“I think I knew when we went to Myrtle Beach that this wasn’t going to work.”
That’s what he said to me.
That was the sentence that ended my marriage.
Those are the words that keep playing over and over in my head and that lead me to the endless questions that I will never have answers for. You see, that trip, it was in 2015. My command sent me down to SC to see him because he was struggling with some personal issues and I felt that as his wife, as the person who loved him with everything in me, that I needed to go help him.
I needed to see if I could get him the help he needed. Yet, he waited until December of 2018 to tell me that he had known since then that we shouldn’t be married to each other. That he knew when I wouldn’t let him handle his problems in his own way that it wasn’t going to work. No. It took him three more years and a minor fight in his truck on the way to pick up my car for him to tell me “I’m not sure I love you anymore.”
Nothing could have shocked me more than hearing those words come out of his mouth that Wednesday night. I’m pretty sure he could have come out of the closet and I would have been less blindsided than hearing the man I loved tell me he wasn’t sure he wanted to be married to me and that if we had just been dating at that point that he would have walked away by now.
I’m not proud to say that the night be dropped this bombshell on me I got rip roaring drunk, but that is exactly what I did. I drank and I cried. I drank and I called friends. I drank and I hugged my dog until he looked at me like I was crazy. I drank. I was hoping that if I drank enough that night, I would fall asleep and the next day it would have all been a bad dream. I was hoping that if I drank enough that night, I could forget that he asked me for time to figure out what he wanted to do. I was hoping if I drank enough that night, I might come to terms with the fact that he was not giving me, us, our marriage a chance to work because he had never told me things were so wrong and he didn’t believe in counseling.
I promise you that drinking did not solve anything. In fact, it made teaching the next day quite the adventure. And it made my brain go into overdrive as I tried to come to terms with the things he had said to me.
It took 10 days for him to go from “I’m not sure I love you anymore” to “I am done soul searching; we need to move forward with a divorce.” He told me he wanted a divorce 9 days before Christmas. 10 days before our anniversary. He destroyed my whole world with just one little sentence. He walked away from anything that required work and responsibility without even giving me a chance to try. He made decisions for me without any input from me. He told me I got the house, the dog, and all the furniture. He told me he was staying in my city. He told me.
At that point I went into survival mode. Anyone who talked to me for a good month after that can attest to the fact that I used a very twisted sense of humor to help me get through. I was told I was being too nice. You see, instead of showing him the door the moment he told me he didn’t want to be married anymore, I was showing him apartments that were in his budget and I gave him 2 full months to get himself together and get out if he needed.
Instead of trying to squeeze every penny out of him that I could, I was helping him write a new budget since he hadn’t had to handle money during our marriage, and he wasn’t really sure of where to start again.
Instead of being a spiteful, angry, screaming ex-wife-to-be, I was being as kind as I could and as helpful as I could. I let him think I believed his lies about who was messaging him on Facebook and I let him think I didn’t hear him up, laughing on the computer with his female friends on the video games. I pretended I was ok and that I could be perfectly civil. I made dinner for two, cracked jokes about normal things, asked him how his day was at work. I coexisted with him for 33 days between when he said he wanted a divorce and when he actually moved out without losing my temper or showing how I was falling apart inside. I refused to be that woman. I kept telling people I was tough. I was ok. I was going to be better for all of this. I was strong.
Then moving day came.
While I was smart enough to take the day off work, knowing I would be useless for my students if I was an emotional nut job that day, I wasn’t smart enough to hide my emotions one more moment. That morning, he said something, and to be quite honest it was probably a nothing comment, but it set me off. I remember so clearly slamming down the laundry basket, storming towards the room he was packing up, and losing my crap. Screaming at him. Reminding him that HE wanted this, not me. Screaming that he was a liar. Screaming that I wanted him out of MY house. Then storming upstairs to my shower and crying until I thought I was going to be sick to my stomach. Try as I might I was no longer able to be the “perfect ex-wife-to-be.” My emotions had bubbled over and I couldn’t take it anymore.
While I am less than proud of that final moment, I am proud of how I handled things leading up to it and since then. For the first week after moving day, I made myself do four things a day: shower, brush my teeth, walk the dog, feed the dog. If I got those four things done, then it was a successful day.
I was still going to work every day because I knew I had to support myself, especially since I was buying a house ON MY OWN and couldn’t exactly lose my job with a mortgage.
I was still doing my grad school work because just because one dream of mine was ending didn’t mean I was going to let the rest of my dreams fade away as well. I was still going to church because I needed to get out of my wallowing moments at home. I was going through the motions, even when I didn’t feel like it, because I knew at some point I would shake out of my sorrow and crave a new normal, whatever that was going to look like on my own.
No one grows up dreaming of divorcing. No one thinks that their marriage is going to be another statistic. And all too often, when a couple calls it quits it becomes an ugly event in which one party ends up looking foolish for their actions. I may not be happy with the fact that my husband essentially asked for a divorce for Christmas, but I am happy with the fact that we were able to handle everything respectfully and politely.
There has been no fighting over assets. There has been no public name calling or ugliness. There have been no issues separating finances. Our divorce has been as passionless as our marriage was the last six months we were together. Maybe the lack of intimacy should have been a neon sign to me that something wasn’t right!
Watching him walk away so hurts like hell. But seeing how easy it was for him to go makes me certain that as much as I hate it, as much as it hurts every part of me, he made the right choice; I sure don’t deserve a mediocre marriage to someone who isn’t passionate about me.
