The Divorce

On the 25th of March, it was 7 years since my wedding.

It was a pretty typical story, we met at university, we were friends for a couple of years, ended up kissing one New Year’s Eve, started dating, moved in together after a couple of years, then got engaged and then a year after, it was our wedding.

We were average and normal in everything we were and did. Nothing spectacular or amazing but traditional and that suited us. Overall we were a young, happy couple in love. We always used to say that we were growing up together through life at the same pace and that was why we worked. We were the only couple in our friendship groups that hadn’t broken up at any point, to then get back together a week or month later. I genuinely thought, while not exactly the love of romance novels, we were a strong content couple that was prepared to work through life and make things work whatever that took.

He wasn’t perfect and neither was I, but we were happy and the decision to get married was the next part of our journey through life together. Sadly at our wedding, an event happened that totally changed my view of love and marriage.

My parents, who in my eyes had been a shining example of marriage, separated after 31 years together. I didn’t know it on my wedding day and was only told seven weeks later, but my father had been having an affair and told my mother that he hadn’t loved her for years and was leaving her for a woman he’d known for six months.

Now I think it’s fair to say that I was a daddy’s girl through and through. He was in the army and so in my mind was my own superhero. It was one of the things he said to me during this time: “It’s not my fault you put me on a pedestal.” I had done that and had hoped to find someone who treated me the way I saw him treat my mother, with what I thought was love and respect. I thought I’d found it with my husband.

I had to negotiate everything I was feeling towards my dad and the total betrayal I felt for him leaving us, while still trying to find strength for my mum. She seemed to suddenly change from the pillar of strength in our family to someone physically small and broken. She’s in a really good place now and back to being the woman who is my strongest supporter but for a few years, my younger sister and I had to be the ones supporting her emotionally, which was a total role reversal I wasn’t ready for. Anyway, back to my marriage.

This massive event in my life suddenly put my relationship on the back burner. I had to emotionally grow up quicker than my husband, and for the first time in our relationship we no longer felt like equals. It was six months after my dad left and we had just moved house and I was really upset that my dad hadn’t been there to be part of that and was crying to my husband. At that point he turned round and said: “Are you not over it yet Jenny, it’s been six months and it wasn’t your marriage that ended! It’s getting boring.” It seems dramatic now but I felt like I’d been slapped with a horrifying realisation that this was someone who was meant to know me better than anyone and who most importantly was meant to have my back on the big things and he didn’t.

I felt so alone at that moment and felt like I had no one to talk to. He was supposed to be the person I could talk to about anything, all my hopes and fears and here was him saying I was being boring.

While I will never accept responsibility for what happened next, I do accept responsibility for some of the things that led to the events of the next few years. The main thing that changed following this comment was our communication. I stopped talking to him almost overnight. Even now it is something I struggle with as a result, how to trust someone enough to open up and actually talk about how I feel without fear of being judged and laughed at. I internalised everything I was feeling and would drive myself crazy going over and over conversations that I had had with both my parents and trying to make sense of it all on my own.

This meant my husband and I stopped talking, not just about the big things but the little things as well. To everyone else we were a year into our marriage and seemed as happy as we’d always been, if not more so. I became an expert on putting on a mask to everyone else around us pretending everything was fine. I don’t know if he knew I was faking happiness or if he just assumed like everyone else I was okay. I think the reason my dad leaving hit me so hard was that it made me question everything I thought I knew about the family values and morals I’d learnt and who I was as a person. We muddled along like this for the best part of 18 months and during this time we did have some good times but after a trip away for a work colleague’s birthday party, he changed towards me.

He was angry all the time and nothing I did was right. If I went out with friends it was a bad thing but staying home with him and doing nothing particular was an equally bad thing. I wasn’t allowed to have a bad day at work and need his support. I felt like in his mind I’d used up my quota for spousal emotional support in the first few months of our marriage and therefore I couldn’t ask for it when I needed it for the normal things that happened in life. In addition, he started working more and more hours, almost like he was trying to avoid being at home with me. There were the times he was meant to be home from work at 6 pm and he wouldn’t walk in until 10 pm, drunk and completely unfazed by the fact I’d been sat on my own worrying about him because he wouldn’t answer a text or phone call. Then there were times he would get so mad that on my day off I had only tidied the living room or kitchen and not the whole house, despite the fact he worked shifts and some days I’d come home and find him in the same place I’d left him, in front of his computer playing video games.

