Part 2 of Your Love Life? | Introduction: So what brought you to Part 2 of Your Love Life?
Sometimes a decisive event effectively cuts your life into a ‘before’ and an ‘after’. For me, it came in my late thirties: content, settled, and naively seeing the future as more of the same. Then over the course of a few months life changed forever.
It came out of the blue. On our tenth wedding anniversary my husband wrote, ‘I loved you the day we walked down the aisle, and I love you even more today (lots and lots more). Here’s to the next 10 years! All my love. xxx’.
Little over a year after he wrote those words, he fell in love with somebody else, and left me to be with her.
I was surprised by how a non-physical event can produce such a massive physical shock. The earth seemed to shift and tilt beneath my feet, maybe because the foundations I had built my life on had taken a hard knock.
Up to that point I had stupidly thought divorce only happened to so-called ‘bad’ marriages where couples argue, don't get on, or don't talk.
Now I was learning what every generation of women learns. It is perfectly possible for a man to be a loving husband for years, seem to enjoy his wife’s company, buy her sexy underwear, and write her tender words on birthdays and anniversaries. In effect show every symptom of a happy marriage.
None of which will stop him saying, at the end of all that and any number of years together, ‘Sorry, I love someone else now,’ and leaving.
It is not only possible, it is banal. Happens every day of every week. The divorce lawyer virtually yawned and fell off her office chair with boredom when I told her the situation. The thing is, it’s not just the complete bar stewards who do it, which is the message I had unconsciously absorbed as a teenager. It’s the nice guys too. The men who inspire trust, the men who appear rock solid.
I’ve been on a long and deep learning curve since then and recognise there is no marriage immune from divorce. Love and life are glorious but risky with no guarantees. But I am adamant it is not a sign the person left behind has failed.
Perhaps the shock was amplified for me because I had been part of a church culture where we were encouraged to believe that God had a plan for your life, that he guided you to your marriage partner and in your life decisions. I thought I/we had done everything according to his ‘plan’. Not 'slept around' before marriage. Met at a C of E church in our mid-20s. Gone out together for a year before becoming engaged. Prayed about ‘us’. Married the following year in the church in which we had met, feeling confident we were committed to each other and to dealing with any problems together as a couple.
So how, how , how ? could this be happening, I wept to whatever God might be listening.
It made me realise that no matter how much you love someone and think you know them, you don't, not completely. They are themselves, an individual and a free spirit, you can never really know what is going on in another person’s head. So if at some point one partner's commitment slides, you won’t necessarily be aware of it until the marriage slides too.
I had so much to learn in that bleak period of watching my husband slowly walk away from me. I wrote reams in my journal in outright panic and an attempt to find courage: ‘I really have no idea what the future holds. I am scared of poverty, if I’m honest, pensions etc. To begin life again as a single woman at the age of 40…plenty of women do it. Hard to see a way forward. Feel rejected, one of life’s losers, a victim. Divorce must be the ultimate rejection.’
Eventually I had to write: ‘He is still not willing to recommit to our marriage vows, still sleeping with his girlfriend, so I asked him to move out. The day he left, I was watching him from the window, holding our wedding photo in my hands, holding back the tears. He saw me, ran back in, and said in a strangled voice, “I’ll speak to you soon.” So he left me, and now I am alone. We are separated.’
What was I going to do now?
