If Divorce Is This Hard, Maybe I Should Have Stayed Married

Why wanting to go back keeps you stuck in pain

“If divorce is so hard, maybe I should have just stayed married”. 

So many people who initiate their divorces ask this question when they are a year or more down the road.

I know this feeling well.

I knew that my marriage was no longer sustainable. I knew that staying was going to be painful. And yet, once I was divorced and the pain truly hit me, I couldn’t help but wonder if I should have just stayed and taken that misery over the misery I was feeling now.

It's an incredibly painful paradox.

I initiated the separation because we were both so unhappy. But I was unhappy now too, so maybe I should have just stayed.

This was the illusion I was falling into.

I was believing that I could somehow control what my ex-spouse wanted or how he behaved. I was looking backwards and imagining that if I had made different decisions, somehow the outcome would have been different.

I also started to believe that perhaps I had made a huge mistake. That maybe I had chosen the wrong path.

But I hadn’t.

I had chosen this path for good reason. And now that the pain had arrived, I wanted to go backwards. I wanted to turn back time so I could revisit the mythical place that was the “happier times.”

But the happier times had died. That was why the marriage had felt so painful.

The death of the relationship had already happened. But I was in denial of that. I denied it to myself because the grief of the reality was too much to bear.

Anyone who has experienced the end of a marriage knows that it doesn’t happen overnight. It slowly declines over many years. There were years in which I went through periods of being able to bury things down, or deny things were happening, because the reality of facing the separation was too overwhelming and I simply wasn’t ready.

I knew it was going to be a shock to leave. I knew that it was going to take a herculean effort to leave the comfort and safety of a marriage and branch out into a life that was completely unknown.

So when I finally made that decision, the bottom line was, I was ready.

Not consciously ready. But something in me told me unequivocally that I had to get out.

And then, one year, two years down the track, when the pain of divorce simply wasn’t leaving, I started to second-guess myself.

Questions arose like, “Hang on, shouldn’t I be over this by now? If I still feel this confused and in pain, maybe I should never have left my marriage in the first place.”

This was the pivotal point. The time when I needed to begin the process of truly letting go of what was.

It wasn’t that I was physically going back and asking my ex-spouse to get back together. No. I tormented myself with imagining it. With wondering. But I never actually got anywhere.

It was a type of emotional hell. Spinning my wheels, panicking, looking for an escape route when there actually wasn’t one.

This was reality, plain and simple. And now was the work that needed to be done in me. I had the time and I had the space. Here it was. What I wanted.

This space was for healing. For coming to terms with all that I needed to face. Not just my ex-husband's shortcomings, but my own.

It was terrifying.

I had to sit with the fact that a relationship could not fix or fulfil needs in me that I didn’t even know that I had myself.

There was no denying that I had changed. I didn’t recognise myself, and that was a destabilising realisation.

Rather than face that, my brain and nervous system wanted to reach back for the familiar. To believe that I could control the outcome by simply going back in time and undoing this pain.

Looking back, I can see that this was a normal human coping strategy. I was fantasising about not being in this god awful emotional predicament. I was trying to find a way to control the outcome again instead of facing what had to be faced.

I hadn’t been ready to do this. And I think that’s why I stayed stuck in the pain, the confusion and the illusion of control.

Eventually, I became ready to start the process of letting go and accepting what was instead of trying to change it. 

Is it an easy process? No.

How long will it take? There’s no set timeline.

It requires faith in yourself, belief in yourself and a huge amount of courage. But the life on the other side is worth it.

Imagine it.

You’re free. You’re clear that you’re exactly where you need to be. You accept your part in where you are today. You don’t need to blame your ex to feel justified and you’ve worked your way through unnecessary guilt.

You’re ready to rebuild a life that feels good. You feel optimistic that there are still good things to come. You don’t need a relationship or a specific set of circumstances to feel that life can be worthwhile again.

You can be alone without feeling like your life is empty.

You can wake up in the morning and not immediately think about what happened, what anyone else is doing with their lives, or whether you made the right decision.

You can stop looking backwards and start making decisions based on the life you actually want, rather than trying to repair the life you lost.

And you can get to a place where the grief is no longer running your life. It may still be there. You may still have days when something catches you off guard. But it no longer has the same power over you.

That’s what you’re working towards when you're in the thick of it thinking “I can’t do this. I don’t want to feel like this anymore. I just want something to make the pain stop.”

I understand that.

And this is why I believe it is so important not to rush to fill the void. Not to immediately find another relationship, another distraction, or another version of the life you had before.

There is something you need to find in this space.

It’s not one clear pathway. Sometimes you will stumble in the dark. Sometimes you will wonder if you are getting anywhere at all.

But if you stay with it, you’ll know that you’re moving in the right direction.

And that will always be enough.

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