Two years

It’s been two years. Two years since my husband told me he didn’t love me. Two years since my world dropped… and kept falling.

The second year has certainly gone better than the first. 2018 was a study of “Just when you think you’ve hit rock bottom…” 2019 was about starting a new life. Admittedly, that rebirthing process sucked, but it feels like we’re through the worst of that and can start getting on with things.

But am I over the end of my marriage? No.

I still have a lot of anger that I had no say in this decision. Third parties had more say in the end of my marriage than I did. (Some days, I wonder if third parties had more say than either of us.) Maybe I’m deluding myself that if it were solely his decision, it would be easier to accept. Yet, knowing that other people could be so casual about my life, about my children’s lives… How can I ever accept that?

Life pro-tip: excepting cases of domestic abuse, if your friend is considering ending a long-term, committed relationship, tell them to talk it over with their partner.

Fighting the Narrative

Two years ago, there were false narratives being pitched to my husband and then to me. Generalisations about relationships and divorce were cherry-picked to make his departure palatable, to prioritise his experience while playing down the impact on me and the children. With these perspectives, my husband was able to box up the stresses of our life together and confine them to one corner of his new life—but that left me stuck in the box of stress. I had to leave the States to escape it, and I still have the feeling of being trapped sometimes.

The obvious rebuttal to this is that I’m bitter, and I can’t make an objective assessment. That rebuttal is absolutely true… but it’s also true that there’s a large part of this that only I know. There are so many sides of the kids’ father and of our lives together that nobody else ever saw.

Everything I know tells me that we’re all worse off than before. Two years ago, we were two depressed people who were failing to support each other fully but who were managing an otherwise functional household. Our children were happy and secure.

I can’t really vouch for what his life is like now, but he’s an ocean away from his children. Certain memories twist me up inside knowing that this is how parenthood ended up for him… for us. Financially, he’s much worse off too as he’s supporting two households.

Meanwhile I’m struggling to hold my life together for long enough to get a permanent job. I’ve lost what support I had for my insecurity issues, my ADD and the general practicalities of managing a household. My mental/emotional state is dramatically worse.

 I’m not going into detail about our children, and I do think we’ve both done a good job of minimising the impact on them, but it could only ever have been a negative impact.

The problem with many of the platitudes about divorce is that they don’t differentiate between a marriage of over a decade and a relationship of less than a year. They assume your relationship with your spouse is something that you can just “get over”. In actuality, a relationship breakdown is a common cause of chronic stress (alongside bereavement and major debt). In my opinion, this is because there comes a point when a relationship becomes a family—in a way that has nothing to do with having children.

In my husband, I haven’t just lost a lover, I’ve lost a member of my family. Outside of my children, nobody was more important to me. In many ways, that’s still true. I’m grieving him as I would a bereavement, except he’s very much alive so there are a few complications with this grieving process:

1. I have regular, if indirect, encounters with him due to his contact with the children. (I may have lost a family member, but the other members of my family haven’t.)
2. People try to comfort me by calling him names and telling me I’m better off without him. (My mourning is socially unacceptable.)
3. I have to interact with him to discuss children and money. (I need to maintain a functional working relationship with the “ghost” of my loved one.)

Relationship Post-Relationship

How is that relationship, two years on? We’re not on bad terms… but we’re not on good terms either. We’re on no terms. Professional terms. We talk only when we need to, and we keep our communication carefully polite and impersonal.

This is destroying me. We’re two people who care about each other and we can’t talk to each other. Maybe it’s just me, but I honestly don’t know how to deal with this. I don’t know how to live in a world where I’m not friends with the father of my children. Every single interaction I have with him feels like a rejection—a demonstration that I am not worth… what? Love? Time? Effort? All of the above?

Neither of us are happy about our stilted communication, but neither of us can fix it. I’m an over-explainer by nature, so sometimes the dam bursts… but all that happens is I feel stupid and embarrassed afterwards for exposing myself, and then the silence is worse than before. I don’t know what the hang up is on his end, but clearly that’s not working out either.

Our relationship ended too precipitously for marriage counselling, and now we’re left with nothing but our communication problems. On this day, two years ago, we assured each other that whatever happened, we were going to be friends for the rest of our lives. That was the height of our naïveté.

I don’t want to suggest it’s all gloom and tears for me. I moved on in the most literal way possible, by upping sticks for Cornwall, and I’m genuinely thrilled to be living here. That could never have been part of my married life. I even have a boyfriend who’s awesome and so incredibly good for me in all the ways I need right now. Ironically, he’s done more to make me optimistic about long-term singlehood than anybody else. (Long story short, neither of us want to settle down.) There are so many things in my life I’m positive about… even hopeful.

Obviously, I also have day to day stress, but it’s mostly of the manageable variety. Even at my lowest ebb over unemployment or my most anxious about my children, I rarely break down, unless it connects back to their father. Only the issues involving him induce those problematic stress reactions: the tears, the hyperventilation, the worthlessness, the hopelessness…

Because we can’t talk to each other, I can’t address that depression and anxiety. The best I can do is find a way to live with it.

Two years on, I feel like part of me has been burned away, leaving a massive, festering wound. I contort myself through life to avoid contact with that wound, but every time something does brush against it, the pain is just as intense as ever. When that happens, the best and only thing I can do is pull away from the pain as fast as possible and continue on as before. Time hasn’t healed this wound, and I don’t see what else will.

The question I always ask myself is, if it were possible, would I dial the clock back to 2017 and do over the last year of my marriage? The answer is still yes. It would still be worth it to me to sacrifice all the good of the last three years in order to protect ourselves from the toll. I imagine that at some point my answer will change, but I don’t know when. Even if we would always have gone our separate ways in 2018, I would love to have had the chance to work through that decision together. Maybe then we could still be friends. Maybe I’d be happier.