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‘What will I say when our sons ask me one day why their dad and I aren’t together?’ asks a newly divorced mother. Our advice columnist responds.
Dear Abigail,
My marriage ended recently, and explaining what went wrong to friends and family has been tricky. From the outside, it looks like your typical midlife crisis. My husband became increasingly unhappy with most things in his life—his job, where we live, and me. When he said he wanted out of our marriage, he told me that he never loved me. To my friends, he is, of course, rationalizing. He’s just spinning a story to justify his decision.
I think he’s actually telling the truth. The thing is, for almost the entire duration of my decade-long relationship, I had a nagging gut feeling that my husband didn’t think very highly of me. It was only in the first few months after we met, while we maintained a long-distance relationship, that he seemed over the moon about me. But as soon as we ended up in the same place and began dating in person, his enthusiasm waned. He grew anxious about my flaws, eager to teach me to improve them (he always considered me pretty poor at conversation), and, over time, his dominant feelings toward me seemed to be irritation and resentment. By that point, however, I had come to admire his integrity, intelligence, and faith, and I was desperate to reclaim his early devotion. I didn’t think I could find anyone else better than him, so I stuck around as long as he would have me.
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Abigail Shrier is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the New York Times bestselling author of Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up.