Divorce, Isn't It Strange.

You won’t always be in pain. You won’t always be in love. You won’t always feel this strange.

I’ve written every version of this story: laughing, loving, grieving, angry, accepting. One of the reasons I struggle to write about my divorce is because I can’t easily tie it up in a pretty bow. It’s not a crazy story or cautionary tale for me, it’s been my life. I’m living it.  

I’ve tried to come up with ways to explain things, ways to connect the dots, because it’s so excruciating to not have answers. The in-between was too painful. I didn’t know how long it would last or what was on “the other side” (I still don’t). I’ve reminded myself constantly these past couple of years:

Be Still, don’t forget to rest.
You can’t control it all. 
Stop trying, it’s exhausting. 

You won’t always be in pain. 
You won’t always be in love.
You won’t always feel this Strange. 

It doesn’t feel good enough to simply say “sometimes there are no clear answers.” Constantly trying to find answers is exhausting, but can I forever survive without the answers? 

Divorce is the best and worst thing that’s ever happened to me – maybe both can be true and every in between. My mind fights against this because it’s trying to categorize everything as black or white. It’s tedious work to try to pull apart the tapestry of safety, betrayal, peace, and confusion. I’ve let myself ask the questions so I can eventually write my own script, to reframe thoughts in a way that’s helpful for me. Because I want to create something beautiful to keep going, to make it all worth the suffering and loss. I’ve often written to try to untangle it all, to pull out the pieces and redesign them in a way I can recognize. 

Best Friend

Laughing.

We met in college, connected over 6 sisters, and killed it in cahoots. I remember the wide eyes as we realized we were just as weird as one another, crying laughing the way we only do when we’re stifling laughter at the most inappropriate times. It’s Strange how someone you lived so many years without becomes your Best Friend.¹

For me, best friend became young love, and young love became marriage. I respect twenty-two-year-old Maddie’s decision to marry the man that had become her best friend over that year and a half. A year and a half!? Pretty good for BYU Standard Time if you ask me. It was the best decision I made up to that point in my life. Five years of our sense of humor has brought us here.  

“We were just babies!” 
“I can’t believe we were only 22.”
“What were we thinking!?”
“I see everyone getting married and think they’re so young but then I realize I was their age when I got married.”
“We got lucky.” 
“We didn’t know what we were getting into.” 

I think we throw rocks at young love so they’ll learn to build walls to protect themselves like we have. Yet everyone deserves to feel deep connection, true love, and infatuation just as much as they deserve to make their own mistakes. Marrying young or old, first or fourth marriage, moving in before marriage – none of these are “risk-free” relationship stepping stones. A guaranteed pass rate doesn’t exist for the test of love and life. We make the best decisions we can at the time with the knowledge and experience we have. 

The truth is, young love is beautiful. Young love is sweet. Young love is not embarrassing. Well, actually it is sometimes (ask 23-year-old Maddie blogging about her perfect marriage), but what a waste it would be “to make yourself feel nothing as to not feel anything.”² In all of our time together, if I can rifle through and push play on our tapes upon tapes of humor, laughing is the easiest way to remember we were best friends first. 

Fireproof:

Loving.

I felt lucky to marry someone who loved me as I was and as I grew. From twenty-one to twenty-six, we grew together. Six moves, five years, four jobs.³ Major mental health challenges and faith changes; graduating college and new jobs; all conquered together with work, fear, and a hell of a lot of laughter. We’d heard the sentiment many times that “marriage is so hard, it’s barely worth it”, yet more often marriage was better than we could have ever imagined. What a relief that after all we’d been through, we must be Fireproof.⁴

Yet nothing prepares you for when your best friend and husband comes out to you as queer. I wanted to throw my hands up in the air and celebrate with him. There’s no greater joy than seeing someone as they are. But he wasn’t just my best friend, he was my husband. What did this mean for me? I was still his wife. 

When I let go of the expectation of him as a husband in the traditional sense, there was awe in watching him change and discover himself. It’s beautiful to love someone and all of their Pieces, for that is true unconditional love.⁵ This kind of unconditional love became most achievable outside of our traditional marriage. It was time to go back to the basics, best friends, but not without a roller coaster of grief.  

Motion Sickness 

Grieving.

I didn’t want to imagine a life without him or live in a world without him. I swung from “I’ll be ok” to “I’ll never be ok” minute to minute, then hour to hour, then day to day. I felt it all – betrayal, grief, bargaining – Trying to find the one in infinite lives that we could be together. Two years of emotional Motion Sickness.⁶ 

Separation was like getting my stitches removed and braving the cycle of pain, then relief, pain, then relief. I tried to forget all of the golden memories because it was too painful. How? How? How? Asking “why” didn’t get me anywhere. It’s a fucked up ending to what I thought was my happily ever after. All the things you collected throughout your life, memories made on paper, all that stuff becomes a load of shit. A burden or painful memories locked up in things you own. I didn’t want any of it. Everything was contaminated with the suffocating air of betrayal.

