I met her on a wet Thursday evening outside The Long Hall, though met is probably too generous a word for how it began. I was standing under the red glow of the pub sign, crying into my scarf and pretending I was only sheltering from the rain. My husband and I had just had our anniversary dinner in town, if you could call two mains and forty minutes of silence a dinner. He had gone home on the Luas after saying, very calmly, that he was tired of trying to guess what I wanted from him. I told him I did not want anything. That was the lie I had been telling for nearly two years.
The woman beside me was maybe in her sixties, elegant in a practical way, with a navy coat buttoned to her throat and a shopping bag from a bookshop on Grafton Street. She offered me a tissue without making a drama of it. I took it and said thanks, embarrassed by the kindness. She nodded towards my wedding ring and said, “Is it the man or the marriage?”
I should have laughed or walked away. Instead, I answered her. “I don’t know anymore.” It came out so quickly that it frightened me. We ended up walking because neither of us wanted to stand still in the rain. We went down towards St Stephen’s Green, the paths shining under the lamps, taxis hissing past, Dublin doing that thing it does where it looks both exhausted and romantic at the same time.
She told me her name was Nora, that she had lived in Rathmines most of her life, and that she had once stayed in a marriage for twenty-six years because nothing terrible had happened. “That’s what fooled me,” she said. “He didn’t drink the wages. He didn’t raise his hand. He didn’t betray me. But we disappeared on each other all the same.”
I told her my husband was a good man, because that was the first defence I always gave. He was good. He paid bills before they were due, rang my mother when she was ill, remembered to buy oat milk even though he hated it. But after we lost a pregnancy in the spring of 2022, something closed in me. He grieved by getting useful. I grieved by going quiet. He painted the spare room white again. I stopped opening the door to it. We became polite housemates with shared passwords and separate sadnesses.
Nora listened without tilting her head in pity. That helped. I told her I hated him sometimes for surviving better than me, though I knew that was unfair. I hated how he could watch the news, make tea, laugh at a podcast, while I counted invisible birthdays in my head. I hated that he never said the baby’s name after the hospital. Then I admitted the worst part, the thing I had not said to anyone. “Sometimes I think I’m only still married because leaving would make the loss real.”
We had reached the railings of the Green by then. Nora stopped and looked at me for a long moment. “A marriage can survive grief,” she said. “But it can’t survive two people pretending not to be lonely.”
It was such a simple sentence, almost too neat, but it went through me. I had spent months asking whether I loved my husband, whether he loved me, whether we were happy, whether happiness was even a reasonable thing to expect. I had not asked whether we were lonely. The answer was yes. We were lonely in the same bed, lonely at the same table, lonely in the same Lidl aisle arguing about dishwasher tablets because grief needed somewhere stupid to go.
Nora walked me as far as <a href="https://d
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