Rob and I have been cutting back on driving lately, so until we were barreling north toward New Hampshire this weekend, I had forgotten the pact I'd made with myself to always be the driver when the two of us are in the car.

Rob doesn't get road rage, but he drives as if other drivers were the punks who bullied him in grade school, and this is his chance to show them who's boss. He is unforgiving, and never allows other drivers or even pedestrians the go-ahead.

He vies for the better position in a merge though it puts the passenger side in danger of being hit. He tailgates, a dangerous move made more so because his reflexes are molasses slow. For my own safety, I watch for brake lights on the highways so I can tell him to STOP! It takes him forever to notice and react on his own.

When I was learning to drive, someone told me to look farther ahead. It changed everything. Take your gaze another 200 feet forward, and you get to see what's coming much earlier, giving you more time to react if needed. Your peripheral vision will pick up what's immediately surrounding you anyway. When I gave Rob this tip, he thought I was nagging. When I try to talk to him about changing some of his driving habits, he never does.

So this weekend on the road, as Rob made one dangerous move after another, familiar thoughts returned. Does he respect me so little that he thinks nothing of putting me in danger? What if we had a child? I couldn't possibly allow him to drive anywhere with the baby in the car. Or, if he suddenly became a safe driver for the baby, could I forgive him for not treating me as carefully? 

And that's when it hit me. That's exactly what I already can't forgive him for — all the small moments in which he has betrayed my safety and trust. With us, it's not one big thing, but an accumulation of disregard. Our healing journey is a rough and pitted road — we get by one hazard to find many more ahead. 

Breaking up is hard to do. I've just been through a big one...with my therapist.

I've had plenty of therapists through the years, but we always parted ways for reasons beyond our control. Either I moved out of town (twice), or my therapist did (once).

I broke up with one therapist because I could no longer afford him. He didn't take insurance and the weekly $75 sliding scale fee was too much on my non-profit salary. I told him goodbye, he told me what a shame because I clearly had much work to do around my relationship to money. I didn't really buy it.

This time was different. I worked with Alice for two years. She celebrated my triumphs and honored my heartache like no one ever had, and I learned to embrace my feelings rather than bury them deep. She practices the same meditation as I do, vipassana and metta, so these became tools in my toolbox that we could talk about and play with.

When she stopped leasing space in a Boston office once a week and started seeing clients only at her home office in the suburbs, I adjusted schedule to make the hour-long trip to keep seeing her.

We finally parted ways because it felt like our work was done. When I first went to her I was discontent and anxious, but I didn't know why. Soon I came out of my isolation and re-established ties with good girlfriends, buoyed by the practice socializing in her office.

I discovered I had been denying the dissatisfaction in my marriage to Rob. I stopped feeling like a hurt and needy child when my mother neglected me, and I learned to feel compassion for my ill father, who never treated me well but who now needs my help.

I remember long ago my mother telling me and a good friend — as tears of teenage anguish flowed down our horrified faces after breaking up with our first boyfriends — that boys will come and go, but we girls will be friends forever.

Twenty years later, I'm still close to Hillary. She's fantastic — smart, generous, fun-loving. But she has a pig-headed husband. Her four lovely children are more anxious by the minute for being in a household with their angry father. I wonder why she's never said word one about leaving him.

It might be their house big enough for six, insurance and benefits, and the double income that can comfortably feed their clan. Security is not to be scoffed at.

Take my friend Angela. She's cool — artistic, determined, down-to-earth. But she knows she's not in love with her live-in boyfriend. In fact, he has proposed and she has declined. She stays. Why? They share a mortgage on a great loft. The down payment came from his father, and she worries if they separate she'll lose out and be back to student-like living - sharing an apartment with strangers. Ick.

Rob was away last weekend, and I spent a good part of it plodding around my apartment, relishing in its comforts, perfecting homebody-ness. "Mine, mine, mine," I thought, smiling, wrapped in my favorite blanket in my favorite chair. Actually, if Rob and I split, I could never afford the apartment myself.

Like Hillary and Angela, I stay because the unknown - single parenting, messy roommates, fewer comforts - seems worse than a bad relationship. 

If that scale tips, though, and I choose freedom over comfort, I know I'll still have my girls. And if Hillary or Angela ever make the hard decision to leave, they'll have me. My mom said so. 

