When my husband and I first got married, we talked about returning to where we went on our honeymoon to renew our vows for our 10 year anniversary. My daughter would be 18 by then and could leave the country without any problems from her dad. And 10 years felt like such a huge milestone to celebrate. I remember being excited about that plan.
What I didn't anticipate was that instead of celebrating the milestone, I find myself wanting to honor it instead, both the good and poignant parts of it. Ten years of marriage may seem like a drop in the bucket to some, but it seemed like something huge to me. And now, with the realization that it will likely be our last milestone, I'm more focused on honoring what we had than celebrating a future that will never be.
In my last entry, I wrote about feeling like I was at a crossroads. Six months later, I picked up my lantern and chose a path. It's a path that doesn't include my husband and, in two and a half months, will mean moving out on my own.
The decision wasn't an easy one, but I have no doubt that it is the right one. My husband and I have mostly been moving forward together because of inertia and I just can't keep living like this. I told him, several times over the years, that I wasn't happy, that we weren't in a good place. The job situation was basically just the last straw for me. For the record, I'm still employed where I was, I still love my job, but Eric's lack of support was the final nail in the coffin for this marriage. Especially when I was offered a job that would have kept me small and he was willing to bend over backwards to make that one work since it paid far less than I currently make. But I realized he wasn't willing to do anything to allow me to stay in the job I loved that allows me to grow.
Of course, as soon as Eric finally realized that I was serious, he started doing everything he could to save the marriage. But the truth is, I've been mourning this relationship for at least a year. Things started to get bad during COVID when he took on more and more responsibilities at work. Then he took a job after I advised him against it. That job required even more time from him, which meant less time for us and the marriage. In 2023, we got in a huge fight and I told him something had to give as our marriage wasn't sustainable on its current trajectory. And he future faked me, perhaps unintentionally, but it still hurt all the same. He promised things would get better when "x" happened. Only "x" never happened and things continued to progressively get worse.
Meanwhile, I took on more of the emotional and mental labor of the household and our marriage, pouring more and more of myself into it and not receiving anything back. Recently, I told him the well had run dry and for some inexplicable reason, he promised he would "dig another well" as if that was a real solution. When I asked him what he meant by that, he couldn't really articulate an answer, which further demonstrated to me that he still hasn't done the real, internal work necessary to fix things and everything he has done continues to feel performative to me.
And since all of this has come to light, I feel like we're still spending most of our time talking about him, what he's doing, what he wants, what he needs/needs to do. So, once again, I'm put on the backburner.
But I've been doing a lot of internal work on myself. I recently discovered shadow work and it was eye opening. I feel like I'm moving to a better version of me. I've outgrown this relationship and I'm slowly moving toward the person I think I was always meant to be. I've stopped making myself small at work. I've started pushing myself out of my comfort zone and owning my ideas, and it's paying off. One of my ideas for how to do something differently at work is being implemented and I'm being given the opportunity to assist in its implementation. My writing has matured and I've even started a new project that has been fun and has reintroduced what I love about writing in the first place.
At home, I've basically said everything except the words "I want a divorce." Part of it was that I wanted time to make sure I was making the right decision. Part of it was to see if I could come back from the point of no return. But mostly, I think I was just buying myself time to figure out logistics. My daughter is in a grueling semester at college and I wanted to wait until she finished it.
(Update as of February 2026)
And then even when I finally said those words, somehow they didn't take. My husband showed me a side of him I wasn't expecting and it really brought into question my emotional safety. So, I walked it back to a trial separation. Whatever it took to get me out of the house. I left at the beginning of the year and I'm slowly positioning my life to where I can revisit that divorce conversation.
The sad thing is barely anyone in my life knows what I did. Since he insisted on framing it as a trial separation, we agreed not to tell our families. I assume he still hasn't told his, and while I had planned to tell mine this week, the reason for disclosing was canceled, so I no longer felt an urgency to say anything. My coworkers know. My daughter, obviously, knows since she moved with me. But that's it. It's been lonely, but also? It's been surprisingly peaceful.
