Three people mentioned Belle Burden’s Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage to me in the last few weeks. That seemed like the universe whispering. I read it on the long flight home from Las Vegas after hiking in Death Valley.
Golden Canyon, Death Valley National Park
Burden’s essay “Was I Married to a Stranger?” was published in the New York Times’ Modern Love column in June of 2023. Like quite a few of those columns, it became part of the cultural conversation and opened the door for a book deal. The column is extraordinary.
The book is good, filling in the details of her story. It was thoughtful and well-written. And yet – I found the column more moving. This illustrates the painful maxim that in writing as in life, less is (sometimes) more.
Is it possible that life’s greatest mysteries can only be touched on – very lightly? Other people are deeply – fundamentally – unknowable. Some are more predictable than others. But all of us have depths. And are capable of many things.
Here is Burden’s story, in short: her husband of 20 years left her suddenly and completely during the early days of Covid. He did not want to share custody of their three children, ages 12, 15, and 17. There was a younger woman involved. Burden’s husband – a successful lawyer and hedge fund manager – had always been loving and attentive: a model husband and father in every way. She could not understand how he was able to walk away so decisively – and quickly – from a long marriage founded on love, joy, attraction, and respect. She doesn’t say it specifically but suggests that they were still having good and reasonably frequent sex, taking that explanation off the table. He simply left, never having complained about their marriage or her.
Burden reflects fondly on how they began – young lawyers madly in love. He grew up in a troubled family in economic distress, while she was a child of wealth and privilege. He was a rebel; she was a rule-follower. Burden is a grandchild of one of Truman Capote’s famous Swans, Babe Paley, which adds to the frisson and flavor of her tale.
As a married couple, Burden and her husband moved in elite New York City circles and spent summers in their vacation home on Cape Cod. Clubs and schools go unnamed, but it would be easy to identify them. She offers a window into the world of manners and social expectations among a certain set. It’s not easy to be divorced in this world.
Burden details how her husband financially prepared himself for divorce over many years – from the beginning, really. Burden altered their pre-nup at his request against her lawyer’s advice. Her book definitely has the feel of settling the score on that front: she reveals how he strategic from the very start, while she was not. Instead, she trusted him completely. He doesn’t come off looking great.
She finds her way, slowly and painfully, in his absence. At the end of the book, she offers her hopes:
I hope because I was open about what happened to me, my children will insist on intimacy, on knowing their partner deeply, on being known deeply. I hope they will talk to their partners about money, about what will happen if their partnership ends. I hope that as they build trust in their relationships, they never lose sight of their own authority, their own voice, their own intuition. I hope they will move toward people who are in pain, rather than away. I hope they will understand that every person has experiences that make them who they are. I hope they will fall in love with abandon as I did with their father. I hope they will know, from watching me, that if everything falls apart, they can get up and piece together something new.
Worthy goals, all.
And yet – the Modern Love column ended in a more satisfying way to me:
I have no secret to share about how to move on without answers. I walked a lot, a form of meditation that made me feel like I was moving forward. I took on more legal work, cooked for my children, walked our dog, bought new rugs. And eventually, after many months, I found myself on a road that had less of a relationship to his, and I stopped looking backward and sideways, only ahead.
I sometimes see him from afar in our shared city neighborhood. He looks familiar, his posture and gait, his sandy blonde hair and orange sneakers, and my heart leaps a little at the sight of him. But then I remember he is a stranger, and I walk on.
Red Rock National Preserve, Nevada