The Ballad of the Sad Café

Recently I read “The Ballad of the Sad Café”.  It was not a particularly great story, but I was taken with a little essay contained within the plot in which the author (Carson McCullers) presents her interpretation (or else that of the narrator) of what is going on when two people are ‘in love’.  She believed that in any love relationship between 2 people, there was always one who did more of the loving, while the other person- the beloved- eventually grew contemptuous of the one who was so shamelessly adoring to the point of disappearing within the devotion.  It struck me as a painful truth.  While most married couples would not likely describe their relationships this way (in fact long-term marriages from the outside look disturbingly like resignation, settling, apathy),  there is probably one person of the two who considers him/herself  less likely to fully recover from the demise of the union.  I would venture that fear about surviving a break-up often serves to keep people together through rough patches in their relationship.

Perhaps a little fear can be healthy or at least productive if it serves the purpose of getting lovers over the “did I sign up for all of this?” hurdle.  In my marriage, my husband was the beloved.  I don’t think that he worried for one minute about how hard it might be to live without me.  When the marriage ended, there was no doubt some sadness, some nostalgia – certainly, but mostly I think there was just a concern about how to maintain the mortgage on the house without my salary.  Two very odd things were asked of me after I’d moved out.  In spite of declaring our relationship as ‘toxic’ and the end of our marriage as being ‘freed from a cage’ (these are direct quotes), my husband made two requests of me: one was to keep his children on my benefit plan, and the second was to arrange for a university scholarship for his son from my place of employment.  At the time I could not fathom how he could ask this of me in the same breath that he declared our marriage irrevocably finished.  Briefly I considered the idea that he was looking for ways to keep us connected.  After all, there would be pharmacy receipts and dental invoices to exchange- all of which might lead to monthly meetings over coffee.  Mercifully my backbone re-appeared and I told him that I did not believe that he was entitled to my benefits if he didn’t want me along with them.  In retrospect, I think I see Carson McCullers’ theory at work here.  Only someone whose sense of entitlement was utterly entrenched could show so little respect for someone who loved him.  I think his requests were indicative of a level of contempt for me.  He must have imagined I’d disappeared so thoroughly into the marriage that I had no proprietary sense left at all.

He didn’t ask just once, but three times.  I can’t wrap my head around that.  I truly can’t.  It just doesn’t fit with the man who claimed to love me so deeply.  I don’t know how to reconcile that with the man who agonized over the choice of music at our wedding because he so badly wanted the songs to represent our love story.  Carson McCullers may be on to something here...