years passed in a heartbeat.

  We left my siblings behind when they were seven and eight, respectively. The next time my mother saw them, they were teenagers. My aunt passed away from cancer, and my mom had to go back home. She’s there now, taking care of my siblings and my aunt’s children, too. I haven’t s
een her in three years. This has torn our family apart, and the only solace I feel is in knowing that it’s for a greater good. I can’t imagine what it must be like for my father, not to see his wife and children. I can’t imagine what it must be like for my mother, to be away from me. We speak on the phone and see each other on video every day, but it is not the same. During almost every call, someone brings up how our sacrifice “will all be worth it,” usually when talking about my education. And when we say goodbye, my mother always cries. Every time I talk to her, I think, Maybe today she won’t cry.

  I played soccer in high school, and I was very good. I had opportunities to play overseas, but I couldn’t pursue them because I’m not a citizen. I was not driven when I was younger. All I wanted to do was play soccer professionally and I couldn’t do that, so I gave it up. We came here legally, with a visa that we overstayed, so now we have no road to citizenship. There aren’t very many job opportunities for undocumented kids with no path to citizenship, so my dad told me that I had to work construction with him. I started when I was eighteen, right after I graduated high school. I was a kid. Working with my dad put a lot of stress on our relationship. I was afraid often—I felt totally unqualified. We were building something with our hands, and the responsibility of what we were doing was heavy. What if someone got hurt because of a mistake I made? Everything felt big, and it made me feel very small.

  But all that doubt and fear went away when I got my first paycheck. I felt rich. I saved my money and sent it back to my family. When my mother moved back, my father, uncle, and I all moved in together in a studio apartment. Shortly thereafter, my dad and I both got laid off. It’s not like you have job security when you’re undocumented; one day you have a job, the next you don’t, and that’s just the way it is. Who are you going to complain to? Who is going to care? I remember how horrible those months were. My uncle was working in events and planning for a university, so he would bring us leftover food from their events. Whole months went by of eating leftover sandwiches with little toothpicks in them. That’s how we survived.

  When we found work again, it taught me the value of money. For my dad, it was a bittersweet experience. When school and my dreams of playing professional soccer didn’t pan out for me, I think he thought it was fine for his eldest to do some manual labor, to learn what it meant to go to sleep dog-tired at the end of the day. But he saw the stress that work, and then unemployment, put on me, and I think he realized that maybe I was still too young to be learning these lessons. I noticed that he was working hard—much harder than before—and he would often cover my work, too. He said that it hurt him to see me doing such hard physical labor. He felt bad for me, and I understand. I would want a better life for my son, too.

  He had an accident at work one day: he fell off an eight-foot ladder. He was unconscious on the floor, and I called the ambulance in a panic. When we got to the hospital, I could tell that he was in a lot of pain, but the doctors kept telling us that he was fine. We didn’t have insurance, so they didn’t want to treat him. We eventually just went home. My dad never went back to work—he couldn’t. His back has never been the same; he has trouble getting up from a seated position, and when he straightens out his body, his face goes red from the pain. At around the time of my father’s injury, the university my uncle worked for found out that he didn’t have papers, and they fired him. So we gave my uncle my father’s tools, and he started working construction with me.

  After that, I started downloading books online about becoming a foreman and a project manager. I paid attention at work and asked my boss questions when I didn’t understand why we were doing something; I took ownership of my work, and my boss slowly started giving me more and more responsibility. After a couple of years, he gave me opportunities to manage jobs on my own. But that didn’t change the fact that I still didn’t have a work permit. It didn’t matter how hard I tried or how good I was at my job, because at the end of the day I was still undocumented, with no solution in sight.

  I don’t remember how I met her, but I should have seen it coming. A couple of months into us knowing each other, she said that she saw how difficult it was for me to be away from my family and that she would marry me so that I could get my papers. I told her that I wasn’t sure I wanted to be married right now—I had feelings for her, but I’d only known her for a little while, and I definitely wasn’t sure that she was someone I wanted to marry. I had a lot of doubts about it, but she said she understood that it was a marriage of convenience. It seemed too good to be true, but I went along with it because I thought it would be a quick fix to so many of my problems.

