It was last week while I was lying in bed and perusing some of my phone’s suggested books that I came across it for the first time. “Shit!” My husband, who was probably up late working, received a text message from me with the headline “Ali Wong and Justin Hakuta Divorce After 8 Years of Marriage.” “Oh, no! That’s terrible,” he replied, before coming over to talk to me a little while later.
I went to bed with a nagging feeling of sickness. The next morning, my stomach was still in knots from the night before, so I took to Twitter to check whether anyone else had been taken aback by the news about one of my favorite comedians. One buddy commented, “[The breakup] feels incredibly intimate.” “It impacts me differently,” another said.
So we’re clear, I don’t typically use my limited spare time to weigh in on high-profile breakups. It’s self-indulgent and intrusive, for one thing, and public figures have feelings, too, and should be afforded some personal space when they’re hurting. Furthermore, I’m a new mother with a full plate and a lot on my plate. The thing is, Ali has always made her marriage a major theme in her stand-up acts, and because of this, I found a lot of parallels between our relationships.
She has often provided me a platform to express the most private and frank parts of my mind, especially on the challenges of marital commitment. I watched her breakout 2016 program Baby Cobra when I wanted confirmation of my feelings about the absurd double standards of parenting.
And these days, when I’m feeling resentful about the home chores and honest with myself about the flaws in my relationship, I reread her 2022 tour de force, Don Wong. This is why the news of her separation hit so close to home.
Ali Wong And Husband Justin Hakuta Are Divorcing After 8 Years of Marriage https://t.co/LQltq3eSD8
— People (@people) April 12, 2022
It reminded me a lot of my marriage.
Ali made waves after she admitted in the latest show that she had experienced temptations to act on them outside of her marriage. She revealed that she has always wanted the Avengers mask. The tremendous risks involved in joining your DNA with another human being to create a new human being who would forever question you, “Where’s Daddy?” were among the unpleasant aspects of marriage and motherhood that she bemoaned.
She went so far as to liken marriage to imprisonment and figure out how long she’d have to sleep around after her husband’s expected death at age 85. I want to f*ck other people now,” she exclaimed. It was shockingly different from anything I’d ever seen from a married woman of that age, and yet parts of it rang all too familiar. My spouse cast an uneasy glance my way, probably recalling our earlier discussions of relationship stresses, infidelity, and extramarital affairs.
When I heard Ali admit those things in front of millions of people, it was like she was providing a megaphone to the mutterings in my brain; I felt a strange mix of guilt, seeing, and reassurance that those feelings were both common and appropriate to experience.
This is the thing, though: We’ve been married for almost five years, and we’re both in our thirties. Our daughter is two years old and she is a brilliant beacon of light that we are completely besotted with. But we’d been together for 11 years before she was born and we got married; that’s right; we started dating when we were just 14 years old. Since we’ve been together for over half a lifetime, we’ve shared in each other’s formative years.
Although our shared history has forged an unbreakable link between us, it also means that neither of us has ever experienced adulthood without another person. We’ve only ever had each other as a committed love partner, and I’ve always felt like an outsider since I can’t openly confess that there are times when I wonder if we made the correct choice.
These uncertainties have grown as we’ve struggled through the last few years of epidemic parenthood, with both of us juggling busy work and aggressive ambitions and the knowledge that life is brief and unpredictable. Still, having Ali around helped me to realize that I wasn’t isolated.
At least after talking to Ali, I realized I wasn’t suffering in silence from marital FOMO.
Seeing Ali talk openly about wanting more from life and being tempted to cheat on her marriage was so damn reassuring. After seeing Don Wong, I realized it was possible to feel “marriage FOMO” and be in a fulfilling relationship at the same time. My husband and I were finally admitting the painful emotions we had for one another.
When we were out together, we were more comfortable discussing our romantic interests, proposals, and missed opportunities with one another. We were laughing at our shared fangirling over our favorite actors and TV personalities. What a relief it is to see my husband in this light, as a human being with interests and passions apart from my own.
We had been on the right track in our pursuit of closeness through total openness with one another.
But now I’m here wondering if maybe the one high-profile example we had of a successful marriage that normalized finding other people appealing or having second thoughts isn’t a healthy marriage at all. If that’s the case, what does it imply for our working relationship? The very act of asking these questions is far more emotionally charged and raw than it would have been before the Ali Wong divorce news broke.
It’s possible that I was naive to find solace in the marriage Ali has been describing to me for the past few years. Perhaps I should have learned to read between the lines. In the best of times, promising to stay with one person forever in front of “your grandma and all your coworkers,” as Ali puts it, is difficult; in the worst of times, however, it is impossible. Last but not least, all I want is for Ali and her loved ones to be happy. Plus, a new Netflix special would be great.
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