Alone For The First Time In 20 Years

Let me give you a bit of a back story. last year I left my marriage in the dust. He chucked a tantrum two years in and decided the best course of action was to stop talking to me completely. Well done good sir, well done. We were together for 15yrs, married for 13, didn’t communicate for 11 and stopped having sex 6yrs into the gig. Put that on your dating profile.  

Our relationship had been great at the beginning, they all are right! He bought me gifts for no reason, we had great sex or so I thought, despite the fact that he never made me cum. I always had to finish myself off while we did doggy. He would rut away behind me then say something super romantic like ‘get the violator’. The violator was the vibrator he chose because it looked soft because that's what you want from a dick right?? Nothing better than a medium hard dick you have to fold into your vagina.

We got married and had a beautiful baby boy, we built a house and for a while things were good. Sort of, our marriage had changed, something was off. I had no clue what happened but my loving husband stopped caring. He stopped putting in effort, he was cranky all the time, he wouldn’t talk to me, his mum gave me shit constantly, he treated me like a child with no clue about the world. He’s 15 yrs older than me and it had never been an issue, until it was. When we first started dating my dad told me one day I would wake up and realise I was sleeping next to an old man. I laughed and said don't be stupid dad! Turns out my dad was right. Dads often are.

I tried everything to be the type of woman he wanted. I tried in vain to be what he wanted in a wife instead of expecting him to like me the way I was. My New Year’s resolution for many years was to be a better wife, to have more sex, to give more blow jobs. I dressed like him, I lost a tonne of weight to look like the porn girls he was watching. I did everything he asked in an effort to get our relationship back on track, I did everything and then some but nothing worked. In the end I think what he really wanted was to fuck his mother. If those two just admitted they had feelings for each other everyone would be so much happier. 

When I turned 30 all I wanted was to have a party. 30 is one of the big ones! I wanted to have my friends over and have drinks and eat good food. He didn’t. So I organized everything myself. I sent invites and set up a marquee in the backyard. Have you ever tried to put up a marquee by yourself? It's not easy. I cleaned the house, organized the food and all I asked was that he BBQ some meat. The night of the party everyone wished me a happy birthday, told me it was all downhill from here and then told me how lucky I was that my husband had thrown me a party. He stood at the BBQ doing the bare minimum, taking all the credit for jack shit and I thought to myself ‘maybe I’m not the problem’. That was it for me, that was the beginning of the end. I had tried so hard for so long to be the perfect wife but I was the only one putting in effort. Then I looked at my son and decided I could probably put up with some discomfort for his sake and I stayed with that man for way longer than I should have. 

Skip forward a few years, 7 to be exact, and many depressive episodes later, to the point where I discovered multiple bank accounts set up under my name. Bank accounts he had opened without my knowledge and without my signature, all for the tax breaks. Nice to learn after 15 yrs together I wasn't his wife because he loved me, I was his wife because it was financially beneficial. We had ‘the chat’ and I found myself single for the first time since I was 18. I'm now almost 40. The last 20 yrs of my life have been spent by the side of very average dudes. And I'm not average, like I'm pretty hot, a 10 if you ask me.

In the end he knew he wasn't doing his part for the relationship. He told me he knew I was unhappy but until I asked for a divorce he didn't feel the need to change. And the second he realised I wasn't going to change my mind he stopped crying and asking if we could go to therapy. He stopped pretending to be sad about it, he went right back to his usual behaviour and I can tell you, without a doubt in my mind, that he was pretending because the turnaround took two days. We broke up on a Wednesday and by Friday he had a binding financial agreement drawn up to separate our assets.  

It's hard to believe 15yrs of your life can be condensed into a few small boxes and tucked away into one room. Life seems so big and expansive but then one day it blows up in your face and you find yourself sleeping on a blow up mattress on the floor in your now ex-husband's spare room. All of a sudden it becomes very clear how insignificant everything is. Not insignificant in a bad way, just in a way that makes you realise what's actually important. The trinkets and things we collect don't actually mean anything. They only hold value for a time and after that all they hold is memories and sometimes it's better to let those memories go. Say goodbye and throw them in the garbage, let the bin man take that emotional baggage to the dump and never look back.

Single me was afraid but determined to prove the ex wrong. He didn't think I had the capability to pay my own bills or put food on the table for my kid. Pretty absurd assumption coming from the guy who had to take notes when I told him how to make a school lunch. I guess you could call it a steep learning curve if you only ever do it twice in 10yrs.

He was wrong about me not being able to cope, I'm an ‘everything is figure out-able’ type of person. Give me 5 mins and a youtube tutorial and i'll have that shit sorted. Everyone was wrong about me actually and now I look at my peaceful life with my quietly dying house plants and I laugh in the face of other people's doubt. My way might be a fucking mess but you better believe ill get there in the end and you'll all be sorry you didn't join me for the ride. As wild as it may be.