After we left Hawaii we went straight to Christchurch, New Zealand.  My second husband was very good at finding and reserving attractive and inexpensive accommodations, even in those days before the Internet.  He had  reserved a delightful small motel for one week.  When we got there I was flabbergasted because I discovered an American couple staying for that same week.   We hadn’t seen each other for more than twenty-five years and they were the minister and wife of a Unitarian church that my first husband and I went to years ago.

 
My first husband and I had been members of a Unitarian church.  The reason we choose a Unitarian church was because my first husband had a father who was a Presbyterian minister who was drummed out of the church for inappropriate behavior.  I could understand my first husband’s distaste for going to church.

However, I insisted that our son and daughter must have some church so that my first husband and I agreed to go to a Unitarian church. That minister was good but his sermons were exceedingly rational.  My first husband and I continued to attend his church and finally that minister and his wife became intimate with us.  I admired his wife.  She was a little rough around the edges, but she was very good at being a minister’s wife.  Back then, it became obvious that the minister became obsessed with me; he suggested divorce then marriage to me.  I was outraged at the idea, because I thought that regardless of outside attractions marriage was forever.  I severed the friendship but now they were in the same motel and the same time. One week out of 25 years.  52 weeks in a year times 25 years equals1 chance out of 1,300!

At the time I knew nothing about synchronicity. Consequently I didn’t realize the significance of this event.   I became aware that his wife was not herself.  It was obvious that she had become an alcoholic.  It was pitiful; a good woman ruined.  I know that she tried to help herself, because I remembered that she tried to get a job as a bookkeeper instead of being a minister’s wife.  Apparently it didn’t work out.  In those days we weren’t aware of Alcoholics Anonymous.

My first husband was a very skillful passive-aggressive personality.  I finally learned that if a wish is unconscious a person can be destructive without conscious awareness.  He didn’t know how to save himself.  He was a tragic person because he had a brilliant mind, but he would never fulfill his promise.  I had to divorce my first husband of twenty-seven years, the father of my children because I had to get away from him.  He gave me five choices as I recorded in my book, Sex In The Eighties:

I divorced my husband because, as I saw it, he gave my five choices: I could be insane or a suicide, either I could be a drunk or a shrew, or else I could be miserable.

I began to drink heavily in the evenings.  I saved myself from becoming an alcoholic by asking myself what I would rather do than drink.  The answer was playing chess. So I joined a chess club and hired a chess tutor and eventually I hired a lawyer to get a divorce from my first husband