My ex-husband is haunting me. Even though he lives way across town with what used to be our bed and our cats, his vibration is so strong that it sails over miles of streets and rooftops to invade my space. We were together for 12 years, married for five of them, and that was when the love we had evaporated seemingly over-night.
You probably could have heard the air being sucked out of the room when he said ‘I do’ if you listened closely enough because from that moment on he began to suck the life out of our love. I had heard that marriage changes everything but I had no clue that things could change so much in so short a time.
He called today, returning a brief business-like call I’d made to his voice mail. He still misses me he says and can’t understand what went wrong. I know I explained the laundry list of reasons why I decided to call it a day, but I think that same sucking-the-air-out-of-the-room phenomenon was present then as well because he obviously didn’t hear a word I said.
He didn’t want me, need me or even look at me for so long that I routinely searched his receipts and email for signs that he was involved elsewhere. And although he never did stray in the way this suspicious behavior suggested, he was absent from our marriage for several years. And that really sucked. Somehow, he has conveniently forgotten all of that.
He sees betrayal written all over me and thinks I just gave up one day, ho hum, like taking off my shoes or deciding to wash away the gray in my hair. He denies his culpability in the loss of us and the fact that we were so happy once and that, almost more than anything, is the part that really stings.
I have spent months drawing a mental roadmap of our marriage from it’s inception to its end, examining every twist and turn and every bump in the road to see where we could have avoided disaster and I have yet to come up with any concrete answers as to where we took that last wrong turn. In the end, it was a lot of little missteps that got us turned around.
And even if it was possible to go back and re-route the course of our marriage, our final destination would have been the same, I’m afraid, because it takes two to steer a relationship to a happily-ever-after and when you’re the only one willing to do so, a dead end is all you can reasonably expect.
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