We had few conversations about anything of importance and if we tried he would get really angry. He wasn’t capable of expressing himself with words and would get really angry and frustrated. I just wanted someone who was capable of talking to me rather than shouting and shoving past me to walk out of a room. I was really unhappy with our marriage. Every aspect of our relationship suffered and we were two people existing in the same house. I now know that during this time he was developing an emotional relationship with a work colleague. He was talking to her when he should have been trying to talk to me.
We then had a holiday with a group of friends to Cuba which was well needed for both of us and I can honestly say it was really incredible. For the first time in months we spoke properly and the other person listened and I finally felt we were back on track and I was excited about our future again.

One week after we got back from holiday he went out for work drinks and didn’t come home until the following day. I later found out that it was the first night he slept with the woman he knew from his work.

For a month I was made to feel crazy and paranoid about what he was doing, he really was working those extended hours, his phone did really run out of battery so he couldn’t text and I was really just imagining things. I was totally exhausted trying to work out what was going on while never actually discussing it with him, probably out of fear that he would say something I didn’t want to hear.

One Monday evening, while out walking the dog, I eventually plucked up the courage to ask him if he was having an affair. The response from him was that I was stupid for suggesting it and how insulting that I’d even asked. The next night when I came home from work he wasn’t there.

For three nights he stayed away and barely spoke to me, only to let me know he was okay nothing bad had happened. I ran away home to my mum’s house not knowing what was going on before a friend came and collected me to force me home to discuss things. When I returned home it finally came out that yes, he was having an affair, he still loved me and yet he wasn’t sure if he wanted to make our marriage work. Twenty minutes into our conversation, and with me trying to comprehend what was going on, he broke down sobbing how sorry he was and that he wanted to make the marriage work at any cost. In my mind that was the decision made, he was going to end the affair and we were going to be okay. He begged me to forgive him and also for me not to tell anyone what was going on because he couldn’t live with the shame and the guilt that he’d hurt me. I’d meant it when I said our marriage vows and in my life had never failed at anything I’d set my mind.

I, therefore, was determined that I wasn’t going to fail at this. I was prepared to do whatever it took to make sure we made it.

We then had marriage counselling for six months, and during this time my personality totally changed. I’d always been someone who was outgoing and social, not anymore. I declined invitations to friends’ parties in favour of staying in with my husband. I walked around on eggshells terrified I was going to upset him and he was going to decide he’d made a mistake by staying with me. I even helped him arrange a Halloween party for his work colleagues knowing full well I’d have to be in the room with the girl he’d had an affair with. I did it for him and for our marriage. I put on weight and stopped looking after myself in every way. I pulled away from friends and totally ostracised myself from everyone in my life. At the same time as struggling with my relationship, I was really struggling at work and trying to juggle the two parts of my life was taking its toll. More importantly, trying to pretend that everything was okay in both was becoming more and more difficult. I became someone who didn’t care what it cost her personally as long as she was able to make her marriage work. I look back at photos of me from that time and I really don’t recognise that person. To say I was miserable is an understatement, although at the time I didn’t recognise that at all.

Of course, I was happy, I was still married to the man I thought I loved. We were working on our marriage and finally seemed to be on the road back to normality. We had just had a perfect Christmas and New Year and were at our couples therapy enjoying the fact that at least our marriage seemed to be back on track. He had told me he wanted us to try for a baby that year and move forward with our lives. Two weeks later he walked out telling me he couldn’t make our marriage work when he loved two people.

