Do You Ever Really Know Your Spouse?

What happens when a beloved one makes a shocking exit.

By
Anonymous
 
Published April 02, 2026
Hua Ye

When my husband left me, he exited screaming.

He declared, “I want to date other people,” then yelled some more and left. I was crushed — but I was not surprised by the way he delivered the blow. He huffed and puffed and blew his top so often that he compared himself to Foghorn Leghorn, the bombastic rooster in the Looney Tunes cartoons.

I knew his anger was his pain turned inside-out. I knew him. I soon forgave him.

Belle Burden’s husband exited with the cold devastation of a drone strike.

One night he’s roasting a chicken at their home on Martha’s Vineyard. The next morning he’s out — after 20 years of marriage.

“Like an actor shrugging off a costume,” she states in her brutally frank and powerful book, Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage.

Her “lovely” union unraveled with stark speed. After enjoying that roast chicken, Belle gets a voicemail saying, “Your husband is having an affair with my wife.” Oh, and the man’s wife had attempted suicide and was being rushed to the hospital.

Belle’s husband, who she calls “James” in the book, assures her the affair is nothing. But at 6 a.m. the next morning, he walks into their bedroom and announces: “I’ve decided I want a divorce. I’m leaving.”

Over the course of the next day, he offers terse reasons: “I thought I was happy, but I’m not. I thought I wanted our life, but I don’t … I feel like a switch has flipped. I’m done. You can have the house and the apartment. You can have custody of the kids. I don’t want it. I don’t want any of it.”

As the divorce proceeds, it turns out he did want the house and the apartment … at least enough to make Belle feel like even more of a chump.

His shot to her heart had washed away every assumption and belief Belle had about the man she married. Did she ever know James at all?

Belle and James come from a privileged social circle that prizes manners and performance. Her family is wealthy and well-known. Her grandmother was Babe Paley, the glamorous wife of TV titan William S. Paley and one of Truman Capote’s “swans.” Her mother is Amanda Burden, an urban planner noted for her smarts and style.

Belle’s trust funds purchased their apartment in Manhattan and their house on Martha’s Vineyard. She added his name to the deeds. James had talked her into changing their prenuptial agreement to say that anything in both of their names would be split and anything they each brought to the marriage would remain with each of them. That meant the millions he earned as a hedge-fund honcho would remain his. She is a lawyer who takes occasional pro bono immigration cases. Her main job: mother and caretaker to children who were 17, 15 and 12 when James left in 2020. 

Turns out, James could be petty as well as cold. As Belle goes through the process of grief and healing, she realizes that his fixation on money was born from fear — his own father had a breakdown and lost his family’s money.

This leaves the reader (and Belle, too) wondering: why didn’t she notice this before or ask James about his fears? What is intimacy anyway?

Dr. Sherrie Campbell, a nationally renowned clinical psychologist, talks about a phenomenon she calls “the low-effort family” — a dynamic that emphasizes keeping up appearances over revealing emotions.

“If a marriage functions more like a performance than a partnership, you can live beside someone for decades and still feel like a stranger when the curtain drops,” Campbell told me.

In low-effort families, conversations are transactional and superficial. Conflict is swept under the rug. Problems are rarely resolved.

All may seem well…but trouble simmers under the surface.

Near the end of the book, Belle describes looking at the movies her husband had made of their family every year for 15 years, an idyllic portrait of how their children grew.

She notes how happy everyone looks, even James, and writes: “This is the gift of an abrupt departure, an exit with no lead-up or warning. He didn’t infect our lives with discord, with bickering, with visible discontent before he left. He kept it lovely until he blew it up.”

But how lovely was it really?

My ex-husband poured out his discontent like morning coffee. He was easily upset — by me, our kids, editors at the newspaper where we both worked. Exasperation and outrage were part of his image as an artist. He once titled an exhibit of his work “Blue in the Face.” He’s also the funniest and most creative person I’ve ever met.

Both family styles — low effort and high volume — can be dysfunctional, psychologist Campbell says. And Belle’s husband didn’t suddenly become another person. She just had not noticed slight changes.

“Most people are not blindsided by a completely different person. They are blindsided by a pattern they minimized,” Campbell said. “In low effort family systems, connection is transactional. As long as roles are being fulfilled and conflict is avoided, deeper conversations never happen. Over time, you can know someone’s habits, preferences, even their basic routines, but still not truly know their internal, emotional world.

“When a spouse suddenly leaves, it’s shockingly painful,” she continued. “However, most often there were subtle clues all along such as emotional withdrawal, avoidance of deep and meaningful dialogue and a stubborn reluctance to repair conflict.” 

Belle reveals that her upbringing contributed to the socially choreographed way she and James behaved. With time and therapy and long walks, she comes to realize life is always untidy and uncertain, and feelings require us to notice and really feel them.

Our brilliant disguises often get in the way of knowing ourselves and those we love, author David Brooks writes in his book How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen.

“Intimacy requires moving beyond superficial interactions to understand the ‘inner life’ of another,” he writes. Intimacy requires asking deep and open-ended questions. For example, “what are you loving now?” or “what was that experience like?” or, simply, “why?” Intimacy requires listening to understand, not to judge.

These are all skills that can be learned, Brooks writes. Without them, without the ability to know our own hearts and the hearts of others, we are destined to be strangers.

In the end, heartbreak opened both me and Belle to more joyful and free lives.

My husband was colorful. Her husband was contained. Mine never pretended to be happy when he wasn’t. Hers kept up his performance until he snapped. I was surprised by my husband’s decisive dumping, but only in the timing. As in Belle’s case, there was another woman involved.

I saw myself in Belle’s transformation. After my divorce, I became a more empathetic person, a gentler and kinder person — as if I had dropped my armor.

Belle’s courage in writing the painful truth has strengthened her relationships and deepened her dreams for her children.

“I hope they will move toward people who are in pain rather than away,” she writes. “I hope because I was open about what happened to me, my children will insist on intimacy, on knowing their partners deeply, on being known deeply.”