The Journal of Best Practices by David Finch Read Free Book Online

something is wrong, and Kristen is biting her lip, her eyes welling with tears, trying to focus on anything in the restaurant that isn’t me.
    It’s not working. Any of it. Our marriage, it seems, is over.
    “What is there to say?” she asks. She looks at me and starts sobbing.
    I hand her a napkin, saying nothing.
    “I don’t know when things got bad,” she says, wiping tears from under her eyes. “I feel like I’ve lost you and I don’t know what will bring you back.” She chews her lip as she organizes her thoughts. “You’re just so cynical and dismissive and checked-out. It’s constant. And it’s not supposed to be this hard . . .” She can’t continue. Her voice is strange, her face is strange—she is consumed with grief.
    I’m annoyed that she’s doing this right now, but not surprised. This is the first time we’ve bothered to talk to each other in weeks. What’s surprising is how little emotion I feel at this moment. By the time I’m able to process all this, I will feel an overwhelming sadness. But right now, in the moment, I feel almost nothing.
    People are looking at us now—first at her, then at me. Just celebrating our third anniversary, folks. Nothing to see here.
    We are not consciously aware of it this evening, as we sit face-to-face in separate worlds, but Kristen is mourning a loss again. This time it’s different. She has my body to hold. It’s right here. She can hear me, see me, touch me, feel me. But she doesn’t want to do any of those things. Embracing me now would be like embracing a stranger. It’s our special friendship that has died, our once deep emotional connection now little more than a distant, if consoling, memory.
    I sit back in my seat and wait as she composes herself. She has every reason to be sobbing right now. She is disappointed in me—I’m not the person she thought she was marrying three years ago. I’m not her friend. But I have nothing to say to her that will radically shift our course and get us back on track, because I’m disappointed, too. I’m disappointed in her for not being the woman I’d thought she’d magically become as soon as we were married: the portrait of domestic excellence, the perfect stay-at-home mom fulfilled by her duties and her love for her somewhat quirky husband. The woman I hadn’t even known I wanted.
    There are no pictures of us on the walls at home, there are no moments of tenderness after a satisfying day of taking care of the baby, there are no clean dishes in the cupboards. There is only resentment. And all this resentment between us certainly explains all the sex we’re not having—and this, in turn, does nothing to combat the ever-mounting resentment. Not only are we no longer friends, we are no longer lovers. Now we are just . . . married. Cheers!
     
    We never would have—never could have—imagined that our relationship would look like this back when we were just friends meeting for coffee. We had no idea that we would someday forget how to be friends. We hadn’t planned on assigning new titles to each other, much less that each new title would bear such hefty expectations. My friend Kristen would become my girlfriend Kristen. The word friend would vanish from the title when Kristen’s boyfriend, Dave, would become her husband, Dave. We didn’t know how detached and distant we would feel from each other after three confusing years of marriage. I didn’t know how lost and defeated Kristen’s eyes would look in our fourth year of marriage, when she’d tell me, “I don’t even know why we decided to get married.”
    Our third anniversary wasn’t what we’d planned, and, sadly, neither was our fourth. But thanks to my Asperger’s diagnosis, which allowed me to take a step back and look at our situation with new understanding, our fifth anniversary looked promising. I’m not an asshole. I don’t mean to be difficult. I can fix this. This knowledge gave me the courage to honestly assess the state of