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The Road Not Taken
Beyond staying, or leaving, I can’t help wondering if there were a third choice.
I loved my husband from the moment we found each other until the moment I walked out the door. But he did not love me in any sense, and I could not give up my desire to be loved. After thirty years, I could no longer bear the weight of my disappointment, and I thought that ending things conclusively was the right thing to do.
I closed that door — but, being of sound mind and body, reasonably attractive, and “interested,” I hoped to find someone terrific waiting for me on the other side. In the past several years I’ve met half-a-dozen interesting men, all of whom were catastrophically flawed and none of whom were at all interested in loving me. So, the thing I was searching for in my long marriage remains elusive.
In contrast, two months after we said goodbye, my ex met and moved in with the woman he would marry only a few months after our divorce — and I remain alone. Recently, I’ve been thinking that I/we might have handled the situation quite differently.
My friend Mimi left her husband of thirty-four years, loaded up her Subaru Outback, and drove from Colorado Springs to Missoula. Within a week, she’d lucked into a great studio apartment. As she settled into her new life, her husband called her…
