Divorce Doesn’t Change Someone

It exposes who they’ve been all along

During my divorce, I found out my husband kept an insurance policy on me but canceled his policy years before. The date of cancelation coincided with the time I was trying to separate from him. I had three children under sixteen and had anything happened we would have been homeless. This was the introduction of shock.

I found myself saying what I’ve heard others say when their marriage ends.

I’m divorcing a stranger. But was I?

The answer is no.

My husband was who he had always been. People’s personalities don’t change in divorce. They intensify. It’s one of the reasons badly behaving people get away with their antics. Their spouse doesn’t see it coming because they’ve convinced themselves they were married to someone else.

A person who would never behave that way.

Why do we believe our spouse has transformed into a stranger? An unidentifiable version of someone we once loved. It’s simple. We spent years accepting, tolerating, and making excuses for their bad behavior. In favor of opting to see the best in them.

We were loyal and devoted not recognizing it as enabling and denial.

Someone close to my husband once told me he’s a very selfish man. Three others told me he was an ass*ole. Another told me he had always been somewhat disconnected. At the time, I was shocked. I defended him. It was long before our marriage ended. But these people had known him many years more than I had.

We choose to see the best in those we love. I shouldn’t have been surprised by those comments. Looking back, I can’t believe I refused to see them. My husband was extraordinarily selfish, he just blamed it on being a busy man. He left me to do everything. For years, I paid the bills for our home, office, and investment properties. I took care of policies, mortgages, car purchases, household repairs, and our children. His one responsibility was to go back and forth to work. But the busy man had three and a half months off per year since he worked on the school calendar.

I was a brand new mother on bed rest for an entire month with a severe infection after birth. But two months later I was painting the walls of our home because he refused to. He would leave town for a week and never call home. He lived in his own world and did what he wanted to do. There are too many stories to tell.

And he was an ass*hole. He would make me cry for weeks on end if he disagreed with something I wanted or how I felt. There are too many stories to tell.

The average man isn’t comfortable repeatedly making a woman cry.

In divorce, my husband was a selfish ass*hole. He cheated me out of our savings and retirement and the correct amount of money I should have gotten in alimony by approximately seventy-five percent. Even though I quit my job to build a business with him in our twenties. He was emotionally and financially abusive. He put himself first above our own children.

Divorce didn’t change him.

It exposed him.

Nothing could’ve convinced me to deceive my husband in divorce. To lie, cheat, steal, or be calculating and manipulative to get what I want. It’s not in my nature.

It was his nature to put himself first.

I didn’t notice because I was busy putting him first too.

I didn’t divorce a stranger, I married one.

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