The Worst Part of My Decision to End My Marriage
By: Vanessa Torre
Tags: Relationships, Divorce, Money, Life Lessons, Marriage

The Worst Part of My Decision to End My Marriage

One thing still makes me cringe when I think about it.

Photo by cottonbro via Pexels

I didn’t take my decision to end my marriage lightly. It was the most painful decision I have ever made. It’s a reckoning that ends with a thud so deep down in your heart that the sound serves only as a reminder of emptiness.

I knew, once I said the words, that my life would be incredibly different and my husband’s more so. The absence of another person in your home every day is a radical change that you can never prepare for.

I thought long and hard about what life would be like if I stayed and what it would be like if I left. The last thing I did in making my decision has stuck with me.

Before I asked my husband for a divorce I ran a complete financial analysis to ensure that I could actually afford to do it.

I went through all of our bills and looked at what I would be solely responsible for after the divorce. This included the mortgage on the house that I desperately wanted to keep as it’s been the home that my daughter has known most of her life.

I spent hours while my husband was asleep making spreadsheets with every scenario I could think of.

It’s smart and it sounds like solid financial planning to ensure that any major life decision you make is feasible in various ways. I’d have done the same with any other fork in the road I came to.

What nags at me, what makes me feel horrible, is what would I have done if I ran those numbers and it turned out divorce was not financially feasible?

Where would I be now? Would I still be in an unhappy marriage because financially it didn’t make any sense for me to end it? Would I have taken the risk anyway?

I also wonder how many people are out there that have gone through the same practice I did without having favorable results. How many people are slogging through something they know is wrong simply because ends won’t meet?

I hope I would have had the bravery and the tenacity to do what I needed to do anyway. Move forward and find the necessary solutions but I realize that the level of depression I felt at the time would have impacted my ability to do that.

Of course, the one thing I didn’t factor in was that four days after I asked for the divorce, my job would go out to bid and I would eventually lose it four months later. That was not part of my plan.

Yet, when the hammer dropped and I realized that the loss of the well paying job I had was going to have a significant impact on me, the idea of undoing what I had done never occurred to me.

That would have been easy. Simply going back to status quo with my soon-to-be ex-husband for financial reasons would have made sense financially but would only have made me miserable and prolonged the inevitable.

Life is not always ready for change at the same time we are. Life has a funny way of reminding us of that.

The first year after my divorce was difficult. The balancing of finances was hard and I was angry. I felt it was the universe getting back at me for being so cavalier with the financial safety I started out having.

I figured it out because I had to. You learn to live on less when the universe forces you to do so. You get creative fast. That necessity led me to write, something I never would have come back to had I stayed in my marriage.

I'm glad I didn’t know then what I would come to find out would happen. My happiness and my soul was worth the expense of worrying about the next job. It was worth struggling through a serious reduction in pay that came with the next job.

It taught me the value of my freedom and the ability to live my life so that I’m happy. You can’t fit that on a financial spreadsheet.

I like to think that had I known then what I know now, I would have made it work anyway. There’s always a way, it just requires us to do hard things. This applies to everything in life. The struggle isn’t the hard thing. Living a life that doesn’t feel like ours is much harder.