It's worth looking closely at the ambivalent space between "happy" and "irreconcilable differences."
 | By Susannah Meadows Senior Staff Editor, Opinion |
The writer Frimet Goldberger was five years into an arranged marriage when she and her husband left their Hasidic community in Kiryas Joel, N.Y., with two babies in tow. Though she and her husband were strangers when they married, they'd cultivated a measure of love and friendship by the time they moved. But such upheaval would be rough on any relationship. |
Goldberger embraced her new freedom, while her husband resisted the rapid modernization she demanded of him. They fought viciously. Contempt set in. "Whatever love survived was overshadowed by bitter irritation and sometimes even hate," she writes in a fascinating guest essay. |
This went on for a decade. But despite the enduring misery and the nights she lay awake thinking she deserved better, she didn't leave — and she's glad she didn't. |
In her essay, Goldberger makes the case for staying married to a spouse you can't stand. |
Not an easy task. It won't be the right approach for everyone, but she makes a compelling argument, offering a new way to think about marriage, a subject that so many of us are intimately familiar with and think we know plenty about. |
How did she endure? How could she be glad? I'll let her tell you. |
Here's what we're focusing on today: |
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