For the first time in five years, I’m single. It’s admittedly a bit of a shock; I was in a relationship with someone I loved for half a decade and now I’m not. I thought I’d be aching for my ex, but the truth is that being with him was doing more harm than good.
- Things seemed perfect from the outside but they really weren’t. Despite being in a committed relationship and having everything I could think of to desire, something felt wrong. I had a house and a spouse, but not a real home or a true partner. I thought that if I had everything I’d told myself I wanted, I wouldn’t feel like I needed more. That couldn’t have been more wrong.
- I lost all the wonderful things about myself that I loved. When I spent some time on self-reflection, I noticed that I was lost in the body of someone who wasn’t me. To maintain my relationship with my spouse over the course of five years, I had to give up a lot of dreams and desires. We left a city I love for his job, I gave up having a dog because he didn’t want one, and I gave up the career of my dreams to have kids because he wanted to. I lost sight of the path I wanted to take when I got with him and that was a big mistake.
- I missed the old me. I consider myself a good mother and a good spouse. I make sure the house is clean and the kids are fed, but that’s not who I used to be. I used to attend gallery openings and drink with friends until the early hours of the morning. I used to run with my dog late in the afternoon and spend full afternoons in libraries, just relaxing and reading. I never had the chance to transition out of my adventurous young adult phase; I was torn out of it abruptly and didn’t get to say goodbye. It seriously sucks.
- I was the one making all the compromises. In the beginning, when I viewed everything through rose-tinted glasses, it made sense to follow love wherever it wanted to take me. If being with my spouse meant moving, it was right to do that. However, thinking back, I noticed that my spouse never made compromises for me. I’d never planned on having kids, nor did I plan on living so far from my hometown, but when I brought those things up, they were shut down. I was told that if I truly loved him, I’d go along with it. And I did. What was I thinking?
- I felt selfish, but I wanted my life back. I loved my kids and would always put them first, but I also needed to make myself a priority. Staying in my relationship was doing nothing but making me miserable and I knew I needed to get out so I could start rebuilding my life the way I wanted it—I just didn’t know how I was going to do it.
- My spouse started to notice the difference too. After I had the groundbreaking realization that my life was no longer the life I wanted, I was tired, bored, and moody all the time. My husband got irritated with my behavior; he wanted to understand why the house was suddenly messier, why I’d stopped cooking family meals and started ordering in. I didn’t know how to break it to him that the problem was him.
- Once I was honest with him about how I felt, everything changed. It took months for the truth to come out. I fell out of love with my husband and our life so quickly that it shocked even me. Everything he did drove me crazy, and I knew I was driving him crazy too. When the tension finally hit its climax, it took only a five-minute conversation to explain that I didn’t love him anymore and needed to leave.
- I had to start making compromises with myself. Ending a relationship is never not-messy, but it’s exceptionally more difficult when kids are involved. I wanted the chance to get back to my roots. I wanted to explore my career options and get an apartment where I used to live, but that meant a big change in my relationship with my children. I had to make some hard choices; I found an apartment nearby and moved into it less than a month after I left my husband.
- Everything was a mess and I loved it. There was no heartbreak on my end, so the hardest part of the split was making arrangements. We had a visitation schedule for the kids, and I was still paying for half of the care cost for them, in addition to rent on my new apartment. I had to find a job as soon as possible, but I’d been out of work for three years by then. I took the first thing that my college degree qualified me for, and it was one of the most exciting things I’d done in years.
- I finally went after the life I wanted and it was the best decision ever. Nothing was in order anymore. My abrupt departure from my relationship was messy, disorganized, and hard for many to understand. It took a lot of explaining to my kids and other family members. I was juggling a full-time job, divorce proceedings, custody arrangements, and a sweet dog I adopted from a local shelter. Everything was a wreck, but for the first time in five years, I felt like myself again. I wouldn’t trade that for the world.