because it is worth it!

Thank you 16:55, you nailed it. Hugs to you - I'm with you...

To refine what a PP wrote to make it accurate in my case: It's the public admission that the fact that, although you still love with the person you swore yourself to forever, and his family, and the life you thought you were going to have, and the dreams, and the future, and growing old together, you chose someone who could not love you the way you need to be loved. It's a blow to your ego that someone doesn't want you enough to change and deal with his mental health issues and addiction issues. For years and years, you thought if you just said or did the right thing, or begged enough, or pleaded enough, that he would. Slowly you realize he won't, and what's more, by this time you have two kids in therapy and they don't even know about the divorce yet.

It's the going to your in-laws' 50th anniversary party and watching the slide show and forgetting for a minute that verbal abuse leaves scars only on the soul, so you can look like the perfect happy couple in all those pictures and getting confused for a minute about what's real. It's about striding in two worlds - one where he's a pretty great guy sometimes and the other where your therapist is worried he is going to kill you when you tell him you want to separate. It's trying to reconcile two unreconcilable halves of the same whole. It's the dissolution of your life with someone else. It's the uncertainty of your (and your kids') future. You wonder if they will ever understand yet they they love him (heck, YOU love him), so you can't really tell them the truth. It's change.

Divorce is so many things happening at once. No matter how long you beat around the bush to get to it, it still hurts and causes anguish when you finally arrive at it. And then to have someone question your commitment, to question the hell you've been through, whether you really have done enough - well, that's almost enough to push you over the edge as you sit crying at your keyboard.

Because one of the most important decisions a person ever makes (who to marry) wound up in failure, no matter whose contributed most of the problems in the marriage. Nobody wants to think they failed at something this major.

It's hard because of the mixture of emotions - fear, anger, rejection, depression, anxiety, sometimes hate. Mix in exhaustion and you have a lethal cocktail.

It's also hard because of the way that our legal system encourages estranged spouses to villify each other on public record as a method of coercion, in order to gain a more favorable settlement.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I see divorce as an amputation of a limb. Two people become one for ever at marriage, and that can not be changed- just like you are one with your arm and leg. But sometimes, you need to cut that infected cancerous arm off or risk poisoning the whole body. It can be life-saving but it is very painful.

Agreed. And divorce should be as rare as that necessary procedure.

I think sometimes you think you are one, and it is your arm, but it is really a cancerous tumor, and you fight the tumor, and sometimes you get a clean cut and fast healing, and sometimes your ex is a total jerk, and you end up losing part of a functional limb because he or she drags out a custody dispute or seeks a lot of alimony. And sometimes you get the cancer surgery and some chemo and you heal and you move on, glad you dodged that bullet.

You people who get all teary eyed and romantic over marriage have a childlike view of the institution.

Anonymous wrote:I see divorce as an amputation of a limb. Two people become one for ever at marriage, and that can not be changed- just like you are one with your arm and leg. But sometimes, you need to cut that infected cancerous arm off or risk poisoning the whole body. It can be life-saving but it is very painful.

Agreed. And divorce should be as rare as that necessary procedure.