Kate Hudson and Heather Mills. Britney, JLo, and Jen. They got divorced in the glare of the paparazzi cameras and scrutiny of the public eye. That's unfair and painful, to be sure.

But the lives of wealthy celebrities are so unimaginable to me, I can't get interested much less relate to their journeys through marital strife. And the stories of them triumphantly coming out the other side? Complete turn-offs.

Am I alone in this? Because, I mean, of course they came out okay. They have gobs of money.

I don't mean to belittle their heartaches; they are people who hurt like the rest of us. And no, money certainly can't buy happiness.

But it can buy a lot. It can buy a new lifestyle, completely assembled. It can buy new mansions, personal chefs and trainers, cars and nannies, and vacations away from it all, to say nothing of top-notch lawyers and mediators, spiritual guides, and unlimited therapy sessions.

What about the rest of us? For a typical woman to separate from her spouse, it might require saving for an apartment security deposit, suffering higher grocery bills, and finding new solutions for transportation between home, daycare, and work. Newly separated women often struggle to make ends meet. And having the number of visits to a therapist determined by an insurance company isn't very helpful either.

I haven't left Rob, but I'd be lying if I didn't say I would be living elsewhere now if last spring at the height of my marital struggles I had enough money to strike out on my own. Luckily, we're relatively content at the moment, visiting a therapist weekly and trying to make our way back to a healthier marriage.

If life is a journey, it's no weekend jaunt to the beach. It's an around-the-world expedition riddled with dangerous passages and course corrections.

My marriage is a journey, unfortunately quite a rough one of late. My relationship to my ailing father and my siblings who also help take care of him is always under construction.

Like many people, I also grapple with work-life balance: how much of myself do I put into my job or even any given project, and how much do I hold in reserve?

I've added another journey. Crazy, right? But stick with me...this one might be worth the added trouble.

I've embarked on a six-month yoga teacher training, and it's intense. The amount and level of physical, academic, and emotional study only seems to grow, week to week. At one point early on I said to a classmate that this might not have been the right time to engage in such a difficult program. Then we started our course of yogic philosophy.

Now I'm chartering more twists and turns in my mind than on the mat. While the training is physically challenging, this journey goes within, and the steadiness of mind I'm building benefits every part of my life.

So this one's a staycation. And there couldn't be a better time for it.

Last week in "Since You Asked," Cary Tennis's advice column on Salon.com, a young woman in a sad marriage suspects she shouldn't be married at all and wonders how to be happy again. The poor thing is caught between the guilt born of a religious family of origin who believe divorce is a sin, and a self-evident truth that she got married too quickly and simply doesn't love her husband.

She even says her husband is a perfectly nice guy. Huh. Sounds familiar.

Tennis's response blew my mind. It validated her (and my!) discomfort as perfectly legitimate and pointed out that leaving the marriage is not a selfish act but instead rectifies the previous selfish act of marrying for the wrong reasons.

Staying in a marriage that cannot be fixed is continuing to patch something that is monumentally broken.

Further, leaving would release her husband from marriage to a wife who doesn't want to be with him any longer, and he could move on. In this case, if the act of leaving is not an act of service to another, I don't know what is.

Cary also talks about how we all carry with us something like a personal truth — he describes it as a package we clutch to ourselves through thick and thin — and suggests that in her case that truth, the thing that defines her and that she is compelled to honor in her life, might be the spirit of freedom.

Perhaps she is a free spirit and marriage in general is not a good fit. Amen. I don't know if he has her figured out, but he sure has my number.

Is my marriage to Rob the relationship I dreamed about having when I was a young girl? No. Do I wish for something more dynamic and fulfilling? Yes.

But instead of getting out there and creating a new life, I'm sitting back, waiting. Life goes on in our cozy Boston apartment. We work, eat, and play as usual. Our marriage is lacking (we don't even have sex!) but arguments are few. We easily split bills and chores, and we have many friends in common.

But if I seem certain about staying put, it's only what I'm letting Rob believe. In reality, I'm preparing the way. I'm breaking free from bad habits that keep me tied to Rob: I'm paying my debt and saving my own money. We're selling our car in an effort to go green, but it hasn't escaped me that it also means one less financial entanglement.

