Untangling my character from the character of the marriage

Next Wednesday would have been our 20th wedding anniversary.  Yesterday a colleague mentioned our supervisor had been up late drinking the night before celebrating their 20th anniversary which made me think of my own and look up what day of the week it fell on.  Maybe my low energy is also my body feeling that.

Twenty years would have been a milestone.  I guess it still is even if we didn't quite make it.  We went through a lot of life's ups and downs together over a lot of years.  

I'm really sad he was willing to walk away from that without even trying to make it work first.

I grew up in a family that demonstrated the values of commitment and marriage.  I saw firsthand (I realize from an outsider's perspective) examples of the rewards that come with sticking together through the good and the bad.  And although a dream of getting married wasn't ever pushed on me and I'm not sure it even was a dream of mine, the values of honoring that commitment, if I so chose to get married were a measure of my character.

I got married as a barely adult.  I had just graduated from college.  I grew into my identity as an adult in the context of this marriage which I think has made it especially hard to untangle.  So what if my struggle today is really about untangling my character from the character of the marriage?

There was a time I was proud to share his last name and was proud to stand next to him.  I thought we were aligned.  I thought we both wanted the same thing.  I thought our characters complimented one another.  

But what he demonstrated last year is that we aren't as aligned as I thought.  After what he did and how he treated me last year, I was ashamed to carry his last name.  One of the women in admin at work commented that she has never seen someone change their name so fast.

Maybe the name was a visual representation of the struggle of untangling my character from that of his and our marriage.