Leon Garber, a psychotherapist who writes as Leon’s Existential Cafe, recently published a personal essay in Psychology Today asking a question I have been living inside for five years: was it really love? His answer takes the long way around, through his own perfectionism, and arrives somewhere honest. A relationship ended, and the ending reached backwards and rewrote everything. The good months became suspect. The compliments became evidence requiring re-examination. He spent months asking whether she had ever really liked him at all, because it was easier to believe he had been deceived from the start than to sit with the confusion of a love that was genuine and then wasn’t.
I recognised myself in that essay immediately. Then, on a second reading, I recognised someone else in it too. Garber’s essay has two chairs in it: the chair of the person left holding the question, and the chair of the perfectionist whose demands quietly destroyed the thing. He sat in both, because his was a story of one man’s mind at war with an ordinary ending. In my story, the chairs were occupied by two different people. I sat in the first. My former wife sat in the second. And she did not arrive there on her own; she was coached into it, by an industry that sells perfectionism with a metaphysics attached and calls it growth.
The first chair: the question that will not close
Garber describes the mechanism precisely. When a relationship ends, the devastated person reaches for one of two exits, because both are easier to hold than confusion. As he puts it, <q>it’s easier to assume you’ve just been duped or, in the worst-case scenario, unlovable</q>. Either she never loved me, or I was never lovable. Both verdicts hurt, but they are verdicts. They close the case. What the mind cannot tolerate is the hung jury: that the love was real and it ended anyway.
I know this mechanism from the inside, but my version had more fuel than his. Garber had one clean breakup to metabolise, one conversation, one door closing. Mine arrived in instalments. Twenty-five years of marriage, years of being told I was her rock, that I was worthy, and then an affair, and the sudden announcement that our marriage had such major issues it could not continue. Then a brief attempt at repair, ended a second time. Then nine months of mixed messages after her new relationship collapsed: being stopped at a train station when I tried to walk away, being told she loved me and needed me, being told her feelings for me were still there because feelings like that don’t just fade away. Warmth with no future attached. Closeness on her schedule. And then, when someone new appeared in her life, silence. No conversation, no goodbye. Ghosted, after a quarter of a century.
Garber’s question, did she really like me, was generated by his own perfectionist mind demanding that everything line up. My question was not manufactured internally. The contradictions were supplied, over years, by her conduct. When the one person who knows the truth of a shared history hands you half a dozen incompatible versions of it and then withdraws entirely, the resulting confusion is not a personality flaw. It is an injury. This is the first place where his essay and my story diverge, and it matters, because his framework locates the pathology in the person left behind. Sometimes it lives with the person who leaves.
The second chair: the perfectionist who walked out
Here is Garber’s confession, and it is a braver one than the genre usually produces. He admits that he demanded perfection not just from himself but from his circumstances. He needed his partner’s words, deeds and thoughts to be consistent, always. He did not merely want to be liked; he wanted, in his word, something close to worship. And in chasing an idealised love inside his own head, he says, he carelessly destroyed the possibility of the real one in front of him.
Read that confession again, and then consider the manifester.
My former wife spent years inside the coaching and self-help world, the world of neuro-linguistic programming, visualisation, manifestation, the future self. She regularly bought prize home lottery tickets, and the ritual around them mattered more than the tickets. She would show me photographs and videos of the homes and ask whether I would live there with her. She browsed real estate listings for houses well beyond our means and wanted to inspect them in person. Once, at her request, I drove out to a new estate to view a prize home from the street. I saw little point, and my flatness clearly irked her, as though the draw were rigged against insufficient enthusiasm, as though I wasn’t trying to win.
I used to read those episodes as harmless daydreaming. I now read them as practice. Manifestation is perfectionism with a cosmology. Garber’s perfectionist needs reality to line up with his interpretation; the manifester needs reality to line up with the vision, and treats the gap between them as a personal project, something to be closed through belief, alignment and the removal of whatever is not vibrating at the right frequency. In that frame, the shared present is permanently on trial. The actual marriage, the actual house, the actual husband are measured against the visualised ones, and ordinary is precisely what the vision defines itself against. A real 25-year marriage that mostly works, that needs some attention the way every long marriage needs attention, cannot survive that audit. Not because it is failing, but because it is real.
