I have often described divorce to my family and friends in this way:
Picture yourself on a ship in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. There is a fire on the ship, and it is sinking. In order to save yourself you jump overboard, and sink to great depths in the ocean. After awhile, you finally have the strength to start swimming toward the surface. You can see a tiny light on the surface of the water, but the water is so turbulent due to the sinking ship you are struggling to move toward the light. However, despite the light being so far away, you keep swimming toward it. You are running out of breath and energy, so you grab ahold of other people in the water, slowly pulling yourself closer and closer to the surface. Sadly, sometimes you push those that help you further down into the darkness in order to spring off of them towards the surface. Once you reach the surface, you take a huge gasp of air. You realize you aren’t safe yet, because you are alone, exhausted, and scared in the middle of the ocean. And although you can finally breathe, you still have thousands of miles to swim before you get to safe, dry land.
Here is my very own personal tragic story of divorce.
Yes, I effectively earned a divorce 6 years ago. Earning it was not easy. It took years of bad decisions and behavior to lead up to it, but I finally nailed it.
It has taken me this long to write the story of what happened, but I’m hoping by me blogging about it, it will bring another layer of closure to this open wound in my soul, and potentially touch others who are going through something similar.
I enjoyed my childhood. My childhood was filled with almost all happy memories, successes, and accomplishments. I was someone that loved to have lots of friends, be involved in lots of activities, and keep most friendships & relationships light and happy. So, I left home for the Coast Guard Academy at 18, with a squeaky clean reputation and a naive outlook on life. Thus far, I had kept my dating life at a relatively shallow level, dating lots of boys, and not jumping into too many commitments. Once I was on my own in the Coast Guard, I continued to date a lot, and even got engaged a few times, without realizing what that commitment really meant. Looking back, I think I probably hurt more guys than I helped, because I was still so lost trying to figure out who I was and who I was looking for in my life.
I think I really hit my peak of poor decision-making when I got home from the Coast Guard in 2004. It was the first time I had considered “my biological clock”, and after looking around at my friends, I quickly realized I was way behind in life. I was 27 and totally single with no plan on the horizon. So I jumped out of one failed relationship into the arms of a new relationship —-always a great way to handle things, right?
So I dated my soon-to-be husband for a quick 2 years, and after immaturely regularly mentioning my age/clock to him, and of course adding a good dose of guilt/pressure to his plate, he asked me to marry him. We had a short engagement, and even during that engagement there were huge red flags. Although we had always had fun going out and partying together, we honestly argued all the time. In fact, I remember showing up to my surprise, bridal-shower so angry from a fight we had had, that I could barely fake a smile for my family & friends. Despite the warning signs, I kept pushing forward, after all, I was almost 30 AND our parents had dished out a pretty penny already….so I kept my eye on the prize and kept moving ahead.
Hindsight being 20/20, it is no surprise after the wedding that we still continued to fight. I remember asking him to go to marriage counseling in the first month of marriage. I made this request for 3 years, pretty regularly, but he was never interested. I reached out to family members (in my family and his), and I reached out to friends. I really didn’t know what to do. I was so used to casually walking away from relationships in the past that now I felt stuck. I felt invisible. I felt depressed and sad, and I had started to just be consistently angry. We would go days, at one point even a week, without speaking. I spent hours crying in my bathtub, crying hysterically on the bathroom floor, and crying myself to bed. I was not only losing my marriage, I was losing the sense of who I was as a person. Unfortunately, instead of putting in the work to learn to get better as a couple, I could slowly feel myself starting to pull away. I used to describe my emotions as being like a light-switch—meaning, once the switch was turned off, I couldn’t get it back on. And after a particularly nasty week-long fight, I felt the switch-flip off.
And then I met someone.
The dreaded statement that I never wanted to say (or type) out loud. I met someone that I started to like, despite being married. Ugh I said it again. When I first met him, I wasn’t looking for someone, I wasn’t aware of what was happening. But the one thing I knew was that I felt happy. After 5 years of being in a relationship filled with arguments, criticism, and disrespect (on both sides), I started to feel excited about something. And before I knew it, I had developed a texting relationship with someone. I kept telling myself it was harmless, that he was just a friend. But I would anxiously wait by my phone for each text to show up, and sit and ponder the perfect, witty response.
This went on for a week or 2 before I realized that I had started to grow fond of this man, and finally got the courage to tell my sister through tear-filled eyes what I had been doing. It amazes me that 6 years later, I can still remember the exact conversation and setting—-we were in her living room, and our husbands were downstairs hanging out. And I said: “I have met someone that I like, and I don’t know what to do.” And then I just sobbed. I mean thinking about what sort of damage you can do to your life and your husband and your future can be absolutely suffocating. So, I just sat there and tried to explain to her what I was feeling, and that I didn’t know what the next step should be. She was perfect in that moment, like sisters are supposed to be, but I could see fear in her eyes. I could tell she was scared for me. Scared that I was about to ruin my life.
