Love in the Time of Divorce

Three years ago, I married the man I loved. So much has changed since then and, while I am waiting for signed divorce papers to arrive in the mail, I am still counting this day as one of the best.

Since then, we’ve spent hours fighting, I spent hours crying and I am still trying to find love for those versions of myself that my ex-husband got to know the best over eight years of us being together.

There is no doubt that I was madly in love with the man I married but it’s only now that I am realising how very little love I left for myself. I remember that I felt so unsettled before we met that it was easy to lose myself in a love for someone else. 

I would like to go back in time to remind myself to not only see beauty in others when they struggled to see it but also find it in myself.

I find myself dissecting our relationship trying to find its faults. Of course I want to learn from it, I want to heal through it, to eventually feel happy again with someone else. 

It is a lot easier to try and recognise unhealthy patterns that I might bring into the next person’s life and to learn how to better communicate what I want and need, than to truly look at how little I loved myself. 

I am still sad that we didn’t work out. I try to stay away from masking that pain with humour even though I would prefer to laugh.

I am sorry to have hurt the man that I loved.

I never got married thinking that we might not last.

I was prepared for the challenges that might come up. More challenges, after those challenges we had already faced.

When we got married, I thought we were invincible.

I always thought that as long as we loved each other, we could survive anything. No matter how much we would hurt each other, I was sure we were both committed to fixing anything that could ever be wrong with it.

Now I’ve lost feeling so naive.

I couldn’t imagine a life without the man I had chosen. Now I realise that maybe what seemed impossible was to be alive without this amount of love. I had no clue how to love myself so I used him. I used the love I felt for someone else to see me through.

Here I am, holding the papers, signed, and now it feels real.

I am sorry we didn’t last. I am sorry some things end.

Sometimes I still miss our lives together, like an alternative universe; and I am smiling at the version of us that got to be.