making peace with divorce

[grebjack]

I am a rule-follower. I have really believed that I could inherit some advice from my elders, and if I lived by it I'd have a generally happy life.

I thought I could find a lifelong marriage by marrying old enough to really know myself, by marrying someone I'd dated long enough to really know him, by being sincerely committed to working through the problems that would inevitably come, and by marrying someone who was just as sincerely committed. We had all of that, but it didn't save us.

I also absorbed the lesson that most of life is about the choices you make. That I could earn the life I wanted by working hard, delaying gratification, learning from my mistakes. I am a teacher, and I still teach this to my students, but I don't really believe it anymore. My professional success and marital failure both look a lot more like luck now. When my marriage first fell apart, I gravitated to programs like Marriage Fitness and Divorce Busting that told me "these are the painful and difficult things you need to do to repair your marriage," and that fit my world view. But most of the conversations on these boards are about newbies whose marriages aren't coming around and old-timers advising that going through these steps will make you healthier even though it may not save your marriage. I think that believing in my own agency in the intense first years allowed me to wean myself off my husband and allowed him to wean himself off me. We were fighting before, and now we will divorce amicably, and that is preferable.

I'm just a few days away from the fifth anniversary of the end of my marriage. I have endured the grief as long as I have in large part because I knew once the pain ended I would have nothing left of the marriage I once had such high hopes for. Now, finally, the loneliness is beginning to surpass the grief and I realize I must make peace with the divorce or I will spend the rest of my life alone. I hope this downer message doesn't mess up someone else's hopefulness. For me, it's finally the (ugly) light at the end of the tunnel.

[Cadet]

Last thread

http://www.divorcebusting.com/forums/ubb...740#Post2229740

Now, finally, the loneliness is beginning to surpass the grief and I realize I must make peace with the divorce or I will spend the rest of my life alone.

So what are you going to do?

[grebjack]

I dunno - I'm actually pretty lost. I'm going to sell my under-water house so that my husband can finally file and get it over with. I guess I'm hoping that once my marriage is fully past-tense, I'll finally be able to stop wishing I could reconcile it. I'd like to say I'm going to be happy and that I will regain my faith that lifelong commitment is more than just a crap-shoot, but I have no idea how to make myself FEEL or BELIEVE anything. I know how to DO things and showing the house/ making extra payments toward the principal, those are things I can DO. At some level I've been holding on to hurting 'cause, as I said above, that's all I have left. I think I chose that and therefore it must be possible to stop choosing it. Other than that, I'm pretty lost.