Love Life Limbo

Ted and Doris started dating in High School. They were both in the theater club and developed a hard and fast friendship. Whenever Ted had great news he always shared it with Doris first. When Doris was rejected by her reach school, she confided in Ted before telling her parents.

 

They told Dawna they were "best buddies." Doris wasn’t really interested in the “immature” guys she knew in high school, and Ted never pushed to turn their friendship into a romantic relationship. He’d never really had a close relationship with anyone before he and Doris became “besties”. He was always one of the theater gang, friendly, attending all the parties, but a bit of a loner.

 

After graduation, they went off to separate colleges but they would spend hours every week gossiping on the phone, and they spent time together over the holidays.

 

They don’t remember who brought it up first, but they developed a running joke that if neither found their soulmate by 30, they would have a marriage of convenience between best friends.

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Doris got involved with someone her senior year and they both got jobs in the same city. As it happened, Ted moved there a year later. Doris and Ted met for coffee, shopped together, and she invited him to all their parties. He invited her to go out with him to clubs. They’d attend shows at the theater together and he’d be her plus-one to any work events her boyfriend couldn’t attend. Doris often set Ted up with her friends, but while he might date them, inevitably the relationship would fall apart because he just wasn’t that into any of them.

 

Around the time Doris’ partner left her for another woman, Ted had begun to see a young woman exclusively. Really drunk one night, Doris joked, “I’d begun to think you were a closet homosexual. So how’s the sex?” Ted was hurt and he avoided Doris for months. But Ted’s girlfriend sensed his interest in her waning and she moved on to a more attentive partner--or so she told Ted when she dumped him.

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Not long after that breakup, Ted and Doris ran into one another at an uptown club. It was as if their friendship hadn’t missed a beat. When Doris found herself in dire need of a place to live because her landlord was selling the building she lived in, Ted offered Doris a place to stay until she got on her feet.

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They quickly discovered how companionable they were living together. They were both neatniks, so they didn’t struggle over unequal responsibility for domestic chores. They communicated openly about finances, and kept up their promised financial commitments so neither ever had to bail out the other.

 

They spent equal amounts of time together and apart. Sometimes one might be heavily involved in a work project and not emerge into common space for weeks, however, neither took it amiss. They trusted they’d catch up when there was time.

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Before they knew it they’d been together for four years. Their parents mostly, began pressuring them to get married in hopes of grandchildren, which Ted and Doris had no intention of providing.

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However, Ted and Doris realized that they enjoyed an intellectual camaraderie and a companionable presence in one another’s life. Soon they were reminding one another of their long ago commitment to marry if they weren’t met someone else before they reached their 30th birthdays. Since both of them were approaching their mid-thirties, marriage started to make more-and-more sense to them.

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“I knew if I married Ted I was settling,” Doris said. “I wasn’t fulfilling my dream of a romantic marriage and falling in love. We’d become ‘friends with benefits.’ It was good sex but it wasn’t passionate sex. It was obvious to me that one relationship doesn’t fulfill everything we need in our lives and what we want in a relationship. I think Ted knew that too.”

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Ted was tired of being shut out of the perks and benefits that marriage provides.

 

"You ask me why I was determined to go ahead with marriage and not just continue to live together? I’ll tell you why. I was able to get insurance coverage for the first time without paying an arm and a leg. I had gone without insurance since I’d left home because it was too damn expensive. Doris's theater union-employee health insurance was free and I was starting to need it. If I had private insurance, I would have had to pay a small fortune in premiums and co-pays. Our car insurance rates dropped, too.

 

"Married, we could file joint tax returns and I was able to write off my business expenses [Ted was a self-employed freelance writer] against her W-2 income for a bigger return. If either one of us were to die, the survivor would receive the other's Social Security benefits instead of all that money being absorbed by the federal government. All the complicated technicalities of major investments, such as buying a home, are simplified dramatically when you are a couple not a single. I could pool my 401(k) funds with her pension. The list goes on and on. We knew we were already making fairly important decisions together and trusted one another to make sound decisions for each other in case of an emergency. It was a complete no brainer. Of course we were getting married.”

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Ted also said he didn’t like being alone. Doris seconded that. “I wanted someone to do things with, somebody to grow old with”

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“We had no strings and no commitment. There wasn’t any specific future plan, and I’ve been happiest just living in the moment,” Ted said. “But I didn’t like the loneliness of bachelor living.”

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“Yeah, the support network without the relationship demands placed upon it really appealed to me. I’d had clingy boyfriends and I’d been the clingy girlfriend. I was so done with all that.”

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As their lives became filled with jobs, the work of running a household and their other activities, their sex life diminished, and finally vanished. Neither especially missed it. Then Doris decided she wanted children. Her biological clock was ticking and unexpectedly, even to her, she became obsessed with the desire for a child.

 

Doris decided that along with a child she wanted more from their marriage. That’s when they came to see Dawna.

