Chapters of a Relationship - Part 1

It’s hard to know where to start really. I think I restarted this paragraph about ten times before I felt like it was just OK to leave. Because there’s just really no way to broach divorce, break ups, and toxic relationships easily. 

I feel like I need to dedicate a blog post to my divorce for several reasons. Even though it happened a few years ago in the meantime. Even though I’m re-married. Even though my ex-husband and I have nothing to do with each other anymore. Not even in the slightest. 

I feel like I need to dedicate a blog post to this subject because it happened. It was a significant chapter in my life and it forever altered the direction of my life. Before, during, and after the relationship ended. 

I feel like I need to talk about my divorce in a single blog post because I don’t want it to be uncomfortable or feel taboo when I mention it in my other blog posts. Because I do mention my ex a lot. Because the relationship had that much of an impact on my life. Ten years of a person’s life is not nothing. 

And finally, I feel like I focus a blog post about my previous marriage and my divorce because it ended up being a goal on my Master List and I want to be part of that movement that divorce isn’t a failure, but can be a chapter in a person’s life. 

To be clear, I am in no way shaming anyone for their relationship choices past and present. I am not passing judgment on anyone’s state of affairs. And most importantly, I am not trivializing or diminishing the life altering, and sometimes traumatic effects a break up or divorce can have on a person. 

Some context. 

I was born in the 1980’s, making me an Elder Millennial by definition. The slice of a generation caught between Gen X, younger Millennials, and Gen Z. I make this distinction because part of the Millennial generation did grow up without the internet as part of their childhood, which as we know has had profound impacts on the development of children. Naturally, this led us to being caught between what we wanted and expected from work, from our families, and from life. The narrative of what we should do with our lives was different than those born towards the end of the generation. 

The extra layer to my upbringing was that my childhood was spent largely in small, rural towns and cities of Canada. Despite Canada’s reputation for being nice and concerned about the environment, there were and are large areas of Canada that are very religious and very conservative. Even today. The societal and peer pressure to agree with ideas like go to church, sex before marriage is a sin, living together unmarried is a sin, drinking alcohol divorce is a sin, homosexuality is a sin.

Sound familiar? 

Sure, my dad being a pastor should have made this easy to navigate, but it actually made it harder because my parents were actually liberal Europeans. The liberal ideas of how society should function while maintaining their inflexible, but incredibly hardworking and efficient lifestyle made socializing difficult to navigate and made my adolescence very lonely. I was an outsider my entire life, and even in my group of high school “friends” I was an outsider. 

When I started College in my hometown, it was just an extension of my high school loneliness and existence. There seemed to be more pressure as the class was filled with even more rural and religious students, most of them in long term relationships already at the start of our first year of nursing and engaged by the end of the year. Half of the engaged cohort was married by the end of the second year and pregnant by the end of the fourth year. 

And guess what, I just wanted to fit in so I wouldn’t feel so lonely. And the first person that showed some real interest in a long term relationship, treated me decently well, made me feel sexy and desired, had a job so he could splash a bit of money on me, appeared to have values that aligned, and made a reasonable effort to keep in touch with me so that I was a little too eager to say yes when he asked me to marry him. 

Just engaged and sparkly, December 2007

And yes, I was the centre of attention for a while, I felt sparkly and like I was finally starting to fit in. Keeping pace with my peers. 

Yes, I was naÏve. I had no friends after all. Red flags, navigating my desires for future ambitions and balancing them with his, living together before actually getting married, etc etc was never talked about. I never questioned the whole journey until I moved to the UK and realized my mistake. But I felt like it was just way too late to just turn around and that I just had to deal with the consequences. 

You know that saying, “You’ve made your bed and now you have to lie in it.”

August 21, 2010: To be fair, I was happy in this moment, in this particular chapter of my life.

This is the much abridged version of how I got myself into a mess. 

Getting out of this mess wasn’t any easier, simpler, or shorter. I didn’t just one day wake up and think, “Right, that’s enough, I’m leaving right now.” It was a slow decline because there was a gradual awareness that something wasn’t right, that I wasn’t just unhappy but also unhealthy in the relationship. 

