Its Midnight and I Can't Stop Thinking About How I Was A Shit Wife.
Midnight Musings: A vulnerable look at marriage and when the small things inevitably became BIG things.
I tend to reflect on the hardest point of my life and that was the SWIFT breakdown of my marriage - a smol recap would be a little drunk and definitely high my husband turned to me and said he didn’t love me anymore blah blah blah. Ok, now that I got that outta the way.. I could chalk it up to two people who had gotten married young, I was a fresh 21 (I turned 22 the next day) and he was 26. We were just two kids, young, dumb and wildly in love. My family warned me about falling too fast and a little too hard - hitching yourself to someone so long can go two ways. We could end up healthy and old and madly in love telling our grandchildren how we made it or we could end up as two ships passing in the night wondering how we got here.
All marriages have ebbs and flows - the good and then the bad. Its hard to really remember the good when the bad has taken up so much residency in your brain. I am the kind of person who remembers every bad thing and rarely remembers the good. I focus and then double down on the moments that wrecked me and less on what led up to it. I affectionately refer to it as my ‘selective memory’. I am also the person who struggles with feeling like a failure - breaking up is a moral failure in my eyes and its also insanely terrifying to see the life you’ve sacrificed for, yearned for and spent your childhood imagining go up in smokes.
I recall sitting on my therapists couch during one of our very first sessions and my chest was heaving, and I said, “when does it hurt less?” and she said with what I will pretend is pity but I’m sure is her best therapist voice and said, “it wont, but one day it’ll get easier”. I am not in the easier stage (healing and learning about yourself is BRUTAL) but I am learning to see my shortcomings. I was and still can be self centered and selfish after being raised by a grandma who STILL put my lotion on me well into middle school BUT I am more self aware (now) and willing to see the error in my ways to make changes and rebuild broken or strained relationships. The world revolved around me and I had a partner who let me be that person for so many years that once it got old, I wasn’t prepared to change OR admit that the way I operated was wrong. I had existed in a way feeling like I met someone who would take care of me and fulfill all my needs without realizing that YOU HAVE TO FILL YOUR PARTNERS CUP as much as your own. You cannot maintain a marriage when one persons cup is running on empty.
I think it takes something falling apart to make you wake up and ask yourself, “what role did I play in the falling apart of this relationship”…and sometimes its hard to accept any blame because you wanna keep walking around like your shit don’t think but it takes a major shakeup to realize, it sure does. The MAJOR thing I’ve learned in my never ending journey of growing and healing is you don’t fail at anything as long as you learn from it and some relationships aren’t doomed they just need a little more watering from both sides - and that goes for all types of relationships: familial, romantic and platonic.
Thank you for allowing me the space to bare my soul and I learn about myself…and for those paid subscribers, THANK YOU for supporting me.
Talk soon,
B.