My stealthy preparation might be moot. When I arrive at the fork in the road, I might choose to stay with Rob. After all, there is the chance couples therapy will bring us back together.

But if it feels right to veer off and pursue a life on my own, I want to do it without heading straight for the poorhouse.

If I stay, it will be for love. If I go, it will be for an independence made possible by my own hard work.

Looking back at all my posts recently, I had to laugh. One of the first was called "Should I Stay or Should I Go?" That could be the title for all my posts, for my entire blog, and indeed for my life!

In my early posts, I waffled, now and then seemingly determined to pursue one course of action, only to change my mind a week later. But mostly I described my relationship with Rob as something damaged. The question was, and remains: Is it irrevocably so?

Today as a warm breeze drifts through my study window and my thoughts flow easily through my head and onto the page, I feel more comfortable in my apartment with Rob, indeed in my own skin, than I've felt in a while.

Some fellow FWW bloggers and readers say don't make a move until you're certain, and when you're certain, you'll know it. Others say I owe it to myself to leave. The latter is not unwarranted or unhelpful advice, but I don't know anything for certain, and I think I'm going to stay put for now. Feels right.

Where staying put with no big-picture plan seemed torturous just weeks ago, it doesn't seem so hard to bear at the moment. Why is this so? Couples therapy? Recent time apart from Rob as I traveled with a friend? Rob's continued evolution through therapeutic work? Maybe all?

One thing I've learned: being gentle with each other, allowing space for independent growth, and not giving in to fear when our directions diverge or seem unwieldy brings a bit of relief.

When the pressure of work, family drama, and troubled marriage overwhelm, I fantasize about leaving town, changing my name, and dropping off the grid for a small but self-sufficient life in the southwestern desert. I don't have much money of my own, but then I don't imagine needing much.

A beat up truck, a dog as companion, and a cozy adobe cottage — that's all I'll need. A pressure-free job at a local dive would pay the bills. I'll be perfectly content writing, exploring desert canyons, and kicking back with a few new friends over beer on rusty porch chairs. No father with Alzheimer's disease to worry about, no student loans to pay, no ambitious career or lifestyle plans in a fast-paced, high-priced northeastern city to frustrate the calm.

Such is my escape fantasy. Do we all have one? Do some people act on them? Are they the brave or crazy among us? I suppose that depends on how troubled their lives were, on how likely they could heal or remain safe, staying put.

This week I depart for a short Mexican vacation. A dear friend who lives on the opposite coast is meeting me for an escape to the beach. We'll sleep in a cabana on the jungle's edge, read in hammocks, and practice yoga on the shore. I anticipate warm air, fresh seafood, and easy conversation.

The temptation to relinquish obligations back home will tug hard. I'll relish the thought of staying behind in a paradise marvelous not so much for its sand and sea as for its lack of strings attached. But no person is an island. I'll be back.

Rob's and my couple's therapist suggested the choice I face isn't between our current relationships on the one hand, and separate futures on the other, but between a new relationship together on the one hand, and separate futures on the other.

Oh, right. I don't have to settle for our relationship status quo; if I choose to stay, it should be for a better, healthier relationship. While this is not earth shattering, it felt new, and gave me pause. I guess I had been in a rut thinking the relationship was unchangeable and therefore doomed. Not so?

After this suggestion, I spent a good day thinking, nah — there's no way Rob can change. And the trauma between us is irrevocable and can't be healed.

But then I thought of all the good changes Rob has already made and decided he would be capable of it. That lasted through a second day. But something still irked me. Even if change for the better were possible between us, I still had misgivings. What were they?

They were my dreams. My dreams of independence, the freedom of living on my own terms — without the guilt and the fighting and the worry — and the pride that would come of humble self-sufficiency.

These dreams of mine are set in the near future; I imagine enjoying this independence while I can still pass for the kind of young that gets away with putting up visitors on a futon rather than in a well-appointed guest room, that travels from hostel to hostel and is not decades older than the other guests.

This is it — I feel I'm in a race against time. Sure, independence at any age will be wonderful, but my particular dreams I want to live out, well, now.

This reminds me of Harry Burns's loving tirade at the end of When Harry Met Sally: "When you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible."