DIVORCE
I Found Out the Truth About Divorce
My judginess made everything harder
For the first 36 years of my life, I was smug and judgy about divorce. Divorce, I believed, was something that happened to people who didn’t make good choices. So I was blindsided when my 15-year marriage ended.
I did everything “right.” He and I came from similar middle-class, small-town backgrounds. We both had happily married parents. We met while attending the same university. He pursued me hard and I eventually came around.
We had two kids — both planned — and I thought we wanted the same things out of life. For 15 years, we did.
I paid a high price for my judginess
Divorce is never easy, but I made it harder on myself than it had to be. If I had accepted that this is something that can happen despite one’s best efforts, my angst would have been less.
Through the years, I’ve known a lot of people who have gone through divorce, and there are a few different ways I’ve seen it happen. Sometimes, both parties realize they’ve made a mistake and part ways soon thereafter. Other times, one partner behaves badly and the other has to step away for their own good. In some long-term marriages, both parties feel they’ve grown apart over the…
