Forgiveness

I believe in the power of forgiveness.  And I don't mean any power given to the recipient.  I'm talking about the positive impact on the person granting forgiveness.  I should be clear here that I'm not talking about a decision to let a person back into your life.  That's completely separate from forgiveness.  A decision to let someone back into your life requires participation from the other person to repair the relationship.  You can forgive someone without their participation and decide to move on with your life without them.

So forgiveness has been my end goal.  I want to ultimately walk away from this marriage holding onto no grudges, resentments, or hard feelings.  So as I spend time processing my grief, I'm paying attention to specifically where I hold hard feelings to know where I need to release them.  (And maybe this would be a good place to point out that the process is not linear - I might think I have moved past one thing only to have it resurface later.  So it is an ongoing process.)

One area of hard feelings is in the way he didn't show up in the marriage - the lack of investment in us, the lack of communication, the conflict avoidance, the focus on my flaws without any self-reflection into his role, etc.  This is the easiest part to forgive.  I had already accepted this was who he was.  His mom (and maybe even dad to a certain extend) really messed him up in childhood and continues to feed into a toxic dynamic to this day.  That doesn't excuse his behavior.  He is an adult in his 40s.  He has had plenty of time to heal from those wounds so that he doesn't harm others with his behaviors.  But I have empathy for the hard start to his life.  And I play a role in accepting these behaviors and I played my own role in those dynamics.

The more challenging area of hard feelings though rests on how he behaved specifically last year.  In the spring we were making all kinds of future plans - planing vacations together, trading in his car, discussing retirement plans, etc.  I was participating in these conversations with the belief that we were doing well as a couple and going to stay together.  He was participating in these conversations knowing he already had one foot out the door.  The lack of transparency and the active participation in deceiving me is so painful.  He didn't even care enough about me to find a way to give me a heads up.

And then when it happened, it happened so fast because he had already processed his emotions, made is decision and likely planned logistics out for himself.  So I was lost in a whirlwind of processing my emotions and figuring out logistics in a very short time.  It felt so incredibly unfair.

And then to make it all worse, although he was working with a therapist, he hadn't even made it a priority to figure out how to communicate with me why he was leaving.  To this day, I have no clue what his actual reasons were.  I can guess based on what I know about him but they don't answer the question as to what happened specifically in 2024 and what specifically was in his mind when he suddenly (from my perspective) felt the need to ditch his spouse of almost two decades.

It's the lying, deception, and abrupt discard that all happened in 2024 that felt so incredibly cruel and is a lot harder to process and forgive as this was all coming from the man I had believed loved me.