As I began my healing journey last year, I remember many conversations with friends and family where I was adamant that I had not lost myself in the marriage. I truly believed I had maintained my own identity. But I have now realized how incredibly wrong I was about that. I suppose it was the very slow, subtle erasures that happened over decades that are hard to notice in the moment. And I was still very much in the moment last year. I did not yet have clarity.
On some level though, I started to question how much of me I might have lost as I discovered how hard it was to untangle what I knew he preferred with what I might actually want. It started with that first grocery store trip after I moved out - I got lost in the shelves of possibilities as I bought things I had never tried before. I remember the paralysis when I checked into my first Hilton property on their app and it asked me to select a room. I knew what room he would want but did I really know what I wanted? It continued as I tried out things like Improv and Hip Hop, two things I never could have imagined liking and found them to be so much fun.
And after a really enlightening moment in therapy last night, instead of making dinner at home, I grabbed my wallet and keys and walked to the restaurant next door. We rarely went out to eat together. It wasn't a priority for him. He wanted to spend his money on other things. I thought I agreed with him and made excuses about how it was more challenging with my dietary restrictions and that I wasn't a foodie. But in recent weeks, I have learned, I really like to go out to eat. So as I sat down last night with a glass of wine, I realized that I love sitting down at a restaurant, ordering both familiar and unfamiliar foods, getting a drink and sometimes even dessert, and being served by someone. (After I typed this paragraph, I went and adjusted my budget so I can feel less guilty about going out to eat!)
So what really made it all click was a conversation about a gray car that I had with my therapist yesterday evening.
My first brand new car, the first car we purchased for me during the marriage was a Suburu Forester. We bought it in about our second year of marriage. When we bought that Suburu, we test drove both a gold one and a gray one. The gold one had just a little higher sticker price. As we were sitting across the desk from the sales employee, without looking at me, my ex-husband said that we would take the gray one.
I hate gray. Of all the colors of cars that exist, it is the one I can't stand. So I spoke up. After an awkward pause, the sales person responded by saying he could give us the same deal on the gold one and so ultimately that is the one we purchased.
But over the almost two decades of our marriage, my ex-husband never let me forget that. He would remind me of the time I refused to buy a gray car and sometimes even referred to it as an "almost marriage-ending moment". It came across as a joke but in reality it wasn't funny at all.
As I told this story to my therapist, I just casually mentioned that I drive a gray car now. She stopped me and asked about that. I can honestly say until that moment, I had never thought about twice about the gray car parked in my parking garage.
We purchased this car in September of 2023 (not too many months after the May 2023 Hawaii trip which I'm starting to realize was an important turning point in our marriage). It came down to money and what he wanted to spend our money on. He didn't mind the color gray and so didn't want to spend extra money to upgrade it to another color. I didn't question it because I had just absorbed his priorities with money so I also thought it wasn't wise to spend an extra $1,000 even on a color I would enjoy. I rationalized it by saying we wouldn't keep the car long and I wouldn't drive it much.
My therapist then asked why I took this particular car in the divorce knowing I hated the color gray. I explained that both of our cars at that time were gray.
When we bought the other car in April of 2024, we again bought gray because he didn't want to spend the extra money on another color. Honestly, I was so exhausted from trying to slow him down when it came to trading in our cars, that I didn't have the energy to care much what color he chose.
I guess it is ironic that a gray car turned out to be the one that I will likely keep the longest, likely by a lot. I think his vehicle is white now.
I walked away from this marriage with the gray car I had never wanted in those first years because he had slowly convinced me that it wasn't worth speaking up for what I wanted. He slowly erased me until I accepted a gray car and then he left me.
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