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The person doing the leaving hands you a shovel and you bury something you once lived to nurture.
That’s the way it goes during the death of a marriage: the denial, the anger, the grieving, and then the inevitable purging of soul.
They act like they’re not the ones who’ve made us jaded in the first place, and then punish us for having battle wounds by leaving us for someone they haven’t fucked up yet.
Marriage as a whole is uncomfortable. Two people from two different worlds trying to stuff all of their emotional belongings into one joined life.
The fact that no one knows me as well as my ex-husband, who left me for another woman, is both devastating and frightening like I’m not worthy of being known fully.
No one has a right to your happiness. It’s a private thing and you have the right to defend it.”
“He was my first love,” I say. “There’s something that ties you to your first love, don’t you think? Something that won’t let go.”
Your husband cheats on you and suddenly you’re blaming the downfall of your marriage on your thick thighs, you know? Or maybe your double chins—of course he cheated with someone who has fewer chins.
I’m still stuck there, trying to prove to everyone that I’ve changed. Trying to prove to myself that I have.
Women deal with things differently than men. We want them to meet our emotional needs without us having to spell it out for them. It’s an if you love me, you should know what I need type of thing.
Divorce isn’t supposed to happen, but it does, and no one really knows how to deal with it. It frees you of one thing while imprisoning you with a thousand others. Life isn’t even remotely fair.
Men don’t cheat because they’re not in love, they cheat because they don’t feel loved.”
“A cry for help,” she says. “They want to be worshipped. They want a woman who thinks they’re the greatest, strongest, most virile.”
The longer you stay in an unhealthy relationship, the more druglike it becomes. You’re willing to deal with the side effects because they’re predictable. You can trust the bad in a way you can’t trust the unknown.”
she’s fine. Basic. Woods was just trying to find the best parts of you in someone else. It won’t last.
“That’s what we are after our relationships end; we’re angry.
Wherever I go, women have different opinions of cheating and how it should be dealt with.
“Living after a broken heart isn’t like riding a bike. You genuinely forget how to go about doing it.”
“We aren’t meant to stay the same. Life hits us from every direction, and we build thick skin in those places ... calluses. It’s the way we survive.”
My husband left me for another woman. Here’s the thing: I thought it could never happen. I thought that we had a bond and our commitment was impenetrable. That somehow the vows we took were a magic spell that would ward off reality.
The distance between us took a while, and it would be unfair to rest the burden of our failure solely on him. I was too busy to notice the things I was stacking between us: my success, my business, my exhaustion, my excuses. Every once in a while I’d notice it, that the little things weren’t making me smile. Or that his presence made me feel guilty and annoyed rather than blissful. I used my new feelings about him and myself as a wall; it was a wall of subconscious guilt. He’d walk into a room and I’d think: What do you want from me now? Why can’t you just figure this out on your own? Why do
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The war for love is fought by saying: You’re the one I want, you’re the one I need, you’re the one I’ll fight to keep. Neither of us fought.
Divorce makes you live in a tall house because you put more effort into your grieving than you ever put into your marriage.
That’s what we do as humans, we grieve harder than we ever tried and we build a magnificent fortress of hurt and self-righteous indignation. In front of this fortress is a garden where you grow your shortcomings. It’s a magnificent garden because that’s where you put all of your effort now. A garden of well-tended self-abuse. You water the shit out of your garden and it grows and grows. I grew a variety of things in my garden: bitterness, self-hate, numbness, self-pity, resentment, and defeat. I tended that garden with such detail, trimming and nurturing my personal hell until I couldn’t find
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No one was coming to save me, no one knew how.
We’re going to make it out alive. I promise.
you are the very last woman who needs saving. One day you’re going to realize that.”
But when two people get divorced because one of them let a third person into the marriage, the person who was left behind faces years of psychological warfare they launch against themselves. Your person didn’t love you enough. Do you know how devastating that is? To realize you weren’t loved enough. I spent two years asking myself what I could have done better, scouring my memories for signs that he was unhappy. Why didn’t he tell me? I could have changed, I could have tried harder, I could have… Maybe I shouldn’t have waited to be better. Is that the problem with all of us—we need a reminder
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None of what happened was on you, Billie. He’s the one who fucked up. There is no excuse for cheating, ever. If he wanted out of your marriage, he could have done that without being a complete fucking scumbag.”
we’re funny together. People always said we had this chemistry that you feel. I’d thought so too until the day he up and left me.
When you are the one left in the relationship, you experience a level of pity and coddling from your loved ones that makes the whole situation feel worse.
The problem with thinking deeply about your behavior is that it has to be followed by personal accountability. Once you acknowledge you’re being an ass, you either have to stop being an ass, or you have to embrace being an ass, and both options are uncomfortable.
Love is a compelling drug.
Love hurts in the way a toothache hurts: you can’t ignore it, and it’s always there throbbing and aching, reminding you ... of what? I think desperately. What is it reminding you of? That you’re human. That you have weakness. That your weakness is another person.
“You were enough. It was me who was never enough. Every day I tried to meet your expectations and every day I failed.”
I’d adored him. In a flash he’d gone from adoring me to treating me like a stranger. It was shocking. I’d never been able to figure it out—why men were given that internal switch and women were not. One little flick and they could turn their feelings on and off—so in control. I used to love this one and now I love that one. Men were more loyal to football teams than they were to women. They never cheated on those.
The thief of love was ego. How weak was love that it could not sustain insecurity? Wasn’t it supposed to do the opposite?
Love is sometimes powerful enough to self-destruct. Because when an imperfect person wields the most powerful weapon in the universe, they’re bound to trip over their own feet.”
But it wasn’t Woods I put my faith in, it was love. I believed it to be the ultimate redeemer, never considering that when something so perfect was handed to the imperfect, it was misused.
“Do you love her?“ I asked. “Yes.” “Good,” I said. “Treat her better.”
“I tried to replace you with a woman who wouldn’t question me, challenge me, fight with me. Because it made me feel,” he looks away while he searches for the word and then comes back with, “—bigger.”
“I was just looking for an easier version of you. But that’s not what I want. I want the full version, the version that scared the shit out of me before.”
He liked sad women and sad animals. I’d summed it up to a savior complex.
Fear of marrying someone again after they hurt me so deeply, fear of never being enough to keep Woods tethered to our relationship, fear that I was trying to save something that died a long time ago. You wanted this, I remind myself. You came back for this.
everyone was so happy that we worked it out. They’d always thought we belonged together, they said. And so I was swept into this belonging, because I was convinced of it myself not that long ago.
How had I not seen what was right in front of me? It’s because I was obsessed with what was behind me, my future always clouded by my stiff-knuckled inability to let go.
And you deserve better than to always be wondering if he’s going to do it again.”
maybe the type of relationship exists where you could both be yourselves and make each other happy.
“No.” I shake my head. “I think what’s different is me. I spent years wanting to rewind time and fix things between us. I was so fixated on that that I missed something important. That—I’m not that girl anymore. The one who wanted to be with you. I’ve wanted to be her again because I liked her better than who I am now.”
“I don’t think I ever want to get married again, Satcher,” she says seriously. “Fuck marriage, Billie. I only want you. I don’t care what form that comes in.”
