I originally drafted this post on 7/1/2016. I didn’t hit publish until today.
Let me start by saying how moved I was by the outpouring after I posted my blog, “When my marriage fell apart, the real work began”. Comments, shares, likes, PMs, texts, calls, and face-to-face sidebars ensued. As you might imagine, my text thread with K that day was filled with acknowledgement of our own mistakes early on, and pride in the wonderful young men our kids are becoming.
As I prepare to get married tomorrow, I have been reflecting on my life – the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Specifically, I have been thinking a lot about the choices that I made during my marriage to K, because if I don’t recognize when, where, and why I made those choices, I’m more likely to repeat them (and we all know where they got me the first time).
Looking back, I see now that we made a major, fatal flaw which was the catalyst to our separation: when we weren’t isolating ourselves to try and figure it out on our own, we were sharing our challenges with the wrong people.
If my memory serves me, and I’ve been told that it nearly always does, neither of us had shared what we were going through with our parents or siblings. In fact, I don’t think that I told my parents that we had decided to separate until after he had moved out of the house – in which we lived next door.
I hadn’t told my closest friends. In fact, friends called K to reach me months after we separated – because I went completely dark. Everything went completely dark.
The simple truth was that we didn’t know what to do, but I have to admit, that a decade later, I’m not sure why common sense hadn’t kicked in. Why we hadn’t thought, “Our marriage deserves more than this. We should talk to our parents, our friends. That counsellor is a quack – he isn’t for us – let’s keep looking for someone who’s in our corner.”
We were no strangers to marriage counseling – we had seen various people over the years for different reasons – mainly our struggle with infertility.
After difficulties that I’ll save for another day, our boys were born in 2005, and the next year was one of the happiest in my life. I missed my work, but I was able to play on the floor all day with my babies which took the cake. I met my closest friends. I giggled all day long.
In late 2006, we sold our home and moved in with my parents while our new home was being built.
And it was then that something happened.
I don’t even know what it was.
But I remember a shift in January of 2007.
Hard stop.
I remember exactly what it was.
That was the month that K was set to take a business trip on behalf of LSI Distributors – our company. I didn’t want him to go without us, but he said it wasn’t something that I could come to with the kids. So he left. And it did something to me.
That moment may sound silly, and it’s certainly not why we divorced, but it was the event that triggered our unraveling to move into warp speed.
He told my dad to stop the build – but didn’t tell him why.
I told him to press on – but didn’t tell him why.
In April of 2007, we moved in, but barely hanging on. One of us living on one floor and the other living on another. This wasn’t the way I thought it would be.
We went for help – several counsellors and our minister.
One of those counsellors suggested we stay together, but have partners outside of our marriage who would meet the needs our spouse wasn’t meeting.
I didn’t remember hearing about that in my vows.
We shared the darkest places of our relationship with our minister and he told us that if we were Catholic, our marriage would be annulled.
My heart was broken.
I believe to this day that everyone we spoke to meant well, but they didn’t know how to help us.
We didn’t know how to help us.
We didn’t see another way. We thought that we had done everything that we could, with everyone that we could, so we split up.
A decade undone.
Most people learn quickly that when you leave a relationship, all of your good and all of your bad follow you into any subsequent relationships. There’s no escaping it. And so pretty soon, I found myself in a similar situation with Domenick.
We went to counsellors, we independently read books about relationships, and we were honest with each about our disappointment that this relationship wasn’t, at all, “easier” than the ones that we had left behind.
About a year go, seven into our relationship if you’re counting, we had a breakthrough.
We attended a conference together that taught us many things, but perhaps the most important was that we needed to evaluate who we had around us – standing guard on behalf of or relationship.
We now talk openly with family, friends, and colleagues about our love. We know that one day, we may need to talk with those same people about a challenge we are facing, and we want them to understand who we are, what we stand for, and how important we are to each other.
If the going gets tough, we don’t want to put our relationship solely into the hands of a stranger. We don’t want to rest it all on someone who doesn’t understand us or want the very best for us.
Today, we welcome a spotlight on us – because the light is so much better than the darkness.
The “spotlight”, however, is only a source of strength if the people around you want your relationship to succeed.
I’m watching it with someone I love right now.
Married for less than two years, she and her husband are seriously considering divorce. The paperwork is in. Her friends are telling her that he’s not worth it – that she’s young and she’ll find someone else.
I try and stay out of people’s business, I really do, but I felt so compelled to talk to her, that I could barely contain myself. I was relieved when she was open to it and we subsequently spent hours on the phone.
I did a lot of listening, but when the timing was right, I shared my own story – of which she had some knowledge of – I’ve known her since the day she was born. I shared the challenges that I have faced over the years in my own relationships. I shared some of the resources that I have used that have taught me to put my partner first – something I always thought I was doing, but secretly wasn’t.
She’s hurt. There is a lot of damage. But all-in-all, I know that she valued having someone beside her reminding her that she took a vow. That it isn’t as easy as just walking away and starting over again with someone new. That being a wife, or a husband, is the most important job that we can have in this world.
Yes, I just said that – and I meant it.
So who are you to your married family and friends? Are you gathering around them in a supportive role? Are you lifting them up when they are down and out? Are you feeding the negativity they feel about their spouse?
Who do you want to be to them?
Equally important is who is around your marriage?
As Domenick and I prepare to get married tomorrow, we are surrounding ourselves with people who will help us uphold our wedding vows – people who will encourage us to see things a different way. Who will share bits and pieces of their own marriages in an effort to bring light to our dark spaces. We are lucky people.
{We invited K and his new love to our wedding – for a moment, they considered it. In the end, they declined.}
For K and me, it wasn’t the people around us who were the problem…it was the fact that neither of us knew how to let the right people into our relationship. And so we imploded. {A side note that it took us years to rebuild so that we could co-parent in great brightness for our children – because doing that in the darkness was not an option that either of us was willing to choose.}
With great certainty now, I intentionally surround myself with women – couples even – who lift one another up.
Just yesterday, after having coffee with someone for the very first time despite knowing one another casually for decades, I texted her to tell her how much I love the way she talked about her husband during our time together.
Her response took my breath away…I adore him. I know I’m the lucky one in our marriage.
She’s a beautiful person – someone I look up to as a woman.
With Domenick, I don’t want an ally to confer that he was an absolute jerk in that argument.
I don’t want to be right – I want to give love to him.
He doesn’t want someone who tells him that he can do better.
There will always be someone smarter or prettier or easier to contend with – he wants to give love to me.
We want people around us who see the blessing that we each are – especially together – and remind us that we are committed to one another – for better and for worse.
So tomorrow, we will walk down the aisle, and we will joyfully continue into our ninth year together.
It hasn’t always been pretty – in fact, there were parts that were pretty {insert curse word here} ugly, but we know now that we have everything we need to take this holy walk…hand-in-hand.