My Marriage…Is Over
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I thought about what it must have felt like, for thousands of thousands of individual human beings, to type that into Google, to have that moment where you just write it out. I imagined men and women crying as they typed in those words, feeling defeated, feeling like failures, feeling angry and frustrated and confused and hopeless. I kept thinking about the emotional intensity those words must have carried for nearly every person who typed them.
“My marriage is over.”
I can’t believe it.
After all these years.
After all the effort I’ve put in.
After how hard I tried to love her.
After everything I did for him.
After forgiving her for her affair.
After that amazing vacation we just took together.
After two years of therapy, and I thought things were getting better.
After hours praying on my knees.
After sleeping in separate beds for the last eight years.
After not having sex for three years, being married but feeling alone.
After they never really would give me a reason why.
After ten years of physical and emotional abuse.
After my pastor and all my friends telling me divorce is a sin and I would go to hell if I did this.
After finally accepting she was never going to change.
After having never really felt like I mattered to him at all.
After I got sick and he seemingly forgot all about the “in sickness and in health” part, and I was left to get through the hardest years of my life alone.
After I nursed him back to health following his motorcycle accident.
After giving her the best and most productive years of my life.
After I worked him through school and getting his career off the ground.
After he begged me to stay and work on the marriage, which I did, then he has an affair and bails.
After she told me she’d leave if I didn’t get therapy with her. I didn’t, and she did.
I’m a failure.
I’m an idiot, I should have done this years ago.
I’m a fool, why did I think he’d ever change?
I’m going to be alone for the rest of my life.
Why won’t he try?
I thought I found the one, and she apparently wasn’t. Did she ever love me as much as I loved her?
Why could he never really choose me?
Why did she stop going to basketball games with me? All I ever wanted was to be in her company.
How come he wouldn’t have sex with me? Am I really that bad?
Where did we go wrong?
What happened to us?
How did we get here?
What in the hell am I going to do now?
I’m 46, I have teenage kids, who’s going to want me?
My god, I’m not going to have insurance.
Where am I going to live?
How will this impact our children?
Why does this keep happening? What am I doing wrong? Is it me?
It’s all my fault. If only I’d…
It’s all his/her fault. They never really…
Why didn’t I…? Why didn’t they…?
How come nobody told me not to marry him?
Why did I let myself say those things to her in our last argument? I didn’t mean any of that.
She/he never really loved me.
We were too young when we got married. We never had a chance.
I’d give anything to be able to start all over with him/her. I know I could do it so much better now.
I can’t stand that he’s going to get his shit together after we split, then be the kind of man for some other woman I always needed him to be for me.
What reason did he ever give for me to actually trust him?
“My marriage…is over.”
[Photo by Siora Photography on Unsplash]