I woke up one fall morning in 1998, pulled myself up off the couch, went and looked in the bathroom mirror. I had come home the night before from a party with my wife and she had informed me that she was going to be taking my son in the morning to go live with a friend for a little while. She told me she needed to think about whether she wanted to continue our marriage. When I looked in the mirror that morning, there was no one around but me. Honestly, I can’t remember whether I said the words aloud or whether I was just thinking them in my head. The thoughts were something like this, “I don’t like what I see anymore and no matter if my marriage continues or not, I am going to make some changes.” I realized at that moment that I had not been living the values that I believed deep in my heart for many years. I needed to be true to myself and start living from my core beliefs or it was just not going to work anymore. My hope in this moment was that my wife would want to follow me on this journey and we would continue to be parents to our son as a married couple. From that day on changes would start happening that would transform my life, as well as our son’s. Before the biggest of those changes would occur, I had to process my loss. Those were the loss of the marriage dream, the loss of not being able to wake up in the same house every morning with my son and the reality that comes with those changes. Over the next several months I transitioned back and forth through the stages of grief and loss: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

Everyone has their own divorce story and I always respect that when I meet people whose story is much different than mine. Some of us were the ones presented with the news that our partner wanted out, others told their partner the news, and a few of us even met at some kind of mutual understanding around the same time. There are people like me who grew up around a strong belief about the sanctity of marriage and others who came from a broken home growing up and might of went in wondering if it would last. I would venture to guess that regardless of the background and preconceived notion, most all of us went in hoping that the one we pledged our love to would be there for better or worse. At some point when reality of the loss of the intimacy the two of you once shared started to become apparent, it hurt. Maybe you stayed together a few more years and by the time it was over it felt like a relief, or maybe it hit you like a bomb and left you in shock. The latter was true for me, which in looking back, was surprising considering our loss of intimacy came very early in our relationship. When I speak of intimacy, I am not speaking merely of a physical relationship between two people. My Grad school professor explained it best when he broke the word down like this: into me see. Unfortunately, some relationships never experience true intimacy because there has never been the safety and security in them to peel back the layers of our innermost being. In those cases, marriage can be a like a slow death, as you began to hide your true nature from your partner in order to avoid their ridicule, cold indifference, or worse, that seemed to happen every time you allowed yourself to be a little vulnerable with them. Whatever your story is as to why things didn’t work out, you’re not alone.

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