The Worst Year

There are years that mark you, and then there are years that unmake you.

This, by any honest accounting, has been the latter.

It began with the slow, grinding recognition of something I’d perhaps known for longer than I cared to admit - that she and I were not drifting toward each other but away, and had been for some time. The marriage fights at the start of the year felt, at first, like the usual friction, the familiar weather of a long partnership. But it wasn’t that. It was the final reckoning arriving in the guise of the ordinary.

I had plans this year. Real ones. Camping. Adventuring. The kind of outdoor life that I wanted to shift to in an endeavor to improve my health. Little of it happened. And the harder truth - the one I keep turning over - is that it likely won’t happen for years. Not with the custody arrangements still unsettled, not with the logistics of children and two fractured lives reorganizing themselves into something functional. The kids are not abstractions in this; they are real and they are mine and I love them with a fierceness that doesn’t require qualification. But love and regret are not mutually exclusive, and I find myself holding both simultaneously, which is its own particular kind of grief.

What I keep coming back to - the thing that sat in my chest all evening like a stone - is the memory of being thirteen years old and utterly, stupidly head over heels for her. That version of me had no idea what he was setting in motion. And then the years of wanting her, and then the astonishment when she actually chose me, the way it felt like the universe had briefly rearranged itself in my favor.

I was so certain.

I was so wrong.

The great compromise, as I’ve called it before - that ultimatum about having children, that either/or - I capitulated. I did. And I’ve said as much to her herself, more than once. It wasn’t a hidden resentment I was nursing in secret. It was spoken aloud and apparently survived, in the way that certain structural cracks in a building survive for years before the whole thing finally shifts. I don’t blame her for asking back then, because it was what she always wanted. I do grieve the version of myself that said yes when he should have said I don’t know and sat with that uncertainty until it clarified.

Perhaps it would have resulted in less net suffering.

I talked to my sister about this tonight. Somewhere in that conversation, I admitted not just sadness but anxiety - real anxiety - about the prospect of being alone for the rest of my life. And then, almost as I said it, I realized I didn’t mean it the way it sounded. Because if someone had offered me a clean trade - this life, this divorce, this financial and emotional wreckage, versus a life alone, quietly unencumbered - I would have taken the solitude without blinking. You can learn loneliness. You can make a kind of peace with an empty house. What you cannot do is excavate someone from your consciousness who was embedded that deeply, for that long, and then simply move on and live the rest of your life.

The “faith crisis” thread from our marriage is impossible to ignore when I trace the architecture of this failure. Eleven years of me discarding our childhood faith tradition and not being religious anymore, but still performing the role - not drinking, not smoking, keeping the external shape of a faith I’d already vacated internally. It worked, in a manner of speaking, until 2019, when I decided the performance was over. One drink. That was all it took for her to threaten divorce. One drink, and the whole structure revealed itself for what it had always been: contingent. The relationship could only survive when I was compliant even if I didn’t believe. It had no musculature for actual conflict, for the honest friction of two people who had genuinely, irrevocably grown in different directions - and years later, it is the same, even if religion has nothing to do with it - because the fundamental rift between us was never what church we attended.

Twenty years in physical proximity. And I’m not sure we have more in common now than when we started. That’s the line that keeps echoing. The promise - or perhaps the mythology - that couples grow together as they age has revealed itself, in my case, to be a kind of sentimentality. We grew apart. Slowly, thoroughly, and without much drama, until the distance was too wide to pretend otherwise.

By the time my youngest finishes high school, I’ll be in my early fifties. By college, close to sixty. These are not abstract numbers. They are the coordinates of the life I’m now inhabiting, and I am trying - with uneven success - to make sense of what comes next, or whether “next” is even a useful frame right now.

What I know tonight is this: I am not interested in another relationship. Not now, not ever. The thought doesn’t produce wistfulness or longing or hope or excitement or curiosity; it produces something closer to nausea; I trusted my own judgment so completely, loved so wholeheartedly, and was so entirely wrong. Why would I ever hand that kind of power to another person again? Why would I put that much of myself out there a second time when this is the statistically likely outcome?

I just wanted one person. A companion. A partner for the long walk. That wasn’t an unreasonable thing to want. But I couldn’t even get that right.

So tonight I sit with it; the regret. The grief. The financial ruin still partly ahead of me. The camping trips that didn’t happen. The plans folded up and put away indefinitely.

The version of myself at thirteen, unbearably hopeful for a life with her, who had absolutely no idea.