I don’t really remember much of the logistics about what happened over the next four weeks. I had to tell all our friends and family what had happened and also what had been going on for the last six months. I left my job and moved out of the house we’d lived in together. I moved back to my mum’s in a different town and all of a sudden I found myself a 28-year-old living at home, with no job and no support network. We had shared the same friendship group and they were all a three-hour drive away from me now. I’d always been the one who fixed things for my friends and now I needed someone to fix things for me but after years of not talking to the most important person in my life, I didn’t know how to talk to anyone or ask for help.

When it came to how I felt, I fluctuated between total anger to complete despair on an almost minute by minute basis. How did this happen when I’d tried so hard to make it work? What had I done to make him leave? Was I not pretty or skinny enough for him? Had I pushed him away into the arms of another woman? How fucking dare he be the one to walk away? Why on earth did I always have to take the moral high road and not go mental at him via email? Why was it so unfair that he walked into another relationship when he was the one who cheated and there was me all alone?

I just existed on a day to day basis. If I wanted to drink wine for breakfast and have cereal for dinner I would. If I didn’t want to move off the sofa for two days straight I wouldn’t. I remember people telling me how lucky I was that we didn’t have children. He told me he wanted to have a baby with me and then he left, in my mind at least that way I would have still had a tie to the man I loved. Despite everything that had happened I still loved him and for a long time after I still would have gone back to him. No one seemed to understand the blame I was putting on myself. In their minds he left me, he was the one who’d done the dirty and I was the injured party but all I felt was that in some way it was my fault and people didn’t understand that.

Now with hindsight, I know that that’s not true and that in truth it wasn’t really my fault. I’ve learnt you can never make a relationship work if only one of you wants to but at the time I genuinely didn’t know what was going on in my head and what way was up or down. He publicly announced his new relationship to all our mutual friends and family on Valentine’s Day on Facebook. Another kick in the stomach! His communication to me via email had turned cold and harsh confusing me even more, this wasn’t the man I knew.

Being British, emotional outbursts and just showing emotions in general, particularly negative emotions does not come naturally to me. I gave myself two months, from the date he left to our wedding anniversary to wallow in any way I wanted. Once this date passed I had decided I needed to move on.

I was actually in Berlin for our wedding anniversary, sat outside a restaurant, listening to various friends and their loved ones having a good time and I felt so lost. I was going to have to totally redefine who I was, and I didn’t know who I was at that moment never mind who I was going to be. I’d been a wife and everything that involved, now I was adrift in a world and I didn’t know my place anymore. My friends didn’t know what to say to me and our mutual friends felt uncomfortable in my presence for fear of saying something that was going to either upset or anger me. This made me even angrier with him, how could he put our friends through this awkward situation?

I came back from Berlin determined not to let what happened with my husband define who I was. It was something what happened to me not who I was but how to do that was the million dollar question. In order to gain any sort of control I knew I had to box up what I was feeling and focus on trying to move forward, at least on the surface.

I managed to get a job relatively quickly and that really helped. I was able to focus on learning a new role and was able to totally redefine who I was. No one who met me knew I had been married or how it ended. I was playing at being happy though. I would come home from work exhausted not at the job, but at having to pretend I was a normal 28-year-old enjoying life. Friends who’ve known me for years have said that throughout this time, everyone who met me got “Jenny light”. I was like a shadow version of myself. On the surface, I was happy, sociable, always there for people when they needed a friend. At night I would go home, sit in the dark, in my flat alone and sob. I would sob for hours, lonely, terrified of never being happy again, just crying until I fell asleep. In the morning I’d wake up, put my make up on and go and pretend for eight hours I was fine. It was so tiring but at least I seemed normal.

I had stopped talking to my closest friends, those who had known me during my marriage, I didn’t know where I fit in our friendship group anymore. I was trying to find out who I was and I couldn’t cope with trying to find out where my new place was in the group at the same time. They didn’t know how to be there for me either. I’d always been the mum of the group, making sure everyone was okay and now all of a sudden I wasn’t okay and they didn’t know how to be there for me, and I didn’t know how to ask for them. That’s not a criticism of them or me, it’s just the way it was. It was easier for me to walk away from the life I’d known and the person I’d been to try and re-find myself.
It worked for a time. The longer I was away from my past, the easier it was to push those feelings and thoughts down and not deal with them. I think that over the next three years it was easy to get over the marriage and the relationship by throwing myself into being busy and making a new life for myself in a new city. I was happy, and I was beginning to like myself again. I thought I was fine, I thought I was over it. Until the divorce papers came through.

