How I Told My Wife I Didn’t Love Her Anymore
I remember that chilly mid-November Sunday morning in 2017 like it just happened a few days ago.
I had just come off of a month and a half of constant work on my business. Between the middle of September and the middle of November, we make the vast majority of our annual profit. It’s constant work for me, and I rarely have a moment to decompress. Once I can finally sit down and take a breath, 60 days of emotions and mental garbage all come out at once.
My wife and I were sitting on our living room couch. Chip and Joanna were Fixer Uppering on HGTV, and the kids were crafting on the kitchen table.
While I was staring at the TV and sipping coffee, my thoughts were elsewhere.
The beginning of the end
We had been married for about six years at this point. From the outside, it looked like we had a really fantastic marriage with an outside image of family life plucked right out of a Norman Rockwell painting.
We never fought. We were active in the community. I, a business owner, was able to stay at home with the kids while she, a government contractor, worked the normal 9–5.
Remember the parable of how to boil a frog?
You can’t just boil some water and toss a frog in there. He will jump right out!
What you do is put a frog in some cool water. Make it comfy in there. Then you turn the heat on. By the time the frog understands he’s being cooked, it’ll be too late.
You see, a few years earlier – I can’t even tell you when because it was so subtle in its initial appearance – my in-love feelings for my wife began to wane. It was so very slight, I didn’t even notice it.
Other people close to me did, though. My business partner would comment on how grossly different I was around my wife. I wasn’t myself. I was reserved, tense, and disconnected every time she came to hang out in my office.
As the months and years progressed, I found myself regularly sitting in my car after a long day of work at the top of the hill leading to my house, pulled over on the side of the road, sipping a drink, playing a game, or just… sitting.
Like I said before, we never fought. In therapy, I learned that, in order to fight, you have to feel strongly about something or about someone – intense love or hate will take you to the brink of sanity and will cause your voice to rise and the anger to take over.
I was ambivalent. I was more alone sitting beside her on the couch sipping coffee than I was alone, in my car, listening to a Bill Bryson book on the anatomy and inner workings of the human cell.
I also found myself falling into a pretty strong sleeping pill and alcohol habit. It’s easy to buy Ambien online for cheap. It’s also easy to mix an Ambien with Captain Morgan and forget the 12 hours between 6 pm and 6 am. I would go through that big handle of Captain Morgan in a few days, popping Ambien like tic-tacs.
Before this fateful November day, I had gone through a 120-pack of Dark Web Ambien in less than two months.
And then, I broke
Chip was being crazy, wacky Chip, and Joanna was trying to reign him in. The deadline was quickly approaching. What, oh what, was going to happen?
This same storyline happens in every episode, every time. I spent the past two hour-long episodes with my brain screaming at itself, the ramblings of a depressed and ambivalent being.
You never know when the break will come. My breaking moment came that chilly November morning, right in front of Chip and Joanna.
“We need to talk.”
The next two hours are a blur. Once the words “I’m not in love with you anymore” came out of my mouth, I had passed the point of no return. My future from that moment on was forever changed, so I might as well not hold back. I verbally vomited two years’ worth of pent-up feelings.
My words didn’t come out in anger. They weren’t hurtful. They weren’t insulting. My words were true and real, from my heart. They were careful, as words have such intense power, but they were honest.
I told her how much I cared deeply for her, about how much I loved our family and wanted nothing but the best for all of us. “All of us” included me, though, and I was in a really bad spot.
I told her how much I valued her and our teamwork as a couple, but romantic love just wasn’t part of that equation for me anymore – it hadn’t been for a couple of years at least… maybe longer.
“I’m not sure I ever loved you in the way you deserve to be loved.”
I told her that it was 100% my fault, not hers. I told her that I would continue to support her and our family in all the ways a dad should. I told her that I wanted us to continue to be the loving and supportive family that we had always been.
In short, I feel I am a good man and a good father. I was there for her and I always would be – I just wanted to be happy.
Now what?
Telling my kids I was leaving was the worst day of my life. It took me a couple of attempts.
After the first failed attempt, my wife and I ended up holding each other crumpled and broken on the floor, both of us wailing and crying like I never had before and hope to never again.
It wasn’t until June of 2018 before I moved out. I needed to be OK with the idea of them being OK without me there. We needed to go through therapy to iron things out.
This was, without a doubt, the biggest failure I had ever endured – the failure of my family. I needed to digest that. I needed forgiveness and permission from my soon-to-be ex to let me walk down our pathway one last time. I needed to know my kids would be ok.
Our long talks and therapy sessions continued after I left. I learned a lot about myself. I learned about relationship “science,” and how maintaining a great relationship with her was the highest priority for our kids.
I learned that kids from divorced parents who maintain a loving relationship are no better or worse off than kids with married who love one another deeply. So, maintaining that relationship was now our greatest goal.
If there’s one running value I’ve kept during all of my 40+ years on this earth, it’s my refusal to tolerate and live with situations I find unacceptable. If something is just plain wrong to me, I’ll gather every tool I have at my disposal to correct it or eject it from my life.
I couldn’t imagine living the next 40 years feeling the way I did. It was the hardest thing I have ever done, but it had to happen.
Today, our relationship remains strong. I am remarried to someone who makes me feel like I have always dreamed of feeling.
When my girls were born, my whole idea of what love actually was changed in an instant. When I fell in love with my current wife, she completely changed my perception of romantic love and just how deep that love could go. I sometimes fear loving even deeper because my heart may literally swell out of my chest and explode.
Can you love someone to death?
My ex comes over for dinner periodically. She’ll sit and hang out when she brings the girls over or picks them up. I love her much more as my parental partner and friend than I ever did with her as my wife.
I still struggle with forgiving myself for the failure of our marriage. It’s something I’ll likely carry with me for the rest of my life.
However, after 40+ years of life, I can finally say I am happy.
Thanks Chip and Joanna!
