I feel bad every time I post something that involves divorce.  I feel like it is a marriage reality that most of us (myself included) would like to ignore in the hopes that it will go away forever–or at least not happen to us.  But it does happen sometimes.  And it did happen to me.  And maybe, if I talk about it, it won’t happen to me again and maybe somehow it will help you avoid this happening to you…

My ex and I dated for 6 years before we were married.  We saw each other through jobs, grad school, films, apartments, and many other hard things for years.  Why then did we end our relationship a year after the wedding?  I cannot say for sure, but for us there were a lot of things I thought were circumstantial that were not.  I thought as soon we get a bigger place, better job, more money, things will be better.  They were better, but we were not.  It turns out that a lot of our trouble was not circumstantial, a lot of it has to do with who we were and who we were together.  As soon as the dust settled on our lifetime commitment, it was clear that some things that weren’t working before still weren’t working and were probably never going to work, and that wasn’t ok.  Do I wish we had realized this before?  You bet.  But a lot of couple learning got sacrificed to jobs and the stress of life.  A lot of it is on me.  I just wanted to move forward together, but it turns out that what our marriage revealed was that we needed to move forward apart.

This is a bit hard to say, but I have been married before.  And, yes, it didn’t work.  I got divorced, something that I was hoping never to do.  I am very lucky, in that my ex-husband is still a friend and still family.  I love him.  But we failed to sustain our marriage.  No reason to get into all the details, but they were big ones related to fundamental incompatibilities that we were sort of ignoring until we couldn’t anymore.  We did try very hard to save our marriage, but we did not succeed.  Did I love him?  Very much.  Did think I was going to spend the rest of my life with him? I certainly did, or I never would have married him in the first place.   Even with the best of intentions, and a lot of love, we failed.

So the result of all this is, when I contemplate all this marriage stuff—which is a bit hard and complicated to begin with—I have to ask myself the question, how will it be different this time?