Here's the thing nobody tells you about leaving a long marriage in your late forties: you get your face back.
Not in a Botox way. In an "I haven't been slowly disappearing to keep the peace" way.
I had been married for twenty years. I don't think I realized how much of myself I had quietly put in a drawer somewhere until I came home after signing the paperwork and the house was mine. Just mine. The first thing I did was move the couch. It had been in the wrong spot for fifteen years. I had mentioned it maybe thirty times. Every time, there was a conversation. Every time, the couch stayed where it was.
I moved it in twenty minutes. Alone. It took about a tenth of the energy it had taken to have the conversations.
That's what nobody tells you. The weight doesn't come off all at once. It comes off in very small, very stupid increments. The couch. The music in the kitchen. The lighting. The groceries, in particular.
My grocery cart used to be 90% things other people liked. I didn't even realize I was doing it. A specific cheese I thought was fine. Cereal I didn't eat. A particular bread that had been on the list for so long that I don't think either of us even ate it anymore. I stood in the bread aisle about three weeks after the divorce, and I put back the bread, and I felt like I had gotten away with something.
Then there was the other thing, and I've been trying to find a non-pretentious word for this and I can't. I stopped drying out. That's the only way I can describe it. I had been married for two decades and I had slowly become a woman who walked into a room and diagnosed what was wrong. After the divorce, I walked into my own rooms and there was nothing to diagnose. Nobody was about to be annoyed. Nobody was about to need a thing. And my face — and this is the part nobody wants to hear — came back.
The lighting in my kitchen is different now. My posture is different. I laugh like I did when I was thirty-two. I stopped sleeping on one side of the bed. I started sleeping in the middle, like a golden retriever. I look better. I am told this, frequently, by the kind of people who used to tell me I looked tired.
Now. I know how this sounds. I know it sounds like a woman who is simplifying. It is possible he didn't want me to get older and I noticed. It is possible we were both exhausted and we both stopped being the person the other one fell in love with. It is possible I was doing some of this to myself. I'm not writing the definitive marriage post. I'm writing the post that nobody else is writing, which is the one where the divorce was — in every practical, superficial, visible sense — a great skincare routine.
Here's what I want to say to the women reading this at the fifteen-year mark, drinking wine at 10pm in the kitchen they don't like, about to close the laptop and go to bed angry:
I'm not telling you to leave. I'm telling you that if you do leave, you are not going to fall apart. You are going to move your own couch. You are going to buy bread you actually eat. You are going to stand in your kitchen in October with the window open and the aspens turning and you are going to think: oh, there I am.
And the hot tub. Reader, keep the hot tub.