And I was scared.
I was scared that the damage I had done with this purely emotional-relationship was the nail in my marriage’s coffin.
I was scared that if I stayed my life would be filled with emptiness, continued lack of pretty much everything I needed, and many nights sobbing on my bathroom floor.
I was scared that if I left him, I would ruin my life.
I was scared that if I left him, I would never be a mother. I was at this point 33 years old, so I pretty much knew that I would be sealing the deal for not having children if I chose to leave.
But I honestly think I was so sad and depressed with the state of my marriage, that I was looking for any safety net to be outside my window so I could jump. And I jumped. Within 3 weeks of the first text, I left my husband. Man, that is hard to “type-outloud”. But I did. I left him for a potential future with someone I barely knew. I left him, with a hope of finding happiness in my life. I left him.
Little did I know how crushing that decision would be in my life. I had broken-up with many, many boyfriends before, and I thought I could nonchalantly end this marriage and just walk away with no battle scars. Boy, was I wrong. It was crushing. It sucked the life out of me.
I was embarrassed by the fact that I had such a huge failure in my journey, and embarrassed that I had single-handedly made the choice to end our marriage. I was also embarrassed that as a Christian-woman, I strayed. Even with it just being an emotional-stray, I knew it was wrong because it affected my heart and the feelings I had toward my husband.
At first, I solely blamed him. I would think about examples where he neglected me, how he didn’t help around the house, how he put me down, and how me didn’t understand me. I blamed how when we were together, we fought too much, we didn’t talk enough, we had zero intimacy, we spent too much money, we drank too much, etc. But, when I am being completely vulnerable, and I look myself right in the eyes and think back to the night I told him that I had met someone that I liked and that I didn’t know what was happening to our marriage, I can remember how he grabbed a hold of me with both arms and pulled me to the ground in our kitchen. Forehead to forehead, his hands on my cheeks, both of us sobbing, he looked in my eyes and told me I was his soul mate and begged me to stay. And I stayed….the night. The next morning, I packed up my stuff and left. The switch was flipped.
A few months after leaving him and realizing my safety net had been nothing more than a kind and innocent soul who had helped me escape a broken marriage, I woke up scared and almost hyperventilating. The reality of my decision had set in, and I was certain that I had ruined my life. I called my husband up at 5 in the morning on the way to work, and I was bawling. As I choked on sobs, snot, and tears, I tried to convince him that although we had each made horrible mistakes and hurt each other terribly, that it wasn’t too late to go back and try and fix us. In not so many words, he told me he had no interest in reconciling and ended the call abruptly.
I called up a counselor that day, and made an appointment. I rushed into her office and broke-down sobbing explaining my story, begging her to tell me whether or not I had irreversibly screwed up my life. She handed me a box of tissues, and simply said, “It really doesn’t matter what you did or he did, or what his family thinks of you….From your description it is clear that you never respected him, so it sounds like it would have taken a ton of work for you to ever be happy with him”. I had never respected him? It shocked me to hear this, but at the same time it immediately calmed me down. I had felt like I was the one that had been disrespected the whole time. I didn’t realize how much I had grown to dislike him through the marriage. I didn’t realize how much I had started to disrespect him. It made the pill much easier to swallow hearing this from a third person, and realizing, we might not have been a good match.
So, although my path to get there was absolutely the most painful and wrong path to take, was my final decision to leave, wrong? Looking back, our issues were so trivial. This was a marriage that could have been salvaged. There was definitely work that needed to be done, but it could have been saved. Could we have been happy? I’m not sure. I do think about him occasionally, hoping he is doing well and that he recovered from our agonizing blunder as quickly as possible. But I honestly have never missed him or the marriage. I think that is a good sign, that it was a solid decision, although not the Christian one. Thankfully, we didn’t have kids, which, has allowed us both to move on as if this never happened. Only our hearts show the scars. The one truth I do know, is that without making that decision I would not have married my current husband, nor had my two beautiful babies —all of whom overfill my life and heart with happiness and love. I do consider myself very blessed to have escaped the previous marriage with minimal internal damage. And after many bumps and bruises in the first year after we separated, I somehow managed to land on my feet, and was finally able to see myself again looking back from the mirror.
So my only advice is to be careful with your marriage and your heart, there are all sorts of dangers—some self-inflicted, some not— that are lurking in the shadows waiting for a weak moment. If you do LIFE right, you should only have one precious marriage; treat it like a short-lived, fragile, delicate flower. Hold it in your arms & carry it close to your heart.