When you do not want to go home, and again and again do not want to go home, you treat it as a sign. On the other side of the city, your wife is not exactly dying for you to come back either. Everything is easier when you are not there. That too is an important sign. Is it not?
So you fantasise lightly about a new and happy life without this heaviness. But just as you come off the slip road you remember the children. You contract. The children are something that defeats every other argument on foot. However you turn it over in your head, you arrive at the same bottom line: there is no chance you are going to do that to them.
You do what the book says. You push the thought down. At most we will deal with it when they are older. And along the way you hate, by another centimetre, the woman who in your sensation is jamming you into this grey life.
Look, people, I genuinely do not know whether you should get divorced or not. I am not going to insult your intelligence with a list of the five signs that you should dismantle the package at the speed of light. I only want us to think a little afresh about the concepts of partnership and personal happiness beyond the din of messages and notifications.
Here is the observation I want to put on the table, and it is not a comfortable one.
Sustained personal suffering, exactly like a run of defeats for a football team, drags us automatically into a search for somebody to blame. And since the eye is built physiologically to look outwards rather than inwards, it will most probably settle on the factor most often within our field of view: the partner.
That is not a moral failing. It is optics. But it produces a systematic error, and the error has a shape.
Two people take on a load that is genuinely crushing — small children, work, no sleep, no money, no time alone together for four years — and each of them experiences the resulting misery as being caused by the other. Not by the load, which is invisible because it is everywhere, but by the person standing in front of them looking equally unhappy.
And here is the part that matters. That misattribution is at its most convincing precisely when it is least accurate — in the years when the load is heaviest, which are the years with young children, which are the years you are most likely to conclude that the marriage is the problem.
I am not telling you to stay. Some marriages ought to end and a stubborn few should have ended years earlier.
I am telling you that the question is unanswerable while you are this tired, and that the honest version of it is not do I still love her. It is: what would this feel like if we were sleeping, and had one evening a week, and were not both carrying the whole thing alone?
Most couples never find out, because nobody ever suggests that the experiment is worth running before the verdict.