Forty Years And One Room We Do Not Go Into

He has never once said a word against it. In forty one years, not one.

He drove her to it. He waited in car parks. When it was cold he brought a flask and read the paper for two hours and never made a remark about the time. When people in the family had opinions, he shut those conversations down, quietly and firmly, on her behalf.

And he has never come in.

Not out of hostility. He simply does not have it, and never has, and after about the fifth year he stopped pretending to and she stopped asking, and both of those were kindnesses at the time. He believes in God. He prays before he eats. It is just that the thing that happened to her in her thirties, which is the largest thing that has ever happened to her, is a country he has no passport for and no wish to visit.

So there is a room in this house that neither of them goes into. She goes in alone, and she has gone in alone for forty years, and it is the best room in the house.

She has never complained about it, because there is nothing to complain about. He is a good man. Everybody says so and everybody is right. And she is the loneliest woman she knows, in a marriage she would defend against anybody.

If your closest person could never come in, sit down at this table. Nobody's husband is going on trial here.

A good marriage can still have a cost in it

Let us say the plain thing, because forty years of not saying it is why it has grown so heavy.

Something was lost. Not the marriage, which is sound, and not his kindness, which has been constant. What was lost is the ordinary expectation that the person nearest you knows the largest thing about you from the inside.

She traded that away, quietly, in about the fifth year, and never told anybody she was doing it, and she has been paying it every week since in a currency nobody around her can see.

And she has forbidden herself to call it a cost, on the grounds that a good marriage is not allowed to have one.

You are not being disloyal by naming this. Nothing about a marriage worth defending has ever meant it cost you nothing. I am not saying that to open something. Scripture says trust in him at all times; ye people, pour out your heart before him: God is a refuge for us (Psalm 62:8), which tells a person where to take a heart that has nowhere else to be poured, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that hold in a woman who has been in that room alone since her thirties.

Where an unshared thing is meant to go

Here is the part that turned this for me, and it puts nothing on your husband.

Read what the verse assumes about the person it is speaking to.

Trust in him at all times; ye people, pour out your heart before him: God is a refuge for us.Psalm 62:8

Pour out. That is not a tidy summary offered upward. It is the emptying of a vessel, and it assumes a person with more inside them than has anywhere to go.

And then, refuge. That word is chosen for somebody who has been holding a thing out in the open with no shelter for it, which is a fair description of forty years of going into one room alone.

You have somewhere to pour this, and Scripture names Him as the refuge for exactly what has had nowhere to go. That is written into the verse itself, and it is the Holy Spirit who brings it to a woman at her own kitchen table.

He is not being judged here

This has to be said very plainly, because a page like this could easily curdle into a case against a man who has done nothing wrong.

He is not a lesser Christian. He has no obligation to have what she has, nobody chooses the shape of their own faith, and the flask in the car park for years on end is a form of love that would shame a great many people who would have followed her in and talked about it constantly.

And she was not wrong to go where she went either.

This was real and it cost you. You can hold both without deciding which of you was wrong. Scripture says if it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men (Romans 12:18), where the qualifier concedes that some of it is not in anybody's gift, and it is the Holy Spirit, and not a ruling on a husband, who lets a woman keep her marriage and name her loneliness in the same afternoon.

And if these forty years have gone past what a person can hold, if sleep has gone, if the mornings have started to frighten you, please talk to somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if there is danger to anybody tonight. That is not going around God. It is one of the ways He keeps people.