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So, Seven Years After My Marriage Ended, Have I Learned Anything?
The official date of divorce (I.e. the legal side) of my first marriage is somewhere around early July, so I’ll be sure to celebrate that with another post whenever it dawns this summer. March 4, 2017 represented the final nail in the final coffins of that relationship, which had begun around July of 2009, including a marriage (165-person wedding, to boot!) in March 2013. I sometimes feel guilty about all the people who attended that wedding and then we didn’t even make it five years, but eh, it was an OK party, so I think they mostly had a good night.
March 4, 2017 was mostly on me, and by that I mean I did P90X in the morning, then went and got drunk at various places around #fortworth, stumbled around, met my friend Wesley Selman — newly-married himself these days, congrats! — near the end of the night (read: 8pm) at a bar by my house, knocked over a full beer onto myself, etc. I have spent many nights of my life wondering why exactly that day unfolded that way, and honestly, I cannot give you a fully-conclusive answer. A few weeks before that, on President’s Day of 2017, my ex and I were walking around doing stuff and things seemed OK. In reality, I think we were truly done years before and just hanging on, and March 4 of 2017 was just the final strike. That’s sometimes hard to say (less so with time), but it’s true.
We were honestly probably done around December 26, 2016 at a stoplight in Miami.
So, it’s been seven years. What have I learned, exactly? Can anything apply to work, per SE? I’ll keep this simple and go “three up, three down” because there’s nothing Americans like more than reducing very-complicated situations like the Demise of a long-term relationship into bullet points.
A con: You learn that most relationships are ultimately fleeting
I don’t mean marriages here, because ideally marriages would be long-term. I mean that most of your life is chapters. Even if you end up with one person for 50+ years, you’ll still have different friend groups across those decades based on where you live, the age of your possible children, where you work, your neighborhood’s shifting dynamics, etc. Most people are…
