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From the New York Times, I'm Anna Martin.
This is Modern Love.
Every week we bring you stories and conversations inspired by the Modern Love column.
We talk about lovers, families, friendships, and all the messiness of human relationships.
Today, I'm talking to a Modern Love essayist named Laura Cathcart Robbins about what happened when she did two difficult things at the same time.
The first one was to ask her husband for a divorce.
This was about 16 years ago.
And from the outside, the life Laura had with her husband seemed like a dream.
He was a big time movie and TV director, and that came with a fancy Hollywood lifestyle.
But just to get through the day in that world, Laura felt like she had to pretend she was someone else.
I think the anxiety around my marriage was that I might not be the right person to be in it, you know, and every single, you know, day that went by, I discovered more things that about myself that didn't align with where I was.
Laura was acting like she loved doing things she really hated.
Hosting parties, decorating the house, showing up to the school pickup line with exactly the right car and the right outfit.
There was a way to be in that world.
You know, there was a sameness to the people in the world.
And a lot of the people in that world, Most of them, 95% of them, were white.
So I was already the black one.
Laura couldn't take it any longer, so she told her husband she wanted out.
Okay, so that was the first hard thing Laura did.