To call it a break-up didn’t do it justice. It was the death of a relationship I was once sure of, the ultimate betrayal of trust. I felt that there wasn’t a song in the world that conveyed the depth of my grief, nor an ending to a movie that would make me cry as many tears as I’d shed. 

The only relief came in realizing:

“Right now there’s sorrow, pain. 

Don’t kill it. And with it the joy you felt.”⁷

Strange

Anger.

When I told people I was separated from my husband because he came out as gay, I swear I could see them doing the math: 

“Did she know!?”
“Did HE know!?”
“Did they have SEX!?-%+*=!?” 

(It’s sometimes in that order, sometimes the sex thought comes first). Maybe I’m just traumatized after some overstepping questions from those that will remain nameless, but I felt the need to clarify that that is not, in fact, what made him gay. He was gay because he’d seen the male stripper in Bad Mom’s Christmas for a little too long. DUH. 

I’ll be honest I’d probably have the exact same thought process if I heard someone’s “gay husband left them” (except I’d have the sex thought first cause I’m a nosey bitch). I kept his secret for two years alone and two months with him. My mom knew first, then my dad and sisters, best friends, and his family. After that, who knows. Someone heard it from a friend of a friend of a friend who asked if my husband was single. 

The first night out since I’d moved home was a wedding reception for the bride I threw a bachelorette party for the week before. I was violently hungover because I’d drank alone for the first time when my husband came home to me having a panic attack and screaming “please don’t leave me”. Sally was brought to life that night, an inflatable cow I’d ordered off Amazon and danced to Nicki Minaj with in the kitchen while downing strawberry daiquiris (then straight vodka). Sally rode in the front seat of my new Subaru with me as we scream-sang Harry Styles' new single. I felt beautiful and free that night getting dressed up in my best color, knowing I didn’t yet have to explain where my second half was. 

“He’s at home.”
“He’s not feeling well.” 
“He’s not here.”

I remember saying these while my blood turned hot and ached under my skin. Any excuse to avoid bursting into tears and screaming at a stranger for asking where my suicidal husband was. It took a lot of failed practices and over-explaining until “We are separated.” became a full sentence and I learned that secrecy and privacy are different concepts. Secrets gnaw at you, privacy protects you. 

It took me over a year to consistently say “divorce”. We were separated. I had rehearsed that line hundreds of times. It was still impossible. Don’t call it a divorce until I do. Let me tell my own story. 

Separation was Strange.⁸ Were we bound to go:

“From strangers to friends,

Friends into lovers,

And strangers again?”

“What should we tell people who ask?” seems like a simple enough question, but I had no answer I was comfortable with. I forced people into awkwardly avoiding the question, giving the vaguest possible answer, or swearing their confidant to secrecy. But what do you tell people when you’re not ready to even admit the most devastating news to yourself? 

Did you know?
No.

No idea? 
Yes.

Reallllllyyyy?
Bitch yes. Thanks for calling into question my gaydar. 

Did he know?”
No.

He never thought just maybe? 
How would I know? 

Reaaaalllllllyyyy?!?? 
God, do we really have to keep doing this?  

“I always thought maybe he was a little gay...” 
Don’t even start me on this one. 

People have a lot of questions. I bet I have the most. All of these questions I dreaded, I sobbed over, I hid from. The bitterness from hearing these over and over again runs deep. So does the embarrassment of not having answers. Talking through the pain just isn’t possible sometimes and other times it’s all you can talk about. 

The thing about anger is that it ignites action. It was anger that gave me energy to finalize our divorce. If grief and joy can coexist, so can love and anger. I can look back on my past with fondness and pride, but that doesn’t mean I should ignore the anger and pain. I repeat to myself, “You won’t always feel this Strange”, but don’t forget the anger served you well. 

Still

Accepting.

I didn’t know “I Still remember me before you” would be the line from our first dance song at our wedding that stuck with me in the end.⁹ I still feel guilt and relief thinking how it will one day be a past life. It’s been agonizing work to get here. Accepting the growth we had together, a successful partnership for a time, and learning about ourselves together in our younger 20’s feels like a beautiful thing to celebrate.

I still don’t know how to answer every question. I’ve spent two years already trying to discern what details to share and what to keep private. I practice what I can handle depending on the day. Sometimes I’ll roll my eyes and tell you this story with anger and sarcasm, sometimes I’ll tell it with tenderness and tears. The truth is, every time I tell this story it will be different, but every version of the story is true for me.

1. Strange, Celeste

2. Call Me By Your Name, Father’s monologue that made me cry.

3. Taken from my “10 Milestones in Our 1st Year of Marriage” blog post which will forever remain unlinked (thank you very much 🫡)

4. Fireproof, One Direction 

5. Pieces, Andrew Belle

6. Motion Sickness, Phoebe Bridgers

7. Call Me By Your Name “

8. Strange, "

9. Still and Strange (linked above) are songs that are bookends to our relationship – our wedding dance & the song that brought me to the end of the divorce.