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“I just want a genuine, two-sided relationship based around love and respect. If Ted isn’t going to get behind me on that then I don’t know what else I can do but leave. There has to be more than friendship and an economic partnership in marriage, and staying with him is just blocking my way to find the one I am meant to be with. The One who will want what I want."

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“What the hell do you mean?” Ted countered. “You already looked at what’s out there. It’s me, Ted, I was the one you poured your heart out to when every relationship fell to crap and every guy turned out to be an asshole.”

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“Yeah, but I’m more mature now. I think I’m mentally and emotionally healthier. I’ll do a better job in my relationships, as well as screening out the assholes.”

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“It’s just selfish of you to change things now,” Ted protested. “We always agreed we didn’t want to bring more kids into this messed up world. What about your promises to me?”

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“It's not selfish to want more than what we have. I shouldn’t have to give up on having a child, and pursuing more romance simply because you don’t want to grow up and take responsibility for another life.”

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“Kids are incredibly expensive and totally time consuming. You have no idea what you want to get us into.”

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“You talk about money a lot, especially when I bring up having a baby. You are so obsessed with what it will cost us. Is this all our marriage is for you,  a financial benefit?”

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“Come on. You know merging our finances and mutually benefitting was a huge part of getting married rather than living together.”

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“I didn’t expect our marriage to become so isolating. You don’t seem to genuinely care about me anymore. You spend so much time on your own or out with your own friends.”

 

“You never used to care. This new clinginess of yours is driving us apart. You are nothing like the Doris I grew up with, the Doris I married. I have no clue what happened to you.”

 

“I grew up.” Doris turned to me. “I see my friends’ marriages and I realize that relationships all move at different speeds, but ours doesn’t seem to be going anywhere at all.  Will it ever get moving?”

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“Ted, I’m hearing you say that your marriage is satisfying as an economic partnership and companionable living arrangement,” Dawna summarized. “But Doris, I’m hearing you say that you are seeking more emotional commitment. When there is no emotional connection, the passion isn’t alive and well. For you, marriage is becoming emotionally and sexually isolating. How fulfilled do you feel?”

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“Not at all, not anymore. Ted has no desire to have sex with me. I want to have a baby. We’re moving in opposite directions and it’s killing me.”

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Ted’s and Doris’s marriage was in limbo. In many ways it was a successful marriage: they were companionable, financially successful, and stable. Neither brought a significant problem like alcoholism, gambling or abuse into the relationship.

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But being married as a “back-up plan,” a relationship of convenience, will rarely yield a healthy union. There might be partners capable of a casual relationship, with no solid plan for a future, each partner mutually satisfied with getting out of it what they both want, but self-interests have a way of creeping in, especially when sex is involved. Maybe one develops stronger feelings for their casual partner. Maybe one of the partners begins to believe they are missing out on meeting someone who may want a more intimate relationship.

 

Relationships of convenience aren’t made to last forever. Since the partners aren’t working on the relationship, and have no plan for moving into greater intimacy, they have a way of becoming inconvenient. 

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The problem with such marriages is that people grow and change. Successful couples grow together. That doesn’t mean that they’re always by each others’ sides, but it does imply a certain amount of togetherness. If you’re living separate lives, with separate dreams then this type of relationship doesn’t really have a future.

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The problem with this marriage is not that it is sexless. Many marriages go through long sexual “dry spells.” As well, there are many legitimate reasons why a couple might have a celibate marriage—an accident or illness might render sexual intercourse painful or impossible for one member of the couple, or they might choose to suspend their sexual relationship while working out some personal or spiritual issues. 

 

In this marriage, though, sexlessness is a symptom of a bigger problem. The real issue with this marriage is that it is a contractual, disengaged, utilitarian marriage. It fulfills the social functions of a marriage but does not foster intimacy or growth. It is ultimately unfulfilling, at least for Doris, who is left to meander on without self-sacrificing love, particularly but not exclusively on the part of Ted.

 

Limbo has never been an authorized Church doctrine, although many Churchmen held a firm belief in it for centuries and Dante made it the vestibule of his hell. In the Inferno, it’s described as a place on the outskirts of Hell, a place without love but also without punishment.

 

Limbo was one of those theological speculations that evolves through logic and seems to solve a doctrinal conundrum—in this case, the problem of the salvation of virtuous people who have not had the opportunity to know Christ. It was abandoned by most theologians because it fails in the face of what the Church teaches about God’s mercy and love.

 

Nonetheless the idea of Limbo continues to be relevant in our times as a symbol for the absence of love not as a rejection, but as a failure of knowledge and understanding. In the context of marriage, "limbo" refers to the idea of a non sacramental marriage, a marriage without a continual effort toward deep, self-sacrificing love. A marriage in Limbo is not a covenant but a contract.

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It can work--but only so long as neither partner wonders, as Doris did, “Is there more?”