I didn’t cry at my wedding. Anyone that knows me, knows that I cry a lot. At movies, commercials, songs, when I’m angry, frustrated, happy, all of it, I cry. I didn’t say yes when my now ex-husband asked me to marry him. I knew it was happening the day that he asked, but there was no excitement, no overwhelming feeling, other than terror, as I enthusiastically shook my head in response, and pulled him in to kiss me. Let’s rewind for a minute, I’d like to explain why I’m laying out the saga of my divorce for the internet to casually read with their morning coffee.
I got married when I was 27, at the height of my friends planning their own weddings, or expecting their first babies. There was a lot of pressure, we had been together “long enough,” it was the next logical step in our relationship. My ex-husband and I had talked about getting married for maybe a year before he finally proposed. We had made some informal plans, knew we wanted a late summer wedding, outside, small-ish, you get it. It was a sure thing, at least that’s what I thought. When you’ve made it that far into the relationship, you’ve talked about these things, they’re literally right there, how do you say no? How do you suddenly change your mind? We didn’t necessarily have a bad relationship, normal ups, and downs, I did love him, and I thought that I did want to marry him.
Looking back there were a lot of warning signs, that I brushed aside, this was my best friend after all. The one who had been there to support me through literally some of the hardest days I had faced, encouraged me to run at my dreams at full sprint. Checked all of life’s annoying little boxes. (Something I would later tell my therapist). How do you tell someone that you loved with so much of yourself, that you didn’t in fact, want to spend the rest of your life with them? You don’t, or at least, I couldn’t, it felt like it was too late.
After that uninspiring proposal happened and I “said” yes, planning happened, then deposits were made, and then suddenly there was a dress hanging in the closet. Some ridiculous amount of thousands of dollars later, and it was my wedding day. I wasn’t excited the week leading up to my wedding. I googled and researched and tried to find any explanation. I read so many articles that could easily explain this away and convinced myself that it was just because we were so comfortable in our relationship that this really just made it all official. Whatever the hell that actually means.
My wedding day felt like any other day, nothing big, or exciting, I wasn’t nervous. Terrible, right? I could have walked away at any time before I walked down the aisle to my favorite classical song. I was scared, embarrassed, and the money was already spent. Maybe things would be different, maybe things would change, my ex would finally level up to to be the person I actually needed him to be at that point in our relationship.
The point is, my relationship should have ended before the inevitable divorce that I am still going through. It wasn’t fair to me and it wasn’t fair to him. No matter how hard it would have been to call off the engagement, or wedding, or leave before it even made it to either of those moments. When I finally started to open up and talk about this with my family and friends, none of them were surprised that I had been feeling this way and knew that I shouldn’t have married this person.
We need to be creating a space for the people that we love so that they feel like they can be honest about feeling this way. Ending relationships for any reason is complicated, messy, and I tell this story so that if there’s someone out there frantically googling the way that I was, that they might find this, and know that it’s okay to walk away. If a relationship is no longer serving you in the way that you need to be supported and grow, you can end it at any time, it’s never too late. You also never have to settle for something simply for timing purposes, live your life, and the things that are meant to find you, will find you exactly when they should.
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