The one thing I thought would never happen to me was divorce. Turns out, I was wrong.
I met my future ex-wife when I was 23, we moved in together when I was 24, and we married when I was 26. For five years the marriage was nice, then for 15 years it was sometimes okay and sometimes frustrating, but always seemed pretty much rock solid.
It wasn’t a perfect marriage. My ex wife and I didn’t always align on things like money and aspirations. And we didn’t really align on important things like romance and intimacy. But I always thought we were friends, and for the most part it was a good enough marriage and sometimes a really fun marriage (my ex could plan a fun vacation with the best of them).
I remember volunteering for the crisis line in the late 2010s, before I realized my marriage was going to end. I had a few callers who were fretting about a failed marriage or a pending divorce, and to be honest it bothered me that I couldn’t really identify with them on that piece, because after all I myself would never be divorced. I’d experienced a lot in my life, including my own near death, but divorce wasn’t going to be one of them, so I felt like that was a gap in my ability to fully help those callers whose desperation stemmed from divorce. So I read a book then two about divorce, so I could have a better feeling of what my callers were experiencing and thus maybe be in a better place of helping them. That was in 2019.
Then almost overnight my marriage just fell apart.
Like most things that come to an end, it was a gradual then sudden process. It began with some yelling (her yelling at me) then apologizing, yelling then apologizing. In the beginning this would happen about once every week or two. Within a few months it seems like every single day she was just so angry at me about one thing or another. Along the way there were other signs: she started spending less and less time at home, more and more time with friends or focused on her career path, and increasingly she was just ignoring me when we were at home. She started questioning me all the time, usually on the theme of why hadn’t I been more successful in life, with success being defined here as making exorbitant amounts of money and commanding exorbitant amounts of prestige. It was like she’d decided at age 50 that I was a total failure because I wasn’t a roaring success, and she resented me for that.
Still, even after 11 months of this, I still didn’t think that divorce was a possibility. It was just a rough patch. It would pass. I even asked if she would be interested in marriage counseling, which she didn’t appreciate at all: “Don’t you see how busy I am??? Why would you ask me that when you know I’m so busy!”
The moment I realized that divorce was a possibility was the rainy evening she was hollering at me, and then she said, “We’ve been together for 25 years. I don’t want to get a divorce!” Huh?? Clearly divorce was on her mind.
To summarize what was maybe the longest month of my life, a few weeks later she asked if we could talk. And she said, “I can’t accomplish what I want to accomplish and be married to you.” And just like that the marriage was over. Something (divorce) a year earlier that I thought was something I’d never experience was suddenly very certainly happening to me.
I remember the Frasier episode where he says, “My wife left me, and that was painful. Then she came back, and that was excruciating.” The end of my marriage was painful, sooooo very painful, and shocking to live through. And it was a very stressful two year process to get divorced that witnessed me age 15 years in that time (I’d been 51 and looked maybe 40, and then suddenly I was 52 and looked every bit of 52). But ultimately, my life is so much better now that I’m divorced, and it would have been a lot more excruciating in life had my ex wife stayed with me or tried to come back to me (not that either one of us would have allowed that to happen by that point).
So I never expected to get divorced. But of course life doesn’t listen to me. And then it was so painful, first the very long process of divorce and then the even longer process of healing. Of truly moving on. The bad news is I had to go through that, but the good news is that a) I’m in a much much much better place now than I was during my first marriage and b) I can honestly empathize with and maybe even help anyone who is going through the unthinkable: the premature end of what was supposed to have been a lifetime together.
It has been five years. For the most part I’ve moved on, although I still harbor some hard feelings at times. And there is no question that I’m better off. So I am beginning the journey of writing down my process in case it benefits someone else in the mist of a divorce or a failing marriage. This is the first of a series of posts I’ll be making about my failed marriage, the divorce, the healing process, and ultimately redemption as I discovered a much better life for myself in the years after the divorce.
Life, Work & Wonder 