I Want to Shout One Thing From the Relationship Mountaintop

Don’t lose yourself to someone who won’t care enough to find you

When our marital problems began I noticed my husband’s hair began to thin out. He was only 42 and I knew instinctively it was from the stress. I was fed up with his bad behavior and ready to leave. But I cared enough to try once I realized this.

My husband didn’t notice my subtle changes.

How I no longer got great joy out of making a big homemade meal every night. Or how our photos piled up instead of being carefully chronicled in family albums.

I once asked our marriage counselor why nothing else about my life was a challenge. Why those two things? He said, “Colleen, it may be because those two things signified family to you.”

I think he was right but that’s a story for another time.

Of course, I went on to lose much more of myself.

The deep core of who I was.

My husband never noticed. At first, it appeared he was trying to win me back. He wanted to make up for some of the past. I fell for it. But it wasn’t about me. It was about his version of winning and losing. It was about staying married.

My husband believed divorce was a failure.

I am always quick to correct people who have that mentality.

Most people do not choose divorce. It’s the unfortunate result of exhausting all of your options. I prayed for my marriage to survive and thrive. I cut back our commitments and prioritized our time together and our time as a family.

I like to say, “I beat the horse, turned it over, then beat it again.”

Or as my friend once said, “Colleen, no person has tried harder than you to save their marriage.”

I’m not an anomaly.

I’m a part of a large contingent of overly caring people who attach themselves to someone who will never have the ability to truly care about them.

Instead, we live a romantic illusion.

And even when our truth exposes itself, we can get sucked back in.

I knew at 40 that I needed to leave my husband. Even worse, it was the second time I had the strong conviction to do so. But seeing a physical manifestation of his stress made me believe he somehow cared.

I was wrong.

“Don’t lose yourself to someone who won’t care enough to find you.”

—Colleen Sheehy Orme

To be clear my husband did care about something. It just wasn’t me. It was the picture of his life. The worldview of what he had assembled. The successful man. The career, the family, and the assets.

I missed a clue when he originally wanted to get engaged.

I wasn’t in a hurry to get married.

I wanted to wait. He gave me an ultimatum. Either we get engaged or he was moving on. I should never have given in to an ultimatum. We had dated for more than four years and I thought maybe I was being unreasonable.

But this is the crimson flag and I paraphrase his words from back then.

“This is what you do,” he said. “We’re out of college, I’m years into my career, this is the next step it’s time to get married.”

If only I had gotten married when I was older. Maybe it would have been more obvious to me. Or maybe not. My 24-year-old self couldn’t see beyond the tall handsome drink of water I met in college. The fun life of the party guy.

No one told me don’t lose myself to someone who won’t care enough to find me.

But I cared too much about him to ever listen to those words.

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