Garber wanted a partner who never wavered, and he named the appetite underneath it with a word most perfectionists would never put on paper. I lived with the household version of that appetite. Birthdays were not days but birth weeks. Mothers Day carried a whole-day devotional standard, which is how I came to learn that installing a new toilet suite on a Mothers Day afternoon, labour performed for her and for the household, on the day itself, could register as an offence. Within a worship frame, acts of service do not score; only attention scores. An afternoon spent working for her was an afternoon spent not adoring her. And by the end, the audit had reached glances: among her stated reasons for walking away was that I did not look at her when she walked in the door.
Grievances that small are trivial as complaints but valuable as evidence, and this is where the worship standard and the manifesting turn out to be one system. Manifestation has a structural problem: it does not work, and the failure has to be filed somewhere. The doctrine is never permitted to fail, so the deficit is always located in somebody’s insufficient belief, insufficient alignment, insufficient enthusiasm. I had already been cast in that role at the prize home estate, as the husband who wasn’t trying to win. The exit grievances were the same mechanism at endgame. The visualised life had not arrived, and the frame offered two candidates for blame: the doctrine, or the husband who didn’t look up. My lack of worship was not an irritant. It was load-bearing. It explained, without the explanation ever having to be tested, why the dream had not come true.
The manifester wants a life that never disappoints the vision, and a partner whose job is to service it. I spent years as a stay-at-home father being quietly graded on a question I only later learned to name: what are you doing to make my dream come true?
The hidden curriculum
There is one more fact about those years that took me a long time to weigh properly: the doctrine was concealed. She accumulated a substantial archive of manifesting content, and she kept it hidden. The belief was managed by audience. When a manifesting friend visited, the conversation ran wall to wall for the whole visit, manifestation and Tony Robbins and little else. When I asked her directly, that same day, whether she really believed any of it, the answer arrived casually: it was just an interest. When the tarot cards came out, and they came out to be used on me, they were just a bit of fun.
A stated belief can be questioned, which is exactly what my question was attempting. What came back was not a defence but a reclassification, and reclassification is the stronger move, because you cannot contest a framework that officially does not exist in your marriage. So the audit could proceed. My enthusiasm at the prize home could be graded, my glance at the door could be logged, and the standard I was failing was never disclosed as a standard. I was sitting an exam I was never told was on, set by a curriculum whose existence was denied whenever I asked about it directly.
I make no claim about whether the concealment was strategic; it may have been nothing more than the reflex of someone avoiding an argument she sensed she would lose. The function is what the conduct documents: full-strength doctrine among the faithful, homeopathic dilution for the sceptic in the house, and a measurable gap between the size of the hidden archive and the size of the admission. One casually curious person does not accumulate a concealed library. And the concealment explains the thing I carried longest, which is why the ending seemed to arrive from nowhere. It did not arrive from nowhere. The framework that was reclassifying me from husband to obstacle had been operating for years. I was simply never shown the screen.
The rewrite, with a doctrine behind it
There is a pattern well known to anyone who has studied infidelity: when an affair begins, the history of the marriage gets rewritten backwards to justify it. Ordinary problems are inflated into fundamental ones, because a broken marriage is a story the leaving party can live with, and a betrayed working one is not. Garber describes doing a version of this rewrite to himself, recasting a real relationship as one founded on false perception, because the false version gave him certainty, spared him confusion, and protected him from future proof of being unlovable.
The record of my marriage in its final year does not support the terminal diagnosis. In early 2021 she booked leave for October so we could celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary. In March we adopted a dying cat I did not want, and took in anyway, because she wanted it and her wanting it was reason enough for me. In June we bought the best dryer we could find, deliberately, as a long-term purchase for a long-term household. People do not plan anniversary celebrations for marriages they privately believe are beyond saving. The investment ran right up until the affair, and the language of major issues arrived with the affair, not before it. The diagnosis followed the deed. And the announcement of major issues was, I can now see, the first time the verdict of a years-long private audit was ever read aloud.
What the coaching world contributes to this old pattern is efficiency. The backwards rewrite no longer has to be improvised, because the frameworks arrive pre-built: limiting beliefs, outgrown relationships, people who cannot come with you on your journey, the future self whose emergence justifies whatever the present self does. An affair stops being a betrayal and becomes evidence of growth. And when the human cost becomes visible, the doctrine handles that too. During the worst period of my life, when she knew exactly where I was at because she had witnessed it, and our children had witnessed it, she told a mutual friend that how I dealt with it all was my problem. That is coaching doctrine almost verbatim. Radical responsibility: everyone owns their own reactions. It sounds like maturity. In practice it is a machine for converting the harm you cause into the other person’s homework.
