When Love Dies

So at some point he sort of randomly attacked me and said I wasn't REALLY getting divorced etc. because my divorce was taking a long time.

My divorce wrapped up a really long time ago, well over a decade ago. The relationship had been a lot of drama from the get-go, in part because I was molested until about age thirteen-and-a-half and I met the future ex at age sixteen, so less than three years after that and before I managed to arrange therapy at age seventeen.

I was a raw mess and people attracted to raw messes are often people with other kinds of problems where raw mess seems like it might be an antidote to their skeletons in the closet. I like to think of the marriage as strong medicine for two people with deep wounds who decided to leave each other at a point where the medicine had done its job and had not yet turned to poison.

We were, in our own way, very deeply committed to each other and it's part of why the divorce was more amicable than the marriage. I had spent years crying after our latest fight and saying "I want a divorce!" while he tried to comfort me and declined to divorce me.

He finally agreed to divorce me after I stopped screaming at him in some fight and said:

I don't want to do this anymore. I'm tired of hurting you. I'm tired of being hurt. I think we've both given it our best shot and if we could do this dance, we would have figured it out by now. I want a divorce.

I had actually decided about a year earlier that I wanted out if at all humanly possible. I think it was another year after we verbally agreed to get divorced that we finally filed for divorce and then the divorce dragged out for something like another two or two-and-a-half years.

I knew I was getting divorced. I was absolutely certain the divorce would happen.

I knew I wanted out and I knew I had his word and he was going to keep his word. This was between me and him and it wasn't really anyone else's business.

The outside world knew us to be a very seriously committed couple and telling people that I was facing a divorce was something that played out over an extended period of time beginning before we actually filed the papers. Different people reacted differently to the news.

Close relatives who knew we had always fought a lot were not shocked. One forum where a lot of people got told one-on-one before it was said publicly did not react with shock. Another forum where I stated it publicly "cold" without first telling a bunch of people reacted very negatively.

The incident where some guy in another state gave me a hard time and accused me of not really getting divorced occurred in the second forum.

It was in part rooted in the fact that he and some other man were both PUBLICLY commiserating about getting divorced and I joined the PUBLIC conversation to say "Yeah, I'm getting divorced too." as a means to make conversation and be generally supportive.

He did what a lot of people seem to do, which I continue to find baffling: He acted like my PUBLIC statement in a PUBLIC and GROUP discussion was some private, and very, very personal confession that somehow suggested I was hitting on him.

Um, what?

This is part of why I blog about such topics these days and say less about them in PUBLIC discussions in online forums: It seems slightly easier to convince nutters that "This BLOG POST was NOT me hitting on YOU" than to convince nutters that "This PUBLIC DISCUSSION on a PUBLIC FORUM involving MULTIPLE OTHER PEOPLE was NOT ME HITTING ON YOU."

His accusation that I was NOT actually getting divorced because some other woman had told him she was leaving her live-in boyfriend for him and then didn't was so bizarre and unreasonable, I basically quit discussing my divorce with him and did my best to simply avoid him thereafter.

• Some people talk about a thing as an alternative to really doing that thing. They sometimes just want some kind of social and emotional validation and they will talk about their PLANS to do X and then never really do X.
• Some people talk about a thing to manage their Big Feels about a big change in their life. It's a form of venting and self-management to help them get through a tough time.
• Some people don't do a lot of talking about it publicly. They are busy doing the thing and you will likely see evidence of progress when they do mention it, though you may not.

Especially if it's something extremely private, like their love life, they may be moving the ex out of their life and dating someone else on the down low without talking much about ANY of it. And, hey, if you aren't directly involved in some way or directly impacted in some way, it's not your business. They probably don't owe you an update.

If you are the type who really craves public validation, you may be the "talk about it in place of doing it" type. If so, a best practice is to SHUT UP if you REALLY want to get on with it.

Just handle your private stuff PRIVATELY and spend some time thinking about a PR position for giving the minimum necessary information when it inevitably comes up awkwardly with people who don't know you that well.

Even late in the game, I sometimes found myself regretting mentioning anything about my divorce socially because men I barely knew would interpret that as "Yo! She's DTF! You can ASK HER OUT even though you don't know ANYTHING ABOUT HER!"

Um, no. Go away and stop bothering me.