Mark Fiedeldey - Finders Keepers

 

So, my husband and I were always very different people, right? We were like Monica and Chandler from Friends, but not funny. [audience laughter] I'm like a Jersey loudmouth. He's a reserved Southerner. I'm like clinically OCD, like very unnecessarily type A. He could end up on an episode of Hoarders if left to his own devices. [audience laughter] 

 

Like many couples, our biggest problem was communication. We communicated in very different styles. You learn that from your family, your peers or culture. I was raised by a bunch of children and grandchildren of loud immigrants from New York that basically told you, “Stand up for yourself. Don't take shit from anyone. If you have a problem, address it right away as loudly as possible.” [audience laughter] His family was all about keeping up appearances, making sure that-- pretended like everything was okay even if there was a problem. So, you can imagine how this went. 

 

So, last summer, right after our one-year wedding anniversary, he told me he wanted to sleep with other people. I was just taken aback, because we'd been together for years and this had never come up. So, he gave it to me as an ultimatum, he was like, “I’m really nervous that if you don’t allow me to go, I’d go behind your back and do it anyways.” And I was like, "All right, well, I mean, I guess I'll do it." I was crying. [audience laughter] So, I agreed to an open marriage, with certain rules and restrictions, obviously. But I was not happy about it.

 

He consoled me, because I was very upset. He said, "You're the person that I love. I want to have children with you. I want to spend the rest of my life with you." And two weeks later, after I cried for two weeks, he told me that he was leaving me. [audience shocked] So, we agreed to a six-month trial separation, and that he would move out of my apartment [chuckles] at the end of the month. So, it was three weeks later of purgatory, where he was basically sleeping on the couch, because I'm not sleeping on the couch. 

 

And so, finally, the day comes, right, that he's going to finally leave and move out. And my best friend from home took the train in from Jersey, and he was the best man at our wedding. We went to the Met to see an exhibit. We sat on the top of the steps at the Met like we were Blair and Serena in Gossip Girl, because I was a Blair, even though I always wanted to be a Serena. [audience laughter] We went to brunch. I got really drunk. We went to Washington Tour Park, we ate CBD brownies, because I needed to get fucked up. [audience laughter] 

 

I went home to a much emptier apartment. Obviously, there was a mess. You know, he was the tornado on a path to self-destruction, leaving a trail of tears behind him. So, I stripped naked, because I was like, "You know what? I'm a single lady. I'm going to clean up this apartment naked." As I'm walking around, I see a green leather book on the TV stand. I was like, “Well, that's deliberate. What is this book?” 

 

I open it up and it's his journal. [audience shocked] So, I sat there and I sat down cross-legged, naked in the middle of my broken home, in my living room and I read every single journal entry that he had written. [audience laughter] Most people think it would be traumatic, but it was actually this huge relief, because it was all the truths that he had never told me for six years. It was all the worst things you could ever hear about yourself or about your relationship that you could possibly imagine, written by who I thought was the love of my life. 

 

But it was like this green little book gave me freedom, because I finally had gotten the answers that I'd asked for the past six years and I never got them. I was broken, but I wasn't shattered. I realized a few years ago that I deserved to have a happy life and I realized this year that I deserve love, just not from him. Thanks.