Sugar and her former husband

Sugar and her former husband shared a close, loving marriage, but their relationship was marked from early on by her persistent desire to leave. Her account does not cast him as a villain or treat affection as proof that the marriage should continue: she describes him as a good man and the separation as devastating, yet ultimately the wisest choice for both. The relationship becomes an example of her conviction that a person can honor a partner’s humanity while still acknowledging that the relationship is not the life they want.

Identity and the beginnings of the marriage

Sugar met her former husband a month after she turned nineteen and married him on what she describes as a rash, romantic impulse a month before she turned twenty. She remembers him as passionate, intelligent, sensitive, handsome, and deeply devoted to her. She loved him too, though not with the same totality. He was her best friend and lover, a guitar-playing companion in political activism and road trips, and a fellow keeper of their large, varied collection of music and literature. They also shared a home with two beloved cats, for whom he was a father. The details establish a partnership rich in companionship and shared interests, not a marriage that can be explained away as obviously loveless or cruel.

Her account stresses that there was nothing fundamentally wrong with him. He was imperfect, as anyone would be, but in her estimation came close to being an ideal partner. That judgment matters to the story of their separation: Sugar’s eventual decision cannot be reduced to escaping mistreatment or rejecting a bad man. The difficulty was that the virtues and affection she could name did not cancel her own unwillingness to stay.

A persistent desire to leave

Almost from the beginning, Sugar heard within herself a clear, recurring insistence that she should go. She calls it an awful thing because it persisted despite her love for her husband and his kindness, faithfulness, and tenderness. This conflict made the marriage emotionally difficult in a way that outward appearances could not settle. She wanted not to want to leave, and for years she struggled to explain why the desire remained stronger than the arguments for staying.

In retrospect, she identifies several circumstances that help describe the strain without treating any one of them as the complete cause. She was young and not ready to commit herself to one person for the long term. The two of them were less compatible than they had first seemed. Her writing mattered deeply to her, while she felt that her husband resented her success as much as he celebrated it. She was uncertain about lifelong monogamy, and she carried resentment about the difference between his upper-middle-class upbringing and her own poverty. Her mother’s death and the loss of her stepfather’s paternal presence also left her grieving and, by twenty-two, feeling like an orphan. She presents these as real particulars that together point back to the central fact: she needed to leave, even while other parts of her loved him.

Sugar’s advice to others facing similar choices draws a distinction between an impulse and a considered decision. Wanting to leave, in her account, does not mean abruptly abandoning a partner at the first difficulty, nor does it release someone from the responsibility to behave decently. It means taking seriously a durable desire for freedom when it outweighs the competing desire to remain. She recognizes that the person who leaves may still love the person who is hurt, and that compassion does not require denying one’s own truth.

The separation and its cost

Sugar did not make a clean break when she first understood that she wanted out. She agonized, tried to be good and then bad, and describes herself as sad, frightened, unwell, self-sacrificing, and finally self-destructive. Rather than tell her husband plainly that she wanted to end the marriage, she had an affair. She explains this as a failure of courage: she loved him too much to make the direct break she needed, and made the separation more painful by making it dishonest.

After she confessed, the couple spent about a year separating. Sugar remembers that period as sustained pain in which neither person was simply opposed to the other; they struggled together through the consequences of the marriage ending. Divorce was the most excruciating decision she had made. The account neither excuses her conduct nor makes the affair the whole meaning of the relationship. Instead, it shows how her attempt to avoid hurting her husband intensified the hurt and prolonged the rupture.

With distance, she came to believe that the divorce was also the wisest decision. Her former husband deserved to be loved by a woman who did not continually feel compelled to leave. In that sense, ending the marriage could be a form of kindness, though it did not feel kind while they were going through it. The conclusion holds pain and care together: the decision harmed him, but remaining in a marriage she did not truly choose would not have offered him the wholehearted partnership he deserved.

What the later marriage clarifies

Sugar’s later relationship with Mr. Sugar helped her understand the earlier one. After several years of marriage to him, she could see more clearly both why she had loved her former husband and why that love had not been enough to make the first marriage right for her. She finds similarities between the two men: both are good-hearted, gentle, artistic, and interested in books, the outdoors, and left-wing politics. The two husbands have never met, but Sugar imagines that they would get along well.

The marriages also share conflict and sorrow. Sugar argues with Mr. Sugar about as often and as intensely as she argued with her former husband, and both relationships have faced struggles that other people have not fully seen or understood. The decisive difference is not a life without difficulty. In her nearly sixteen years with Mr. Sugar, she has never felt that she was fighting for her freedom, nor that he was fighting for his. When they have struggled, she has wanted to emerge from the difficulty with him rather than escape the relationship. That contrast prevents the first marriage from being read as a simple rejection of intimacy: the same capacity for argument and hardship can exist in a relationship she chooses to continue.

Grief, truth, and the meaning of leaving

The loss of Sugar’s mother belongs to the emotional circumstances she names when looking back on the marriage, but her account does not present grief as a single explanation for the divorce. Her mother’s last word to her was love, spoken when illness had left her too weak to say more. Sugar was not beside her when she died in the hospital, and for years she repeatedly revisited the choices that had kept her away, though thinking through them could not change the loss. The remembered farewell—her mother unable to bear a kiss, Sugar promising to return the next morning, and her mother’s final response—shows the enduring force of absence in Sugar’s life as she entered adulthood.

Several months after her mother died, while clearing the family home, Sugar found a glass jar containing stones that she and her siblings had collected for their mother as children. The stones came from beaches, trails, and even grassy edges of parking lots; their mother had called them worry stones. Holding the jar briefly felt to Sugar like holding her mother, but the objects could not restore her. Years later, she describes the absence as permanent even alongside a life that contains happiness, a fulfilling career, marriage, and children. Her children now give her stones, and she keeps the best ones in her pockets. The changed direction of that gift offers an image of continuing love, not a claim that grief disappears.

In a later reflection addressed to a bereaved father, Sugar likewise distinguishes enduring grief from enduring love, describing her love for her mother as larger than her grief. These reflections illuminate the emotional vocabulary she brings to relationships: love can remain powerful without making loss reversible, and affection alone does not determine what a person must do. In her account of her former husband, that distinction takes a difficult form. She loved him and recognized his goodness, but could not make herself want to stay. Her insistence that a person cannot falsify the truth at the core of their life is therefore not a dismissal of the marriage; it is the principle by which she explains why its ending, despite the pain, had to be faced.