The Finale: Lessons From a Failed Marriage

Thursday was going as it often did. Back-to-back video meetings droning on make the hot coffee a survival tool on the cold winter morning. The holidays were just a few weeks away, and the risk of accidentally showing everyone I was shopping rather than being fully present made it worthwhile to keep my personal computer open beside me.

Ting!

The notification appeared from my personal email. My divorce lawyer sent a message.

The past few months had been a tedious back-and-forth trying to get all the documents signed and submitted to the court so this years-long divorce could finally be over.

It hadn’t been particularly contentious. Thinking about it and simply trying to get through the process was exhausting.

A single glance at the subject was my undoing:

CONGRATULATIONS! YOU ARE DIVORCED!

My face must have said it all, because a work colleague who is a dear friend messaged me with a frantic note.

“Are you okay? What happened?”

I turned off my video camera for the last few minutes of the meeting. The voices continued in the background, sounding like Charlie Brown’s teacher with her meaningless “Wah-wah. Wah-wah-wah.”

I sat motionless in the chair as the reality sank in, a single tear running down my face.

Where did this come from?

This is what I wanted. I was the one who left. I was the one who decided the marriage was unfixable and over.

This should be a happy thing, right?

There was no jubilation. No great relief. No celebration.

My first impulse surprised me.

What I Wanted Him to Know

I wanted to reach out to my now ex-husband. I wanted to apologize for the pain. I wanted to tell him that this was never what I wanted.

I wanted to tell him I had tried as hard as I could to make it work. I wanted to tell him that I loved him. I wanted him to understand that leaving had not been sinister on my part. It had been survival.

I wanted him to know I tried.

I wanted him to know that I saw goodness in him. I wanted him to know that he has things to offer to this world and that I was sorry for not being the one to help him see them.

I wanted to thank him for the good times. There were lots of them over the years. I wanted to apologize for the part I played in the bad ones. I wanted to thank him for our beautiful daughter and the son we never got to know.

I wanted to encourage him in his journey to seek growth and find healing.

The Hard Truth

As the single tear became a flood, my heart broke once again as the realization that all of those things had been said — hundreds and hundreds of times over the years.

They made no difference in the outcome.

Through my sobs, I realized that he had broken my heart for the final time.

Or maybe the harder truth is I had broken my own heart.

I had wanted a reality and worked towards it with everything I had, without fully taking into account that maybe it wasn’t what he wanted at all.

That was a bitter pill to swallow.

At the start of the journey, this ending was never anything I could imagine, but it is the ending we have.

Perhaps the lessons from a failed marriage are the unexpected gifts that can keep growing.

The marriage ended. The lessons did not.

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