making peace with divorce

[grebjack]

I am a rule-follower. I have really believed that I could inherit some advice from my elders, and if I lived by it I'd have a generally happy life.

I thought I could find a lifelong marriage by marrying old enough to really know myself, by marrying someone I'd dated long enough to really know him, by being sincerely committed to working through the problems that would inevitably come, and by marrying someone who was just as sincerely committed. We had all of that, but it didn't save us.

I also absorbed the lesson that most of life is about the choices you make. That I could earn the life I wanted by working hard, delaying gratification, learning from my mistakes. I am a teacher, and I still teach this to my students, but I don't really believe it anymore. My professional success and marital failure both look a lot more like luck now. When my marriage first fell apart, I gravitated to programs like Marriage Fitness and Divorce Busting that told me "these are the painful and difficult things you need to do to repair your marriage," and that fit my world view. But most of the conversations on these boards are about newbies whose marriages aren't coming around and old-timers advising that going through these steps will make you healthier even though it may not save your marriage. I think that believing in my own agency in the intense first years allowed me to wean myself off my husband and allowed him to wean himself off me. We were fighting before, and now we will divorce amicably, and that is preferable.

I'm just a few days away from the fifth anniversary of the end of my marriage. I have endured the grief as long as I have in large part because I knew once the pain ended I would have nothing left of the marriage I once had such high hopes for. Now, finally, the loneliness is beginning to surpass the grief and I realize I must make peace with the divorce or I will spend the rest of my life alone. I hope this downer message doesn't mess up someone else's hopefulness. For me, it's finally the (ugly) light at the end of the tunnel.