Happy Ending
It’s a beautiful Saturday evening, 6:21 pm. Sitting on the lanai, I’m watching the sun begin to set, the plants dance within the wind, and the birds fly through the basil fields. Life is good, and I’m extremely grateful.
A year ago, I was in a much different place. In fact, this is what it looked like:
I’ve hesitated in sharing this post for a year, simply because I’m in a new chapter of life, and I want to be consciously focusing on my gratitudes, blessings, and gifts instead of spending time in the dark.
At the same time, there’s much wisdom that the darkness can inform for us, and in order to appreciate the light, we have to sit with the lights off for a moment.
So as this photo came up on my camera roll memories this week, I paused to reflect, and I realized it was time to share a bit of this story.
Even further, y’all know I’m a firm believer in the power of storytelling where the act of authentically sharing our story with those who have earned the right to hear it is a therapeutic tool for connection, and I want to share this for anyone out there who might be challenged with something similar.
So, let’s go.
This photo was taken on March 21, 2023, moments after I ended my marriage.
I had gotten home from the gym, told my husband at the time that I couldn’t do this anymore, and I went upstairs, starting to lose it all, and I took this photo in the bathroom because I wanted to document the reality, fullness, and complexity of life.
I was married to a wonderful man for 5 years, together for 6.
We met in our home state of Ohio, and our first date was a really special Friday night where I drove two hours to see him, we had moscow mules and beers at a Columbus brewery, and ate dinner at a bitchin’ pizzeria — BBQ chicken pizza, btw — my fave. We kissed, I drove the two hours back home, and I had some butterflies.
He informed me right away that he was going to be joining the military soon, and we immediately talked through the “we’re either in this or we’re not” type of a dating approach that we had to take. I told him that didn’t bother me, and it was game on.
The cliff-notes version —we started talking on a daily basis, FaceTiming on our ways home from work, driving to visit each other on the weekends, and formally starting to date at my best friend’s wedding. We started to meet each other’s family, and it was going really well.
He joined the military and was soon whisked off to Basic Training in Texas where we were apart for 7 weeks. Since we knew from the start that our dating time was going to be pretty quick, we mutually proposed at his BMT graduation.
With his need to complete even more training, he stayed in Texas, and I flew back and forth to visit him every month or so. We’d have weekends in Austin and San Antonio, and they were magical. It was a romance out of Pearl Harbor, and these memories are ones that I dearly cherish. I can still smell the lavender of our Airbnb in Austin and the mutual silence we held for an hour after watching A Star Is Born in theaters in San Antonio.
We got married, and a few months later, I was able to move down to Texas to be with him. Since I joined him, he was able to move off-base, so we moved into an apartment in San Angelo, Texas, the biggest city in the United States not connected to a major highway (that’s a fancy way of saying it was in the absolute middle of nowhere).
We had fun, and we were a team. We laughed and laughed, we adopted three pets, and we explored different parts of our city and different parts of Texas. We got closer with each other’s family, and it was truly really great.
There’s one thing that we don’t talk enough about when it comes to relationships — when people enter into relationships, particularly marriages, we tend to forget about the individuals who make up the marriage, instead shifting our focus onto the unit itself. We often don’t spend enough time talking about the fact that marriages are made up of individual people, and those individuals need to be nurtured. Even more, these individuals are still learning about themselves, who they are, how they operate, what they want, what they need, and what they want for their life, and this is happening all within the context of a marriage.
So when people would ask me “What happened?” in regards to my marriage ending, it was never a simple answer for me to give.
The best I can describe it? Imagine a braided rope. Slowly, we started unbraiding it, one day at a time, until I discovered we were holding two separate ropes.
How did this happen? Little things, over time, that added up. And again within the context of two individual people learning about themselves as they were growing up, growing older, and attempting to grow together.
For instance, in moving down to Texas to be together, I left a job that was incredibly important to me. And I couldn’t find work in this small town, so I started working at a coffee shop. I learned that a critical component to my well-being is purpose, and I felt lost without any purpose here. I was able to find purpose for the moment in making people coffee, but this disconnection to my purpose left me lost. My partner wanted me to find purpose in our relationship, but I learned that’s just not how I’m wired — my purpose is found in helping others through work. I tried and tried to change this, but it was inevitable at the end of the day.
Another example: we learned that we had different needs, different perspectives. He was more social, I was more reserved and introverted. He recharged around others, that drained me. The harder we pushed each other to be more like ourselves, the harder we both dug our heels into our own perspectives, untying the rope a little quicker one moment by the next.
We had different sexual needs and desires which led to different types of mutual and consensual exploration. This can often be beneficial for relationships if the foundation of the primary relationship is set; unfortunately, ours was still wet cement.
We moved from Texas to Florida, I started working at my ultimate dream job with the ultimate dream team, and COVID-19 happened. There was a shooting on the base he was working at, the pandemic isolated us from the social world, I dove head-first into my job and my continuing education, and we continued opening up our relationship—because I wasn’t meeting his needs (because I was focused on work) and because of our different sexual tastes. I thought I was okay opening things up at the time, but looking back, I wasn’t — and unfortunately, sometimes that’s something you don’t realize about yourself until after the fact.
He received orders to be stationed in Hawaii. I wanted to be excited, but I really struggled with it because that meant me leaving my dream job. As I learned that a stable career was of utmost importance to me (influenced by the way I was raised — those strong farm values of your impact on the world is what you do to help others), all of our moves and my job changes that followed as a result led me to feel increasingly disconnected from myself in a critical way. Leaving my dream job left me further disconnected from myself, and I felt the need to stand up for myself.
