Thinker. Dreamer. Lover

It is the 10^th year anniversary of my marriage, although it has been about 7 months since my spouse, and I have separated. To say that it is a difficult day, would be an understatement. My heart aches from the remembrance of this day 10 years ago, when we walked into the local courthouse and took a vow to always love and cherish, in sickness and health, for richer or for poorer as long as we both should live. I remember my husband’s face on that day, he had such love and so much trust that came through his eyes, knowing he was giving me his heart. That day, in fact, it was the love we shared, the impulsion of our emotions and the intensity of feeling that we had for one another that made us go to the local town hall to sign a marriage certificate and enter into one of the oldest known institutions of modern society.

I take the words I give as an oath to the person that I married, as a commitment that I will honor. It is my personal code of ethics and morality that I’ve defined for myself, that if I give my word, I stick to it. This does not mean that if a marriage no longer works or if there is no longer love, that I believe I should be forced or obliged to remain in a situation that is environmentally, mentally or emotionally an impediment to my own well-being. That is not the case; I simply believe that for me, making that oath meant truly seeing the relationship through all the ups and downs and always trying, always working towards unity and keeping the marriage intact.

I am an idealist, a romantic and an old soul that is ruled by the moon and its ever-changing faces. For me the bad times come, and they pass, the good times remain the memories that you cherish, and you can always change your destiny and path towards the better, if you work on it together.

I didn’t stop loving my husband. My love for him changed from that mad, head over heels, love at first sight feeling, to one of acceptance, commitment, and belief in his potential to overcome, to succeed and to become the person he wanted to be. As for myself, I believed that in my altruism, I would find peace and fulfillment in life as there is no greater gift than unconditional love, partnership, and complicity of spirit. In my ability to adjust and evolve to his needs in our relationship – I did lose myself as a person and I abandoned the self-love that I also needed. It was a sacrifice and I thought, rather I hoped, that in time it would turn around and that my husband would become the great person he could become and that I would be able to find myself again. I was not wrong. I envisioned and willed for him to become healthy, and he did. What I did not foresee, is that he would stop loving me.

He stopped loving me or perhaps he never loved me in the same fashion that I loved him or he just was not capable of it. It is hard to explain or know and it is the unknowing that haunts me on this commemoration.

Images pop up on my phone, on the internet and in my mind as vestiges of a life that has abruptly ended and in which I had no choice in the matter. I feel sad, I feel depressed, nostalgia overcomes me. It is an emotional rollercoaster on which I am jerked rapidly uphill just to descend at pummeling speeds downwards and my energy and my mood deplete. I just want to sleep. Perhaps in rest, I can dream of another time, another life or simply just pretend to be someone else.

I don’t know what to do with myself in this current state of what appears to be a rudderless existence. I find myself as though a vessel out to sea, with not a sign of a safe harbor and a captain who is half asleep at the helm. There is no turning back to find the shores from whence I came; those shores have faded and eroded away, even if their memory maintains a strong foothold in the present. I am the only one onboard this ship, unaccompanied and alone. Either I find a way to awaken and steer myself in some direction, unknown to me, or the stagnancy of my situation will eventually render me a ghost ship lost forever over foreign waters.

What is next is the in-between stage from being us to being just me which is laden with painful and uncomfortable musings on the futility of my place in this world. Love is what gives us the strength and the hope to muster on. Love is what we hold on to when the tidal wave of life knocks us down over and over; it’s what gives us the strength to get back up. I channeled all of my love into this one person. It was love that carried a message of hope, the hope for him to believe that he would evolve, he would conquer his demons and reach a better version of himself. It was selfless in its nature to give and not expect in return; it was also extremely naïve in thinking that in offering itself unconditionally to the other, that how it was received would not also eventually evolve for him.

This is what happened. The storms that we weathered together over the years, left me haggard and wasted. I was a diminished version of myself, lost in insecurity, uncertainty, despair, and anger. I was not angry that I had given so much, but rather that it in order to do so, my own sense of worth had to be tested. He received the good, the generosity, the armor of my love which battled by his side, but when he finally healed himself and became whole – he began to see that love as a crutch, a handicap. As he recovered from the affliction that consumed the majority of our relationship, he became strong, and I was a stumbling block in his path to begin anew. A worn torn version of my previous self, spiritually and emotionally amputated and unable to tend to myself without some form, of support, which was not something he was able nor willing to give.  I was the living embodiment of self-deprecation and dejection. All my hope was lost.

Perhaps I knew it all along, perhaps I sensed it that in loving him the way that I did, without the equivalent in return, that I was grossly neglecting myself and leaving no space for self-care and love of self. My duty to marriage was the priority on which I pinned all the effort I had invested, firmly believing that he valued that oath in the same way that I did. It had been years that we had been struggling along. At times, I geographically distanced myself in order to attempt to collect the pieces of me that were coming apart at the seams. I knew there were a lot of things that were not how a good marriage should be, but nonetheless I was bound to the relationship and just thought time was needed, space was needed but that if I were firm and convicted in love, eventually healing would happen and we would stand beside each other as an integral whole.

The ending of it all came swift, sudden and abrupt. Logistically it was not improbable given the distance over the last few years and the schism that had developed between what direction our individual lives were going. He had found new love. Disbelief. Shock. It was a hammer direct to the fragile encasing that contained my limpid heart, shattering it as if in time, suspending it from my body for but a millisecond, to then quickly return as shards acutely stabbing me in pain. Each pulse and heartbeat reverberate that pain. I’ve felt it every day since, and fueled with the memory of today, it pounds throughout my body, my head, the entirety of my being.

Instead of celebration, today is about mourning and loss. Instead of reveling in a steadfast love, I wallow in the awareness that love was fickle while I was true.

We never made it to 10 years.