My father is an engineer. I was an inquisitive child. My father outdid himself answering my questions. The result: I know stuff about things that many people do not know.

For instance, did you know that you can break a wire by bending it repeatedly? The reason is metal fatigue. At a microscopic level the wire begins to fracture. As the wire is repeatedly stressed by being bent, these fractures grow until the wire finally breaks into two pieces.

I would sometimes do this to coat hangers if I needed a short piece of wire for something but couldn’t find wire cutters or another suitable tool. I would grip the wire and bend it back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, until the wire broke.

My marriage was like a wire. I was on one end; Ljubica was on the other. Our relationship was strung between us. How strong was that wire? It does not matter. The weakest, puniest wire will never break if it is never stressed. The highest quality steel beam will fracture if it is subjected to enough stress. Drive enough cars over the Golden Gate Bridge and it too will fall.

Metal fatigue is insidious. Its effects are often invisible until the metal fails. This is why engineers are cautious: suspecting that a beam might be near failure is enough to warrant replacing it. No one wants a bridge full of commuters anxious to get home to fall down.

The wire that was my marriage was subjected to incredible loads. Ljubica bent it back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, over a period of years. She bent it out of shape within months of our wedding when she said, “I shouldn’t have married you.” No season went by without her bending it.

Ljubica never permitted anyone to see her bending the wire. (Except me. I couldn’t not see her.) To casual observers, the wire was always straight. They never saw the tangled mess that it could be.

And then the wire broke. It broke suddenly a year ago. “You raped me,” she accused me. “You raped me on our wedding night,” she indicted me. “I’m leaving you,” she declared. SNAP. The end seemed sudden. It came out of nowhere. “Where did this come from?” friends opined. “Your marriage seemed so perfect,” they cried.

But the specialists knew. The psychologists, therapists, psychiatrists, counselors, and spiritual directors understood. The myriad of unobservable microfractures had caused the marriage to fail. The end was sudden but not unexpected. Stress a marriage enough and it will fail.

He that has ears to hear, let him hear (Matt 11:15).