Truth

My epiphany this week was that I'm not solely responsible for the end of my marriage. This is an epiphany because I realized that I've been blaming myself on subconscious level for it. But it wasn't all my fault. Now I did choose a broken person to marry and entered into a marriage with some unresolved issues of my own. However, those choices didn't doom my marriage. Other broken people marry and stay together, they work it out; to do so is certainly possible.

I figured this out when my ex's karate teacher called me, looking for my ex, and he wondered "what he'd done to piss him off" that he (the teacher) hasn't heard from him (my ex) in several years. I joked, "I wonder that, too," and then hypothesized that after my father in law died, my ex took whatever issues were on his mind that he didn't want to share with me, combined them with his grief, and just ran away, not wanting to deal with any of it. His karate teacher said thoughtfully, "Yeah, that sounds about right."

That is the only answer I've ever had about my marriage's end that came from my ex, or at least from his camp. It may be heresay, and not much of an answer, but it's enough.

In the end, quite simply, it's over because he ended it. He said he didn't love me anymore. That line still bugs the hell out of me. Love is a feeling, and feelings are fleeting... short of outright acrimony taking its place, not feeling love doesn't doom a marriage, not if there's trust, friendship, and a desire to be open and accepting about working it out. He wasn't open, and he didn't believe I'd be open to accepting "the real him," whatever that meant. He decided it was over, and so it was. So as it all happened, there is one reason I'm not married any longer, and it's because he cut and ran. Period.

If he'd hung around and tried to work on matters with me, maybe it still would've ended, but then it would've been over for different reasons. He didn't do that, so it's over mostly because that's what he chose.

Part of me wonders if I'd glared at him and said, "You're right that we do have issues, and perhaps it's time we work on ourselves, and eventually to work on stuff together, but I am not agreeing to a divorce unless you first get all your baggage on the table and talk to me. For now, this is still a marriage, and it's not all about you, and I deserve that much. That's what it's going to take for me to go quietly, if that's what we find we must do," if things would have been different. I have no way of knowing... but that's what the me who I am now would say. That's what I did say the times the HL and I considered breaking up the first three times... minus the insistence. With him, it was more of a wishful thought, "How about we try to be authentic?"

Anyway, my aunt is encouraging me to be proactive about what I want in life, but I'm not prepared to ask for a relationship right now. I really don't want to bother yet... find the idea of having to give of myself more of a burden than a boon. I saw Brothers and Sisters last night, and Sally Field said to Calista Flockhart something about how people fast from food to purge their bodies of toxins. Then she hypothesized that going without a relationship for a while allows the same thing to happen psychologically. That's just what I'm doing, I realized. I'm detoxing my psychic self... and maybe eventually, I'll be ready to find someone worthy of me.