He Doesn’t Love Me Anymore! Did He Ever?

You set your expectations high when you say “I do” to the man of your dreams and then when it all comes crashing down around you, you wonder why you believed in happily ever after in the first place. But you did, and now it’s time to believe in something else. When God closes one door, he opens another, but the wait in the hall is a bitch. As far as I can tell, that’s divorce in a nutshell.

I loved him absolutely and felt settled and happy on the terra firma that was our life together. But then one day I realized that his heart had sailed and come to rest upon another continent. A place I couldn’t reach, even though it was merely a touch away. He didn’t love me anymore, which made me wonder. Had he ever?

In the end, many questions are still left unanswered and maybe that’s because there are no answers to give. I have tried to trace the trajectory of our cobbled marriage, hoping that if I could pin-point the specific place we ran aground, it would all make sense to me and I could at least salvage some of the good memories, which are still too painful to revisit. Maybe someday that will change. I hope so.

But for now, I am making new memories and filling in the spaces left vacant by a life undone and welcoming each day as it comes. I moved through the jungle of pain one step at a time and just kept stumbling forward but sometimes it felt like I hadn’t moved an inch. Looking back, I can see that my slow and steady progress brought me to this moment, and this moment is sublime.

In the final equation, these pages and my friends were the glue that held me together. They helped me revisit a belief in myself I’d thought was long gone and gave me the courage to trust that better days were just around the corner. I am here to tell you that there is life after divorce. It’s like being re-born as the sum of the best parts of yourself, because it takes all of your strength to pull them together. My wait in the hall is over and more than one door has been laid open to me. But every now and then I still find myself looking back and wondering how I escaped my married life in the first place and why or how he ever let me go.