Marriage Doesn't Always Have a Happy Ending, And That's Okay
Weddings. Days full of hopes, dreams, and optimism. You pledge your troth to your one and only, truly believing you will be happy ever after. Or do you? With the statistics for divorce sitting at 45% on 2020 figures, why do people still think that they are going to be the ones that ride the storms and come out of the other side still speaking, still holding hands and walking off into the old-age sunset?
My husband and I split up when my daughter was only 15 months old. We didn’t argue or fight. We didn’t do muskets at dawn. I just knew that for me, this wasn’t the relationship that I wanted to be in for my whole life. We’d only been married for 4 years, so what caused the massive change of heart? Well, I explained it to my daughter that at the age that most people get married, they are still growing and changing an enormous amount. Your husband or wife will also be changing. Unless you change in parallel to each other, you may well both become different people that aren’t all that compatible anymore. It makes me misty eyed and a bit soppy when I see couples that seem to become more entwined and stronger as the years go on - for me that’s like a tiny miracle.
There is a strong connection on how settled a person’s upbringing is with how likely they are to have a long, sustainable, happy marriage. How well-formed the person is by the time that they get married and how happy they are in their own skin, how much changing they still have to do must have a profound effect on their long-term relationships. This also gives weight to why second marriages are far less likely to fail, with only 31% fatally hitting the rocks. Add into that, people being pickier second time round, knowing what they will and will not compromise on, and with less of the pressures of managing small children, careers, buying homes, and all the other life stuff that gets in the way of people just enjoying each other.
I’ve been through a few of my friend’s divorces with them. They tend to fall into three categories – either mascara-down-the-face-heartbroken singing “I Will Survive”, drunken middle of night calls, turning up in the middle of the night banging on their door, sewing sardines into the curtains types or jubilation that they have got their life back and left that no-good other half behind in the dust, or the ones that are just really sad that it hasn’t all worked out as they wanted. Every one of these scenarios still goes through the same five processes of grief – denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Even if they are the one that instigated the split, there are still the same feelings of loss and often a sense of failure that they couldn’t make it work after setting out with such high hopes. With divorce being very much the norm, there shouldn’t be any stigma attached to it, but from personal experience, there is still that sense of fucking up and breaking something that you should have been able to keep whole and being judged for it.
I haven’t married again. I’ve had a number of long-term relationships, but it seems I’ve continued to change throughout my life to the extent that I’m not the same person at the end of a relationship than I was when it started. [I’m kind of hoping that’s stopped now!] The only thing that makes me sad about this is that there is nobody who really, really knows me. I haven’t got that person to have a shared history with, who was there when I got all my scars, who was with me when we did all the daft things you do when you’re young. I’ll never have a 40th wedding anniversary party looking back at all we’ve achieved together. I’m lucky however that my ex-husband is one of my best friends and has been the best dad for my daughter I could ever ask for, so I’m taking that as a massive relationship win.
Submitted Anonymously
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