I’ll Take One Divorce Hold the Drama

Oh wait, I already ordered that side

“You’re never going to win Colleen,” says my husband.

“If you think there’s winning and losing in love,” I say. “You’ve already lost.”

I think this is our drama. This type of absurd declaration amidst the introduction of escalated voices, ugly words, and my husband’s boy-like misbehaving antics.

I think leaving our marriage will discard it.

But I will soon have a pivotal realization.

We are both intent on different things just as we had been in marriage. I had remained past our shelf life. The way couples do when they resist their demise for too long. When we turn into unwanted caricatures of ourselves.

You know the drill.

I beg my husband to care, to go to counseling, to stop upsetting our children and me. He ignores me, walks out of the room, refuses to address the problems, there’s momentary calm…and then the cycle resumes. It’s exhausting.

But not as exhausting as the divorce drama will prove.

We continue to play our individual roles.

Again, intent on different things. And they play out the same way, without resolution. I continue to be me. He continues to be him. And because he views relationships as winning and losing he becomes an even bigger distortion of who he already is.

I surrender just as I had many times throughout our marriage. Divorce is not something I choose, it’s the unfortunate result of exhausting all of my options. I am waving the white flag. There’s nothing joyful about giving up. It doesn’t feel good to lose someone you value.

I just want a chance to begin again and heal.

I own the mistakes I made, the loss of self, the better parts of me.

I want my children and me in a healthier environment. I understand it will take time to heal from my naive emotional investment in a failing relationship. That my determination to save my family actually came at a cost to my beautiful babies.

My husband continues in battle. He is as unrelenting in divorce as he had been in marriage. There will be no negotiation. Things will be handled the way he deems. It’s a war and in combat, there’s always a winner and a loser. And the winner takes all. They get all of the riches.

He’s not interested in new beginnings.

He’s intent on punishing and hanging on to an old relationship.

What makes our marriage not work, in turn, hinders our divorce. We are two completely different people. I may have hated myself for mistakes I made when he began drinking and our marriage faltered but before that, he was always my priority. And I was never his. He was nothing but selfish.

Something one of his family members once told me about him. At the time, I found it difficult to believe because while he absolutely had a history of hurting me, I continued to see the best in him.

She urged me to protect myself. I should have listened. The degree of selfishness and self-absorption impacted our children even more in divorce.

I shake my head when I see articles about how to divorce without drama. This isn’t possible for many of us. We aren’t leaving mature, confident, egoless adults. We are freeing ourselves from some of the most difficult personalities you will encounter.

The non-negotiators, the child-like, the spoiled, the selfish, the unyielding, and for some of us empathy lacking.

Individuals who believe the world revolves around them.

That will create drama.

Because every good battle demands someone to be destroyed.