Twenty Four and Divorced.

…A Love Story.

I got married very young.

I was eighteen years old when I started dating my best friend since middle school, and we were serious from the beginning. Everyone championed our relationship and cheered us on as “perfect” without batting an eye. Our relationship was a whirlwind. I got engaged the summer I turned nineteen and married about five months later. The whole time I was cheered on for my decision, and I felt happy. If everyone else — the people I trusted to tell me what I believed was “God’s will” — says this is the right thing to do, it must be right. Right?

I loved my young fiancee. We were best friends and always had a blast. I loved his family and his family loved me. I pushed down the very real doubts and fears I had before getting married (because doubting is wrong) and I blissfully wed my young husband and best friend. We were the seemingly perfect, young, married couple for two years, but we were both incredibly lonely. We were outgoing and focused on maintaining and creating friendships with people outside of our marriage, but it was difficult. Friends that I had on my own pushed me away after I got married. Married friends began settling into gender roles that my husband and I found uncomfortable and wrong for us.

I had ambition for a career I had been pursuing before I got married, but was constantly reminded of a very damaging church word called submission. The shame of this word smashed me down and the concept helped spiral me into some serious anxiety and depression. It was my kind and loving best friend of a husband that encouraged me to push aside those harmful church concepts and move across the country with him so I could finish my degree and pursue my dreams. I will always love him for helping me make that decision.

Upon moving away we changed, as young people in their very early twenties do. I began school to finish my degree — driven and focused on my career and passions. He began feeling stuck and unsure of what his life was supposed to look like. I can’t pinpoint one thing that made our marriage unravel, but it slowly came to an end before we hit three and a half years.

— — — — —

Ending our marriage was an unbelievably kind and amicable decision.

We knew we were ready to move on. It was sad, but it was that gut feeling of just knowing what was right — for us together, and for us as individuals. There was a lot of serious contemplation to begin with. He hadn’t done anything mean or abusive. We’d been faithful to each other. We didn’t fight “too much” or “too little,” …but we both knew when it was over.

The Christian Church teaches you not to follow your gut. Growing up in that tradition I was taught that it’s dangerous to follow anything you feel within yourself, but to only follow God (which, really means to follow the white male interpretation of the Bible as given to you by primarily male pastors and church leaders). I remember a couple weeks after we had broken up, sitting in a couples therapy session and trying to articulate the “why” behind our breakup. I cried out “It’s just a feeling I have deep in my gut that we are over. Is it wrong to just trust my deep knowing?” “No,” the therapist answered, “it is a very wise and honorable and totally valid thing to trust.”

It was liberating to hear.

Never once have I wished that we could go back to being married.

I think a lot of people think I’m crazy for walking away from such a seemingly perfect life. But the reality is that you never know all that is going on in a relationship, especially if you only know what is shown on social media. Things were fun and sweet with us, but not perfect, my friends. Humans change and grow apart and that’s okay. I know without a shadow of a doubt that I made the right choice in ending my marriage and independently embarking on my next chapter.

This doesn’t mean, however, that I regret our marriage and relationship. I can’t stress this fact enough. I cherish the memories of being married. Getting a dog, planting a garden, traveling to Ireland and Chicago and Austin, moving across the country together. We really did grow up together. I look fondly upon those memories of spending life with my best friend, and I know that I will get to experience more beautiful and different memories with myself in my new, independent life.

The hardest part of divorce has not been losing my title as wife and life with my young husband.

The hardest part has been the utter disgust and distrust of my choices from those that I thought cared deeply about me. I have heard very few “are you doing okay?” “is there anything I can do to help you?” “you must be going through a hard time.” Instead, I have heard either a lot about the Bible’s definition of marriage, the covenant that I made, and the sheer disappointment from people that I thought loved me.

That, or silence.

Women that gladly stood beside me in my wedding have not spoken to me about my divorce. Family members and leaders I looked up to that showed so much care in my engagement and wedding process have remained silent, not calling or even texting a single thing. I understand that divorce hurts more than just the two married. I understand that people have busy lives and that finding time to call the somewhat distant family member that is getting divorced halfway across the country isn’t always top priority. And I understand that some people don’t want to have a difficult or awkward conversation and would rather pretend that nothing happened by simply never bringing it up. But the silence is what has hurt the most. People being unwilling to try to understand what I am going through. Unwilling to become vulnerable themselves to the real, lived experience that their loved one is going through because their Bible or their pastor tells them that what she is living is wrong. Unwilling to listen, hear, and try to understand.

— — — — —

I’m proud of myself.

I’m proud of my young husband, who doesn’t feel like he deserves the nastiness that often comes with the title of ex husband.

This has been a lonely season of life, but it has also been one of rebirth and regrowth. I see myself as I was meant to be — strong, independent, beautiful, outgoing, creative, kind. I may have learned these things without getting married and divorced before the age of twenty-four, but this was my journey to get here. This story of my marriage and divorce is hard and beautiful and lonely and sad. It is not one that I ever wish away, but it is also not the thing that defines me.

I’m really proud of my steps on this journey, and I want to share them. There is a stigma that people who have been previously married are known by their title of “divorced.” I guess I see it as an important relationship that has come and gone, nothing more and certainly nothing less. I’m not writing this for pity or anger or to to cause drama or to overshare, but because I want to bring understanding to the journey I have been on. I want to sweep out from under the rug anything that may feel like it had been brushed there and open conversation around these concepts. Women are allowed to tell as much or as little of their stories as they choose. Period. I know it may be uncomfortable or difficult, but remaining silent throughout my divorce is not helpful for my healing and new growth to begin.

I’m proud of the strong woman that I have always been, and the journey that I have been on to realize her for myself.