  We went to city hall, and shortly after we got married, I got a conditional green card, which meant that I’d have to be with her for another two years if I wanted to get citizenship. They do this so that people don’t take advantage of the process and then get divorced as soon as they get their papers. But almost immediately, she started getting very jealous and possessive. She told me that she felt I would eventually fall in love with her. I was completely dependent on her and her whims—she threatened to divorce me or tell the government that it was a sham marriage—and I guess she knew she had me where she wanted me. Eventually, all these small financial emergencies started coming up: a fix for the car here, new furniture there. She and her mother were constantly hitting me up for money.

  By the time I asked her for a divorce, about a year in, I was totally broke and an anxious wreck. But I had decided that my health and peace of mind came before a stupid piece of paper. She, of course, completely refused to grant me the divorce. I couldn’t take it anymore, so I showed up at the immigration office and told them everything. They said they’d cancel my application, and a lot of money, heartache, and anxiety later, I was right back where I started. The whole experience was really traumatic for me and my family. We are not the types of people who cause trouble and break rules. We are not criminals. I did this because I had no other option, and I really scared myself and my parents when it didn’t work out.

  But things did look up for me. A year or two after the divorce, I met Ana. Her story is as crazy as mine. She was born in Latvia to alcoholic parents. Unable to care for their children, they passed the three daughters on to their grandmother. When she passed away, the older daughters ended up on the streets. Ana was lucky enough to be put into a Latvian orphanage that had connections with the States. While she was under their care, she went from foster parent to foster parent for years. When she turned thirteen, she was told that a sixty-one-year-old former nurse from America wanted to adopt her. She came here on a trial basis and loved it—loved her new mom, too. So she stayed. And, eventually, she met me. She always tells me, “You don’t have to be blood to be family.” We’re getting married next year.

  I feel like I never had a childhood. I had so many people—my mom, my siblings, my aunt’s kids—depending on me from such a young age. I work all the time—we all do—so that we can support each other. I don’t waste money on luxuries, I don’t drink, and I don’t do drugs. I don’t get in trouble with the law. I just keep my head down and work so that my family and my siblings can have a better life, a better future. The sacrifice we have made as a family, to break in two so that we can have better lives, is not something I take lightly. But also, what does that mean—better lives? It’s hard to quantify. Is not seeing my mother worth a better paycheck? When my aunt died, it brought things into perspective. My mother could die, and I would not be able to go to her funeral.

  I’m not sure there’s a happy ending for all of us as a family—if my father wants to see his wife and children again, he will have to go back to South America, which means leaving me here. My mother and my siblings won’t be able to come to my wedding, which makes me very sad. I have to believe that all our sacrifices will count for something—that my life in this country matters, that maybe my children will be able to chase their dreams because of their father. Who knows? Maybe one of them will be a soccer star. I have to believe
it. Otherwise, it would be impossible to wake up every morning.

  Gemma, early twenties

  I met my boyfriend in college. I was out to lunch with a girlfriend of mine and we were at a cafeteria-style spot on campus. He and a friend of his sat down next to us, and I remember immediately feeling that they were kind of looking at us and talking about us. We were both single at the time, so we reciprocated—we were having the type of conversations that you have when you know people are overhearing.

  I remember I’d gotten Thai noodles from the buffet bar and the peanut sauce kept spraying all over my face. I’d forgotten to get napkins, and my friend said loudly, “You look ridiculous. You need a bib.”

  And he kind of leaned over (he was a table away from us), and he said, “For what it’s worth, I think you look adorable. But here’s your bib.” And he gave me a napkin.

  This is far from a great romance, but I was nineteen, and I thought he was cute—cute enough to go out on a couple of dates, maybe. Before we left for class, we exchanged numbers with both of them. I remember not being super excited about him; I didn’t have butterflies or anything, which is really interesting because every single guy I’ve dated seriously since, I’ve had immediate “butterflies” for. He’s the only guy I’ve ever dated to whom I wasn’t super physically attracted.

  So anyways, I was studying at the library the next day when he texted me and asked if I was doing anything. I blew off my work and went to hang out with him, and the rest is history. I should also mention that he was quite a bit older than me—by almost a decade—he’d taken time off after college and was actually in the graduate school there.

  I was supposed to be living in the dorms at school. He lived off campus, and we were spending so much time together that I ended up basically moving in with him. It all happened in the span of a month—we met, started hanging out, and then most of my stuff was at his place. My roommate at the time (whom I met maybe three times), was this Russian girl who was super thin and beautiful and aloof, and I remember “moving in” my things to the room we were supposed to share and then gradually moving everything back out to his spot. I basically had maybe three pieces of clothing there and a pair of shoes. Everything else was over at his apartment.