Lilith

 

I met Lilith before I divorced Sylvian.

When Lilith learned I had been married, it shocked her. I hadn't mentioned it in our early courtship.

I wasn’t trying to deceive her even if I hadn't presented the whole truth when we met. The marriage had already collapsed inward at that point; the paperwork was just lagging behind the truth. 

I understood her reaction, there are facts that remain facts regardless of intent.

When she then learned I was still legally married, it shocked her even more.

She chose to stay. That decision mattered more than any explanation I offered.

Time is a series of sliding doors, and this was one of them.

Our children are the result of that decision.

Stockholm

We lived in Stockholm when we married, in the summer of 2004. Even so, we chose to marry in Reykjavik, where our family and roots were.

The city environment suited me. It had structure without hostility, distance without coldness. Streets that behaved predictably. Public spaces that didn’t demand performance. I could exist there without constantly scanning for threat or misalignment.

Lilith moved through the city differently than I did.

She was direct where I was cautious. Expressive where I was measured. She didn’t circle topics the way I had learned to. She named things quickly — feelings, expectations, frustrations — and waited for a response.

At first, this felt like safety, then it felt like exposure.

A Different Contract

Our relationship was originally based on a misunderstanding, she thought I was an inconsiderate prick writing chauvinistic posts on some dating site and my outward persona can very easily be interpreted as someone like that.

I know I've been an asshole in the past, I fear I will probably be an asshole sometime in the future.
In the meantime, I try very hard not to be one.

She'd recently gotten out of an abusive relationship with exactly such a character, and even if she wasn't consciously looking for a replacement it feels like her subconscious was looking for the familiar patterns she was used to.

Our marriage did not begin with urgency, that alone distinguished it from the first.

There was no shared debt masquerading as devotion. No crisis to manage together. No business to rescue. What we shared instead was something quieter and, at times, more difficult: mutual presence without a task.

Lilith didn’t need me to save her. That unsettled me.

I didn’t yet know how much of my identity had been built around usefulness, around stepping in when something faltered. With her, there was nothing to fix. She wanted companionship, not containment.

I had to learn how to be there without doing.

On the surface, she came from the ideal perfect happy family, where communication was key and everyone respected each other's feelings.

It wasn't until much later that I learned how different the reality behind the scenes was.

Violence has many shapes and forms, only a handful of those being physical.

I still remember one of the first serious conversations I had with her father; "In this family, you don't divorce". It felt genuine at the time.

After My Sister

We married only months after my sister died.

Grief hadn’t resolved itself by then; it had simply gone underground. I carried it with me into the marriage, unannounced but active. Lilith noticed, of course. She noticed everything.

She didn’t push, she also didn’t pretend it wasn’t there. This was new to me.

In my family, grief had been managed through silence or logistics. Lilith treated it as something that could be spoken about without needing immediate resolution. She asked questions I didn’t always know how to answer as the words required weren't a part of my emotional dictionary.

Sometimes I resented that, sometimes I was grateful.

Truth Without Rescue 

What distinguished my marriage to Lilith most clearly was this: she did not allow me to confuse honesty with withdrawal.

When I went quiet, she didn’t assume it meant depth. When I stepped back, she didn’t read it as virtue. She insisted — gently but persistently — that being present meant staying engaged even when nothing was breaking.

That you fight for what you care about, even if it means having painful conversations when silence would be the easier choice.

This was harder than crisis, crisis had rules. Stability required improvisation of a different kind.

I learned, slowly, that love did not always arrive with urgency attached. That someone could want me without needing me to absorb their fear. That intimacy didn’t have to be earned through endurance.

I was not good at this at first.

What Changed, What Didn’t

I didn’t stop being vigilant. That kind of habit doesn’t dissolve easily. But I began to notice it in myself - the way I anticipated conflict that never came, the way I prepared explanations that weren’t required.

Lilith would watch me sometimes, then say, simply, “You don’t have to do that.”

It took me years to understand what that was.

Marriage as Mirror

If my first marriage had revealed how quickly I confused care with obligation, my second showed me something else: how easily I mistook restraint for depth.

Lilith wanted access. Not control, not dominance.

Access.

She wanted to know what I was thinking while I was thinking it, not after it had been filtered for safety. This was not a skill I had learned early. It didn’t come naturally. It had to be practiced.

I failed at this frequently, but I never gave up.

That mattered.