I didn’t have much fight left in me.

I think about how fast it ended.  And at first my focus was on how quickly he could just discard me. But there’s a second piece to how quickly it ended. If I’m truly honest, I played a not so insignificant role. 

There was about 6 weeks during the first half of the summer where I kind of tried to hang on.  But early on in those six weeks I was realizing how little he was trying and how much he had allowed a negative cloud to distort his perceptions of me and our relationship and how little he was willing to reflect on the accuracy of those perceptions. 

So that night in mid-July, before he left for a two-week visit with his mind, I knew my fight was gone. I was done tolerating the way he was just stringing me along. My heart was breaking as I told him he either needed to sincerely work on the relationship or move on - that he couldn’t keep stringing me along. In that moment, if he had picked up the fight maybe I would have eventually found mine again. I wasn’t truly ready for it to end. I just knew that I couldn’t carry us alone anymore. 

So after I dropped him off at the airport that next morning, I started making my own plans. I moved out of the marital bedroom. I downloaded financial statements and asked him for copies of what I couldn’t access. I started to budget for myself. I started to think about how to divide things. I talked to an attorney so I knew my rights. 

When we ran into issues with how to value certain assets, I did the research to come up with a plan and by mid-August, we had sat down together and come to an agreement that only needed the review and drafting by our attorneys.  At one point, he asked me to help find an attorney we could use together. That’s the only thing I wouldn’t do. He had to find his own attorney and if he wanted this divorce, he had to file it. 

I made it easy for him. Because I had lost my fight. I was tired of trying to convince someone of my worth who refused to see it. Maybe I wasn’t so afraid to lose him anymore. 

I think back to how different this time was from the previous time we almost separated. It was in maybe 2016 or 2017.  He had developed an unrequited crush on his boss. We went through couples counseling then. I felt a desperation then that I didn’t feel this time. I was so afraid of losing him that I would do just about anything. In hindsight, I now realize that our counseling sessions were only focused on me and my faults with no reflection on his role in the dynamics.  And I think it was as things were unfolding last summer that I truly understood that. 

Even this last time, I would have worked things out with him but I wasn’t going to do it in a one-sided way. I knew I was worth more than that. Any effort I put in to our relationship at that point going forward was only going to be to match the energy he was putting in. 

And since he was willing to put exactly zero into the relationship, it disintegrated quickly. 

So maybe the speed at which it all happened speaks more to my growth than it does to his distance and immature discard.