In my mid thirties, I was diagnosed with a genetic disorder. I ultimately concluded that I needed to leave my marriage if I was going to have any hope of getting healthier and surviving.
An intimate partner can do all kinds of damage to your health very casually. My husband wasn't taking my need for germ control adequately seriously and I was convinced that staying would be the death of me and when I died, no one would blame him. They would blame my genes.
During that time, I had a lot of friends. Three different friends of mine adamantly insisted that I could not leave my husband because I was too sick to survive without him.
Like me, all three of these friends were married women with serious health issues of their own.
I felt like what they were really telling me was "I can't afford to leave my own marriage. I'm a prisoner of my marriage and of my health issues. I find it threatening to talk to a woman with similar circumstances who is talking about leaving her husband."
I felt their comments about what I should or should not do with my life really had nothing to do with my life. I felt it was entirely about their lives and they were projecting. I felt crystal clear that leaving was what I needed to do for my welfare and the welfare of my sons.
I got divorced and was gradually getting healthier. All three of those friends stopped speaking to me.
At the time, I didn't understand why they seemed to feel so trapped and seemingly felt so threatened by the choices I was making. It took me a long time to conclude these were women who likely needed to stay married to keep their healthcare coverage and have any kind of income.
That wasn't the case for me. In part because I was a military wife, I would be keeping my healthcare coverage following the divorce and getting alimony.
Healthcare needs to be provided to US residents for being residents, not through their employer. The ACA ("Obamacare") was a step in the right direction and likely the only thing politically viable at the time but it's insufficient.
If we want to escape the chains of our past and establish a healthy modern society, we need to stop tying healthcare coverage and a raftload of other essentials to employment and, thus, for many people, to whether or not they remain married. This practice is rooted in a paradigm where the nuclear family unit with a breadwinner father and homemaker mother was the foundation of society and we designed everything to reinforce that.
We need to not only stop actively reinforcing that, we need to actively stop reinforcing it and focus on designing a new system.
There are better ways to create a family-friendly world. Much of Europe does a better job of that than the US, so we don't even need to invent this concept whole cloth.
An intimate partner can do all kinds of damage to your health very casually. My husband wasn't taking my need for germ control adequately seriously and I was convinced that staying would be the death of me and when I died, no one would blame him. They would blame my genes.
During that time, I had a lot of friends. Three different friends of mine adamantly insisted that I could not leave my husband because I was too sick to survive without him.
Like me, all three of these friends were married women with serious health issues of their own.
I felt like what they were really telling me was "I can't afford to leave my own marriage. I'm a prisoner of my marriage and of my health issues. I find it threatening to talk to a woman with similar circumstances who is talking about leaving her husband."
I felt their comments about what I should or should not do with my life really had nothing to do with my life. I felt it was entirely about their lives and they were projecting. I felt crystal clear that leaving was what I needed to do for my welfare and the welfare of my sons.
I got divorced and was gradually getting healthier. All three of those friends stopped speaking to me.
At the time, I didn't understand why they seemed to feel so trapped and seemingly felt so threatened by the choices I was making. It took me a long time to conclude these were women who likely needed to stay married to keep their healthcare coverage and have any kind of income.
That wasn't the case for me. In part because I was a military wife, I would be keeping my healthcare coverage following the divorce and getting alimony.
Healthcare needs to be provided to US residents for being residents, not through their employer. The ACA ("Obamacare") was a step in the right direction and likely the only thing politically viable at the time but it's insufficient.
If we want to escape the chains of our past and establish a healthy modern society, we need to stop tying healthcare coverage and a raftload of other essentials to employment and, thus, for many people, to whether or not they remain married. This practice is rooted in a paradigm where the nuclear family unit with a breadwinner father and homemaker mother was the foundation of society and we designed everything to reinforce that.
We need to not only stop actively reinforcing that, we need to actively stop reinforcing it and focus on designing a new system.
There are better ways to create a family-friendly world. Much of Europe does a better job of that than the US, so we don't even need to invent this concept whole cloth.