Storm Tracking: Scenes of Marital Disintegration

The purpose of the research was to explore the kinds of conflict cycles couples may engage in even as they struggle to overcome their problems. This script was developed from research notes, contemporaneously recorded during the weeks leading to the author’s separation from her husband, using autoethnographic processes of systematic introspection.1 The play script form was adopted to reflect the coconstructed, embodied, and embedded nature of relational cycles. A story in and of itself can “call” us into the heart and mind of another person, and a script shared publicly in performance can extend the process of relationship inquiry into another experiential domain.2 The disintegration of the author’s marriage as told in “Storm Tracking” mirrors the emotional complexity of relational endings in general. The author has employed a representational form that preserves and perhaps extends this complexity, rather than reducing the story to a finite explanation of what went wrong.