I proposed coming to Hawaii later, and I proposed plans to my supervisors for ways to keep me on-board with the team. My partner felt I wasn’t being supportive of him, and this caused us to start unbraiding the rope even faster. We went to couple’s counseling, we had fights and blow-ups, and there was even a moment where we were one sentence away from getting divorced.
But, I listened to him, and this is where the resentment started to not only grow but metastasize.
To keep the story short, in my perspective, our transition to Hawaii is where our division happened, and it was only a matter of time from then until we’d realize that we weren’t healthy together. By this point, we had learned fully about each other, especially recognizing that we had to do a lot of retroactive dating, and it became clear that, yes, while it’s normal, healthy, and beneficial for partners to not agree on a lot of things and to have different perspectives on things, they need to be on the same page about the “big stuff,” and we weren’t.
We tired and tried to be, but in doing so, that simply drove us apart from ourselves. Before long, we both were dancing in-between feeling connected to ourselves or being connected to each other. If we were connected to one, we were disconnected to the other, and this kept our foundation from solidifying. It only cracked it further.
I knew in my heart that we were going to separate. And I knew that I’d have to be the one to do it. I just didn’t know how to do it and at what point it would be necessary to do it.
Looking back, truth be told, I should have called it quits about three years earlier than I did. I held on for three years too long. But, in my head, I had voices and insecurities of “You’re not trying hard enough” and “You’re being weak” and “You’re giving up” rolling around, and that’s what had me keep trying, time and time again.
It was often that I’d reach out to my support system (my best friends), saying “I can’t do this anymore,” and they’d give me advice and feedback on how to leave. I wouldn’t take it, and I’d come back to them a couple weeks later, complaining of the same things. Eventually, they said it was like the boy who cried wolf, and that it was no use of helping me if I was going to continue choosing to stay in the same toxic situation. In fact, me choosing to stay there made it even more toxic than it already was.
But choosing to leave a marriage is no easy feat, even when you know it’s necessary. There’s shared assets. There's shared debts. There’s pets. There’s family and friends. There’s your own pride. There’s the social component (what will people think?). There’s the holy shit, I’m gonna cause so much pain to someone feeling (and as a mental health provider, this is kinda the last thing that I ever want to do to any one). Choosing to leave a marriage — or any relationship for that matter — is a masterclass in decisional balancing, weighing the benefits vs. the costs.
Eventually, I became so aware that the costs were outweighing the benefits. I tried to communicate this to my partner, but he wasn’t seeing it the same way. I started to see how unhealthy and toxic our relationship was — there were times I had to call crisis lines for myself, there were times I had to rescue him from running away, there were times of self-harm, there was times of suicidal ideation, there was times of so much disrespect toward each other.
I don’t know the exact moment, but something helped me ask myself the question, “Is this how I want to love somebody?” And the answer was simply and clearly no.
I don’t want my partner to feel like they have to run away. I don’t want my partner to feel like they need to harm themselves or their body. I don’t want to feel unsafe in my own home. I don’t want my partner to feel unsafe in my presence. I don’t want my partner to feel happier with others and unhappy with me.
There became a moment that it was logical that this relationship needed to end. Neither of us were ourselves any more, and neither of us were happy.
So, I had the conversation that March morning after the gym a week before his birthday where I then ran upstairs to take the above photo.
This photo shows my grief. It shows that I tried. It shows my hurt. It shows my pain. It shows that even though I was the one to end it doesn’t mean I wanted to do it, I needed to do it — for the both of us.
And here we are, a year later.
Divorced, yet aligned. Independent, and grateful. Thankful for this chapter, and so proud of myself for listening to my gut for the first time in my life and choosing to let go of something unhealthy for the both of us.
To the special person I was married to for 5 years, if you’re reading this, thank you for being you. Thank you for being the great person you are, and thank you for joining me on this chapter in our lives. Thank you for the time and memories we shared. Thank you for growing together with me. I’m so proud of you, and I can’t wait to hear what you accomplish, where you go, and what you do next. I’ll always be proud of you, and I’ll always love and care for you. Thank you for bringing me to Hawaii, even though I put up a fight, because you helped me to find community.
This is a happy ending story because this is me now:
Grateful
Thankful
Fulfilled
Surrounded by blood and chosen family
Surrounded by the best of friends
Running a successful, meaningful business and non-profit
Active and healthy
Slightly moisturized
Very sweaty
To anyone going through a difficult time, particularly in regards to an intimate relationship:
Trust yourself. Listen to your heart. Listen to your gut. Listen to your intuition. You know what you need to do for yourself, whether that’s to stay or whether that’s to move forward. The ending of a relationship does not mean you’ve failed; it means you’ve recognized that something is no longer beneficial for you or the other person(s), and you’ve learned that your light is being dimmed, and the world (and you) needs your light in full brightness.
Letting go will be one of the hardest things you’ll ever endure in your life. It’s going to suck. It’s going to be awful at times. It’s going to feel terrible.
But, one day, you’ll have this same blog-writing moment that I have, and you’ll say, “Hey self, I’m proud of you. I’m so glad you’re back. I missed you.”
I missed myself, but damn, I’m so grateful he’s back.
My light is shining in full brightness again.
All my best,
Kevin