11 years of marriage, blown up in an instant
Been married for 11 years. I’ve been unhappy for the last little while, but it was never anything I thought couldn’t be worked through if we attacked the problem I was having together and come up with an actionable plan. To my surprise, when I got the nerve to finally bring up my feelings a week ago, I got hit by news that she is basically out of this thing already. She had never mentioned not being happy a single time in our marriage of her own volition. I was the only one who ever brought up internal struggles I would be having during our marriage, which were very very few, so I guess I foolishly believed that because I, the quiet, reserved, just-wants-to-pet-dogs person, would find it within myself to bring something up, that she, the social butterfly and all around talker, would do the same with me. Our marriage was, or so I thought, pretty damn open with one another about things. I can’t think of anything she doesn’t know about me, honestly. Apparently that has not been the case though and, of course, when I asked her, “Why have you never mentioned being unhappy with me before so we could try and address it?” She had no answer. Which hurts, as I’m sure you can imagine because it seems to confirm my current suspicions that she has been checked out of this thing for awhile and just hasn’t said anything, which is still baffling to me just knowing who she is - a very vocal and expressive individual, typically. Hallmark commercials make her cry. Apparently they are more impactful than I am, hah.
So, she has moved out of the bedroom. I’ve made a few passing attempts at conversing and trying to see what exactly her intentions are and I’ve offered for us to go to couples therapy so we could try and save this thing, if she wants to, but can’t get any straight answers. I’ve cried every single day for hours and hours, absolutely devastated. But that being said, as the longest week of my life has dragged on and I’ve had time to examine who was putting what into this marriage and reassess the way I have been treated over the last year and a half, and think about the last days without her speaking to me at all…I feel lighter. I feel like I matter again.
I had not realized just how beaten down and battered, emotionally, this marriage had been making me and how much stuff I had been enduring and the absolute strain it has put on my already subpar mental health, but these last days with almost no communication has kind of started to make the illusion of what I thought my marriage was start to lift and show me what it really had become and where I fit into my wife’s life, as far as priorities go. To the point where I’m ready to just go ahead and make up both of our minds since she won’t tell me what is going on with her thought process.
My philosophy in any relationship I have ever been in has been: If you don’t know if you want to be with me or not, then you already know and it’s time to move on to the healing process.
I’m devastated, of course. I’ve never hurt so much, quite frankly, and I can’t figure out which part is bringing the pain the most: Simply that I lost my best friend overnight and the death of this relationship or the realization it’s possible that over a decade of my life may have turned out to be more illusion than reality. But I’m also feeling important to myself again and that I can endure, as I had been doing in marriage anyway, no matter how much this sucks right now.
I don’t really know what the point of me sharing this was. Just to put it down and send it out into the void, like releasing a bird or something, maybe.
Edit: Just wanted to put a quick line in here that it is absolutely hysterical how many “this seems like such a one sided take” comments there are. You’re reading from my point of view and something that was categorized as “vent,” of course it’s going to be one sided. I wasn’t trying to write a full research paper analysis on my marriage and I wasn’t trying to get psychoanalyzed just based on this lol