Everyone says how difficult the first year of marriage is. I never really understood why. Why get married if your relationship is so weak that it will be troubled by the first year? I must confess that I was always so smug when people said that to us. We were so strong together, never argued and loved each other so completely that I believed the first year of our marriage would be easy. Never in my fevered, cold-feet, pre-wedding nightmares did I foresee that we would only make it to a month before you fell out of love with me and fell for someone else.
Here we are, though, on our one year anniversary and I’m sending off those papers.
There is a certain irony to this. One year is the paper anniversary, right? Well, here you are – your gift from me on our first anniversary is our divorce papers, exactly what you want. Aren’t I thoughtful?
I should hate you for what you’ve done to me but I don’t. I can’t.
In fact I still love you and miss you every day. I’m not sure why I want you to know that. To remind you of my existence, perhaps. To remind you that we were once something. I thought, something special.
I go over and over things to figure out if there was anything I could have done differently to make you stay. Maybe I didn’t fight for you hard enough, but recently I realised that you never asked me to. You never said sorry or begged for my forgiveness.
When I first found the emails and confronted you, you said that you didn’t want to throw away our marriage or all the years we’d spent together. But what did you do to try to fix things? You still kept in touch with her – how was that going to fix things?
You told me that you didn’t regret having met her. Not only did that cut me down to my soul, it showed me that you never had any intention of staying with me.
So why ask for forgiveness? You didn’t want forgiveness, not from me. You want to be able to blame me, in part, for the break up. You want to tell people that you tried to make amends but that I couldn’t forgive you, making it not entirely your fault. But it was, it was completely your fault and I want you to know that.
I want you to stop making excuses and stop trying to justify what you did. The trouble with that, though, is that you don’t care. You got what you wanted. A new life with her, a life without me, while I’m picking up the clichéd pieces of my life and your broken promises. I wish I could be a better person and say that I hope you and your girlfriend have a long and happy life together, but I can’t – for where is the justice in that?
All I can say is that the two of you deserve each other. I deserve better.
Anonymous
