Picking up the pieces of a broken life.

It’s… been a while. It’s a weird thing to write on here. I wish it were under happier circumstances.

Hi, I’m Josh. I’m 35. I’ve got a good, not great career. I’m in the best shape of my life, and happy within myself as a person. I’ve got some great friends, a loving supportive family, and pretty much have a ton to be thankful for.

But my wife left me.

It came as a surprise, though I suppose that’s pretty common. It’s like a mega-version of feeling dumped, and someone has to be the dumpee… I guess it had to be me.

Almost three weeks ago, we were coming back home to Atlanta from a trip up to the Poconos after a weekend with friends. I co-founded an online gaming group 10 years ago, and although most of us don’t really play too many games anymore, we still find the time to get together for one weekend, have a friendsgiving, and celebrate with the nerdiest frat party you’ve ever seen.

We’d just gotten through the checkpoint at the Newark airport, and sat down at the terminal to wait the 2 hours for our flight home. Then she pulled out her phone, and said the fateful words that led to a string of sentences that felt like stones being thrown through the stained glass window of my life.

I’ve got to talk to you about something… I’m leaving you…

I don’t respect you…

I have to know that I’m not settling…

I felt numb. I felt like someone else as she read carefully prepared words from her phone that, despite that, still felt completely improvised. And once she was done, I asked her questions. But she had no good answers. I wanted to talk her out of it. I wanted to communicate, to understand all of the whys and answer them, to break down her reasons. But no one knows my wife better than I do, and I knew tightening my fist would just cause her to slip away even faster.

We did immediately agree to go to couples counseling. On top of that, we both agreed that it would be a good move to go to solo therapy as well. She left the next morning with two bags, not even bothering to close the door behind her. I watched her drive away. It still didn’t register at first. I had taken the day off, so I did normal errands that, even under happier times, wouldn’t get done unless I did them.

But as the next day came, and I woke up to an empty bed, it hit me like a ton of bricks. She wasn’t there anymore. I was alone. I was in our big, quiet house, alone. Except… I wasn’t. Our tenant who rented the downstairs bedroom came home, dropped her things, and asked me where my wife was.

Oh… she didn’t tell you?

Didn’t tell me what?

My memory of the night before came through loud and clear as I told her about my wife being gone. The memory of her telling me that this woman in front of me had “poisoned her soul”. All because our tenant had come from a bad marriage, and was now living the tinder life to its fullest, with the freedom to date and go wherever she chose. That envy of the life she saw from across the couch in our home, apparently, was hard to resist.

Coming into the marriage, I knew that it was going to be a challenge as we moved forward. She was much younger than me – I’d never intended her as a serious romantic option when I first friended her on facebook. I did it because she was a member of my community, and had enjoyed listening to me narrate an online D&D campaign with some of my friends. The fact that we started chatting, and didn’t stop for hours was an unexpected byproduct of my seemingly random friending of her. But there was something about her that stood out from the other women that had ever been in my life. I didn’t get bored of her. After spending a day with her, I still wanted to be around her.

And that didn’t change for the next seven years.

But for those reasons, I told her my approach to our marriage would be a little unorthodox. That I wasn’t just marrying her for the person she was today, but also for the her of 5 years later. 10 years later. 20 years later. That I knew she was leaving the college experience behind to be with me, so I would be fine with giving her as much freedom as she could handle. But I guess even though I told her she was welcome to go bars alone, make friends, and not have to worry about calling me so long as she found her way home, that wasn’t enough. Because in the end, my existence as her husband grew to be a boundary she had a hard time dealing with.

Oh, she had some other reasons, of course. She pushed harder to further her career than I have, and resented that I didn’t move up as well.

A long time ago, I recognized immediately that for her to truly be happy, she had to be successful in her career. We couldn’t both push full bore at that, and still keep the lifestyle we wanted. So I was content to keep at my mid-level job, get a steady, if unspectacular paycheck, and do all the things in our life that she never wanted to do. Clean the house. Pay the bills. Run errands. Many days, by the time I went to work, went to the gym, made dinner, spent time with her eating dinner and watching TV together, and got up and do chores that needed doing, it was already 8 or 9pm, and I would be maybe an hour or two away from needing to sleep and do it all over again. It was unreliable to impossible for me to do all that and consistently work on extracurricular activities to better myself.

She was and is such a take-charge person that I knew I had to support her and let her choose things when she wanted. Maybe I was a little too passive at times.  But that’s something to talk about, not walk out the door over.

Every time I’ve seen her since, she’s found new ways to be unpleasant to me about all of this. After our first session of couples counseling, we spoke long afterward, and sat in her car and cried to each other. I told her how much I loved her, and if she need to figure things out and be sure that I was the course in life she wanted to take, I was happy to keep our life together otherwise – maintain the house, friendships, etc. She held my hand, and didn’t want to let go. I was eventually the one who pulled away, telling her I knew that if I didn’t, I’d never leave.

I don’t deserve to have someone love me like you do, she told me.

The next time I saw her, she had nothing but nasty things to say to me. Things like how awkward I was, and how she wasn’t sure if she could see herself having babies with me. Surprisingly, these comments didn’t hurt me all that much. She wasn’t fooling anyone, least of all me. She was doing nothing but trying to push me away, and build a wall. Why? Guilt? Frustration? I’m still not sure.

At counseling, I had told her that I wanted to see her once a week, regardless of anything. Call it a date, a meetup, a hangout… didn’t matter. She came to our first one with nothing but a smile, telling me how she’d tried LSD for the first time over the weekend, and how much it felt like a waste of time to come see me.

As you might imagine, through all this I’ve had a bit of a mental breakdown. I’ve had panic attacks, anxiety attacks, depression, loneliness… you name it, I’ve been dealing with it.

At Thanksgiving yesterday, my brother gave me a little legal notepad, and told me that it would help if I wrote out my feelings. I started doing that today, but then I thought of this site… and wondered if maybe typing it out might be even better.

So here I am, picking up the pieces of the life I loved.

Not even sure anyone will read this, but at least I feel a little better after this. I’ll probably come back later and write out what happened last Tuesday, because it was one of the weirdest days of my life, and deserves to be preserved.