I want to take a sec to remind my readers that there are three sides to this divorce story.
My side.
His side.
And what really happened. (Which is likely somewhere in between the two.)
This is my side of things.
I don’t wish Wasband any ill will. I want him to be happy. And I do not intend to besmirch his name. He is an excellent father to our children, he just isn’t the guy for me. Ya know?
We were babies when Wasband and I got together. I was 24 and he was 19. Our brains weren’t even fully developed, when we made the choice to be a couple. I was the only woman he had ever been with at the time we separated.
The divorce was no great surprise on my end.
I had been begging for two years for change. I had major needs that weren’t being met. And I felt cold and alone in my marriage. I wrote letters, I argued, I bargained. He never wanted to go on dates. I would suggest an activity, and he would go with one of his friends instead.
He didn’t want to participate in family day trips. He went on exactly two vacations with us, which he hated. And he made sure everyone else was miserable. I don’t look back on either of those trips with fondness. I look back and feel embarrassed. Embarrassed that he was so rude to people that are important to me. Good people, that didn’t deserve his behavior.
In our 13 years together we never took a trip together without anyone else.
When we moved to a new town, he refused to find a new job there. He worked at Subway with a Master’s degree. I worked two jobs for over a year at one point to keep us afloat, and he refused to get a better job. He wouldn’t transfer to first-shift after we had kids. He worked 3p-11p for the entirety of our relationship, when I worked first-shift for the majority of it. We never saw each other. He didn’t care. When he finally did get a better job, he made sure it was in the same town we had agreed to move away from. Still on second-shift.
The fact that he now willingly and happily does these things for his girlfriend, tells me that it wasn’t that he isn’t capable of doing them. He just didn’t want to do them for me.
He never fully joined me in our relationship, but got pissed off when it imploded.
It’s taken me a long time to realize that we were pretty much doomed from the start. There were issues from the beginning. I’m a big spender. He is controlling. We were two imperfect-as-fuck people who just wouldn’t let go. Sometimes I suspect that he still hasn’t.
This divorce was not his idea.
As our relationship deteriorated, he got paranoid that I was cheating on him. I never left the house without my children. During the day I looked after extra children. I was almost always home. I rarely visited friends. My time away was when he kept the kids while I ran errands. He baselessly accused me of cheating for over two years. He continued to accuse me after we graduated couples counseling. I snapped. I wanted out. But I didn’t know how to get out. I was pissed off that he kept accusing me of something I wasn’t doing.
So, I sent a guy some nudes, and nuked my marriage in the process.
Sometimes it feels like he’s still clinging to the remnants of what we had. He still tries to exercise control where he can’t. He asks mutual friends inappropriate questions about my personal life. And he reads my blog posts, and tries to use my words against me. His girl is so insecure that she listened to my podcast, and stalked my Instagram.
There are times, when I assume his heart is hurting, that he likes to lash out and say the things he knows will hurt me. He has told me that I am a bad mother, he accuses me of untrue things, he unleashes all the anger he has ever felt in his life on me in those moments, and he holds my mistake against me. But he has never taken accountability for the terror he has inflicted on me with his words or for his share of the responsibility for our marriage crumbling. He has never apologized for digitally stalking me, and causing me extreme debilitating anxiety with his actions.
Flashback to our wedding day…
The day of our wedding he showed up late, because of a groomsmen being a dumb fuck. He was a dick the entire time we took pictures. He spent his time during our reception getting wasted with his childhood friends. The next day we arranged a brunch for all of our out of town family that we never see. He ditched me there to take the dumb fuck I mentioned earlier home. I ended up waiting in the parking lot of the restaurant for like 45 minutes after everyone else had left. When he got there he was mean to me. Like it was my fault he had been inconvenienced. That was the first time I thought about divorcing him.
The downfall of our marriage and divorce doesn’t fall squarely on my shoulders. We both killed it. Many times. Over and over again. It wasn’t one mistake I made that broke us. There were a hundred little deaths. It was dead a long time before we acknowledged that it died.
Our divorce was final this past summer. We’ve both moved on with new people who are a better match. We are rebuilding our lives. Hopefully his wounded ego catches up soon.