I felt torn between the promise I had made to my ex-husband, “Til death do us part”, that idea that you work through everything no matter what. What kind of person would I be if I broke such a fundamental promise? I was also feeling torn when I realized that I was never going to get from the relationship what I needed to thrive and reach the goals and potential that I wanted to. How selfish was I going to be if I didn’t make the relationship a priority, or even broke it off, to pursue what I wanted before it was too late?

I ignored a lot of these questions, and a lot of these thoughts because I was fairly isolated. I didn’t have many friends and definitely zero female friends I could confide in. I distracted myself from these thoughts, pushed them down by training a lot, competing when I could, getting involved in the management of Taekwondo teams, and piling on what work. There couldn’t be a problem if there was no time to have the problem, right? 

Of course this backfired: I danced with an eating disorder, exhausted myself, was driven by anxiety, and when the fights did come up with my ex, they were explosive. Horrible thoughts would bubble to the surface, but we’d always make up and call ourselves a team that could work through anything. 

On the rare occasion that there was space and time to approach the edges of my anxiety, they were brushed away as inconsequential, downplayed because they weren’t as bad as his, or taken as a personal attack on his worth. Instead of discussing or dealing with the issues I brought up I spent my time consoling him and putting his fragile ego back together. 

We went to marriage counselling twice, and it helped for a short period of time: his behaviour improved for a short period of time, and I felt appreciated again, but then it was like it was too much effort to keep up the changes. Too much work to keep up the facade of effort, understanding, and appreciation. These experiences simply confirmed that you can’t make people change, they have to find it within themselves to change. And if the break up of a marriage isn’t enough to motivate, nothing really will. 

It was at this point that my dress size shrank and my gin consumption went up. Nobody noticed, or at least said anything, because I “looked great” and I continued to juggle my commitments flawlessly.

When the break up finally happened, everybody was surprised (except for my mom, of course. Her sixth sense knew) and was taken aback: we had been the perfect, or at least a well functioning couple. The conclusions people made was that either an affair had happened or that I just woke up one day and something snapped, I wasn’t right in my head.

I mean, I wasn’t. But the relationship was the cause not the effect. 

The conclusions people had come to were fostered and perpetuated by my ex-husband as he started going around telling everyone we knew (and everyone I didn’t know) that I was having an affair. That my decision to leave him came “out of the blue”.  It was the quintessential airing of our dirty laundry to make himself look like the victim and to ostracize me from our social circle so that I would be without any support and have to go crawling back to him. 

His strategy worked and didn’t work simultaneously. It worked in that I was indeed ostracized by my social circle: almost no one reached out to me and asked me if I was OK, and a couple of specific people who were close to me, who I would have thought had my back, actually put the shame and the blame on me for leaving without ever asking what happened. 

I don’t speak to these people any more, how could I? I can understand feeling awkward if you’re friends with both people that have broken up, but actually taking the other person’s side and making you feel terrible? That’s not a friend. And I have to say, that was the hardest chapter to close in my life. It was the hardest wound to heal from, even harder than my break up and divorce. 

It was hard because even if I had gotten the chance to tell people, “I’ve actually been thinking about breaking up for the last 2 years”, or “I had a plan to leave him by the end of the year anyway”, or “it was actually an unhealthy and toxic relationship for many reasons and it was just time to leave” it wouldn’t have made a difference. 

Even now looking back. Even if I had gone around like my ex did and thrown around my version of events, nobody would have listened or cared because I left. 

I left the marriage. 

Me. 

So that made me the villain.

That he wasted all of our money, that he felt justified to do the bare minimum because he worked “40 hours a week and put a roof over our heads”, and for the same reason didn’t need to consider my needs, that he felt entitled to my time and my body because we were married, that he thought going to therapy was weakness, that I experienced anxiety meant I was crazy, that I was shamed for not being the perfect army housewife of the 1970’s, and that he undermined my every pursuit (artistic, career, sports, friendships, or otherwise) I had that took my attention away from him didn’t make him the villain. 

Because he was willing to stalk me and try to shame me back into the marriage stay and work things out. 

It’s a narrative most people who have met me won’t have heard: I didn’t have the energy to compete with my ex’s narrative. And if the people in my life that I had called friends believed a narrative that didn’t fit my character, then they never really bothered to know me and I didn’t need them in my life.

I say that so easily now, but just as it was hard to close the chapter on very close and specific people, this was equally as difficult. It was hard to let go of the friends, of the support network, I had built up over several years. I watched my chosen family choose to abandon me.