Marriage.2

My task tonight, explaining the nigh-on unexplainable.

If you’ve been following along at home, you know that on November 7th, my husband of 16 months announced that he didn’t want to be married. I’ve posted here now and again about the “process” of adjusting to his announcement–my sorrow, my bouncing about amid friends’ homes, my anger, my puzzlement.

Whenever I told another friend my news, the response was always, “What the hell?! What?!” For truly, there wasn’t much that made sense about my husband’s decision. And as I pointed out now and again, he and I had spent MUCH more effort on planning our wedding than we spent on rescuing our marriage. There was something about the suddenness of his declaration that made no freaking sense. Not to mention that the declaration itself made no sense. What?!!

Which all makes our current circumstances almost as puzzling.

See, we’re back together.

It’s a long story, of course, but the gist is that my dear husband has done that thing I hoped he would but knew I couldn’t make him do.  He’s looked hard at his true motivations behind his desire to end our marriage–and found they pretty much had nothing to do with me, our marriage, or even, life in the present tense.

(His change of heart is a long story full of much more detail, and I might go into some of that at some later point, but for now just trust me on this one–he’s tackled some sh*t that was fundamentally f*cking up his life.)

So, here’s some of what I take from this (because you know how I like to learn a lesson from this kind of thing).

Through this whole time, even in the midst of my pain and confusion, I stayed true to my values, my needs, my beliefs. I trusted my intuition, I said what I had to say, I held my ground.

When I was attached to the sanctity of our marriage vows, I held forth. When I believed my husband’s reasons to end the marriage were whack, I told him so, and demanded more answers. When I needed support to get through it all, I leaned on my friends and family.

This has been the first time in my life that I’ve held so true to myself, and that I allowed myself such vulnerability with my friends and family. A big change for me.

In time, I found that my head and heart were too battered from trying to restore my marriage, and I stepped up and filed for divorce–if my ship was going to sink, at least I would be captain.

In the end, my steadfast convictions and my commitment to myself and to what I knew to be true, affected my husband and contributed to our reunion (yes, a partial contribution only–the real work was his–but still a real contribution to his shift).

So, my lesson here, is of course that same old one–how we can’t change someone else, we can only be ourselves.

This time, my reward is HUGE, as if the universe agrees that I have really learned these lessons and so gave me back my husband and marriage. Sweet.

(I’d like to give photo credit here, but the image is one my husband tore from a magazine and gave me while we were busy planning our wedding … some automobile ad as I recall.)

Tagged as: divorce, marriage