And yet the same woman, told over the phone one November day that I was struggling, dropped everything at work and was at the house within fifteen minutes, and sat with my head in her lap running her hands through my hair. A phone call would have discharged any obligation; she chose the fifteen-minute drive. The doctrine said I was not her concern. Her hands said otherwise. The framework never forced her to feel nothing. It only excused her from ever reconciling what she felt with what she was doing.
The hung jury
So, was it really love? Garber’s answer for his relationship was yes, and his best insight is that love can be both genuine and temporary, and that the confusion this produces is not an insurmountable problem. I have arrived at the same verdict by a harder road, and I would state it more starkly. The love was real, and so was the callousness, and sometimes they were present in the same gesture. Stopping me at that train station was care, and it was also another dose of hope she was never going to honour. The years of affirmation were not falsified by the ending, and the ending is not softened by the years. The mind wants a single verdict. The honest answer is a hung jury, and learning to live inside one is the actual work of surviving this kind of ending.
People ask, kindly or otherwise, why questions like mine persist after five years, and the culture has a ready diagnosis: a failure to find closure, as though closure were a thing lying about waiting to be found. But closure is the wrong word for what was withheld, and so is honesty. What I was denied is older and simpler: an account. When you end a marriage of twenty-five years, especially the way this one ended, affirmation, then affair, then reversal, then months of mixed messages, then silence, you leave behind a set of contradictions that only you can reconcile, because you were the only one standing on both sides of them. Giving an account of yourself, even a partial and self-serving one, is the last act of a shared history: here is what happened, here is what I can tell you about why. It hands the other person something stable to grieve against.
She never gave one. Every version on offer was contradicted by the next, or by her own conduct in the same season, and the final version was silence. So the reconciliation work fell to me, permanently, without the evidence needed to complete it. That is why the questions remain open five years on. Not because I cannot let go, but because a file cannot be closed by the person who was never given its contents. Grief can metabolise almost anything if it has a stable story to work on. I was refused a story, repeatedly, by the only person who had it.
And the doctrine, here as everywhere, arrives to bless the refusal. A framework built on radical responsibility owes no accounts: your reaction is your problem, my journey requires no defence, explanation is just energy given to the past. The industry does not merely license the harm; it abolishes the mechanism of repair, by teaching its customers that the account they owe is a limiting belief holding them back. The adjacent party is left doubly stuck, injured by the framework and denied, by the same framework, the one thing that lets injuries of this kind close. If I am still standing inside the question after five years, that is not a symptom. It is arithmetic. A debt does not stop existing because the debtor has moved to a new address.
And in my case the arithmetic has a final line, because I know now that the account will never come. It cannot. In her cosmology, the new life was delivered by the universe, and its arrival is the verdict on the leaving: there is no act of hers to answer for, only an unfolding she was wise enough to align with. Remorse is not merely absent from that frame; it is incoherent within it. The invoice was made out to a cosmos that endorses everything, which means the debt is not simply unpaid. On her books, it does not exist. So the creditor stopped waiting. I set my own terms years ago, no contact, no audience for the requests that were the only contact on offer, and I wrote the audit instead. It is not the account I was owed. It is the account I could author, and it turns out that is the only kind the adjacent party ever gets.
But I will not accept the essay’s framework whole, because in my story the perfectionism did not belong to the one left asking the question. Garber diagnosed his ex as a perfectionist too, from the outside, and that move is always shaky; interiority imputed by the person who was left is testimony with an interest in the verdict. I am arguing from something different: a dated record of conduct. The anniversary leave, the purchases, the prize homes, the instalment-plan ending, the words spoken to others while her actions kept contradicting them. What she believed in her private depths, I cannot know and do not claim to. What she did is documented, and what she did is what the coached, manifesting, perfectionist mindset looks like when it operates on a real family.
Garber’s sharpest line, paraphrased, is that while you are busy constructing an idealised love in your mind, you carelessly destroy the possibility of the real one in front of you. He wrote it as a confession. I received it as a description of what was done to me, to our children, to a marriage that needed attention and got a verdict instead. The self-help industry did not invent that mistake. It just industrialised it, gave it a vocabulary, sold it a certification, and taught its customers to call the wreckage growth. The rest of us, the husbands and wives and children standing adjacent to the transformation, are left holding the question the industry never has to answer: was it really love? It was. That is precisely what makes what followed unforgivable in the moment and, eventually, survivable in the long run. The love was never the illusion. The vision was.