I knew from his sister, who I still remain friends with, that he was still with the girl he’d left me for. In fact, they were having a baby together. I think this was what forced him to finally sign the divorce papers. It was something I’d wanted for two years. I felt like I couldn’t move properly move forward until that came through. When I saw the envelope from the sheriff court on the doormat I felt sick. I opened the envelope and saw the decree absolute and burst into tears. I didn’t miss him, I knew I didn’t want to be with him anymore but fuck I was devastated.

Seeing it in black and white that I had a failed marriage was so upsetting. I couldn’t comprehend this feeling at all. This was the official end of a relationship with the first man I’d truly loved but a man who had hurt me so much. Yet here I was crying and sad it was over, it didn’t make sense. I spent a couple of days locked in the flat totally numb and walking around spontaneously bursting into tears. In July, it will be 2 years since my divorce was finalised.

Two weeks later I had applied for a visa to go to Australia for the year and that’s where I am as I write my story.

The end of my marriage was definitely a shock and something I was totally unprepared for in every way.

When asked by a wonderful friend if I was interested in writing about the end of my marriage and my divorce and the effect it had on me and my mental health I immediately jumped at the opportunity. I was the first of my friends to go through a marriage break down and had no one of my own age to discuss the way I was feeling. In the hope that this will help someone else I feel it’s important for me to be open and honest about the things I experienced. In saying that now I’m sitting here trying to write about it I’m suddenly filled with fear and confusion. Fear that I will be unable to articulate and express exactly what when on and how it made me feel without it seeming like a woe is me, sob story. Confusion, as to this day I’m still unsure as to how I actually feel about it all and how much it still has an effect on my life. Here’s hoping it’s made some sense to whoever reads it.

Now while I am currently living an incredible life with amazing opportunities, I’ve only recently realised that I’m still dealing with issues that have come about from events that happened during my marriage and at the end of it. Most importantly, I’ve learnt that it is okay to still be dealing with these issues. I only have a handful of people I consider true friends. It’s easy to be friends with people when you are in a positive head space and when you are happy and the life and soul of the party. To know that you have someone you can call when you are sat on the floor, drinking wine from the bottle, sobbing because they’ve run out of your favourite hummus at the supermarket, that’s a very different kind of trust in a person and something I still struggle with. There are a few people who I really trust with seeing me vulnerable. I spent four years trying to deal with everything myself, thinking that I had to deal with it alone because if I let anyone in they too would leave when the situation got too difficult. I’m getting better at letting people in but it’s still a difficult thing for me because the last person I trusted with seeing the real me, rejected that and walked away and found someone else because it was too difficult for him to deal with. What if the next person I let in does that?

At the beginning of this year, something happened to a friend of mine that forced me to let people in. I was forced to open up and talk by someone who literally wouldn’t take “I’m fine, don’t worry about me, what’s happening in your life?” for a suitable response. I tried to push people away but sometimes persistence overcomes resistance and I really did need to let someone in at that time.

I’ve finally realised it’s actually stronger to admit you need help than it is to go it alone.

Don’t misunderstand me, I still have a natural instinct to shut everyone out and not discuss how I’m feeling and what I’m dealing with but I’m trying to be better about letting people in.

What I’ve learnt this year is that in order to be the strongest version of me, I sometimes need help. Knowing myself and knowing when I need help, makes me able to be a better friend, daughter and sister. I went to a few therapy sessions, which helped me organise my thoughts and put in place practical things on how to cope when I feel anxious or nervous about things.

I don’t regret my marriage, it’s taught me so much about life and about who I want to be, but I’d be lying if I said it didn’t have a negative effect on my personality. I’m getting there and one day soon I know I will be totally back to the optimistic, trusting, person I used to be, even if I’m a little older and a hopefully a little bit wiser.