I had written recently about the possibility that I’d regret cutting ties with my friends back in Maine when Ex-Husband and I divorced.
It’s timely that this week Ex-Husband shot me a Facebook request, and I accepted.
It’s been quite an eye opening experience. I was thinking there’d be some residual feelings that would be stirred reading his updates, interacting with him. After all, we were together over 10 years. But nothing.
Working on the book, I’ve spent a lot of time recently immersed in journals and essays that I wrote in 2009, when we were first opening up our marriage.
First off, I am floored as I’m working on the book and recounting the story of everything that happened as I opened my former marriage by just how much was actually going on when it felt like at the time practically nothing at all was going on. At the time, I was so focused on the limitations there were – i.e., things like how slowly my relationship(s) were developing, how frustrated I was by online dating, how the best matches always seemed quite far away, whether this person or that person would open up to me physically/sexually or say “I love you” – and even more so for Ex-Husband’s love life, as he took rejection so hard and took it quite personally that it found him so long to find partners. Despite realizing their value at the time, I was having countless marvelous little experiences, some funny, some sad, some somewhere in between.
But even more surprising is how much I used to love him. As I step back into my emotional space of 2009, it’s incredible to think that I got to where I would leave him in 2011 (or technically that I got to the point where I told him I had gotten a separate checking account and wasn’t giving him any more money and he left). At one point, I loved the man, with the full force of my heart. I was completely devoted to him.
I think I was trying to love enough for both of us, but it only got us so far.
I’ve been sending out friend invites to some of the friends I’d turned from during the divorce, trying to stave off criticisms that I knew at that time I surely could not bear, seeing what comes of it.