This week Sugar is offering her advice in a response to five letters.
Dear Sugar,
I’m a twenty-six-year-old woman who has been married for nine months. My husband is forty. His wedding proposal was terribly romantic, like something out of a movie starring Audrey Hepburn. He is kind and funny. I do love him. And yet…
He’s only the second person I’ve been in a serious relationship with. Throughout the wedding planning process I had second thoughts about settling down so young, but I didn’t want to hurt or embarrass him by calling off the wedding. There are so many experiences I fear I’ll miss out on by staying married to someone older. I want to apply for the Peace Corps, live all over the country, teach English in Japan, and yes, date other people. These are all things I was giving up when I said, “I do.” But it’s only hitting me now.
I feel stuck. I want to leave but I’m also terrified of hurting my husband, who has been so good to me and who I consider my best friend. Sugar, I’ve always played it safe: I picked the safe major, accepted the safe job, went ahead with the wedding. I’m terrified that leaving my husband will mean I finally have no excuse for why I’m not living the bold, experience-rich life I’ve always dreamed of.
Sugar, please help me.
Signed,
Playing it Safe
Dear Sugar,
I am a messed-up woman. I bear the scars of much emotional abuse, some physical abuse, and one sexual assault. I have an addictive personality, flirt with anorexia, OCD, and I don’t know what it’s like to live without the flush of adrenaline in my body from chronic stress. I’m vain, self-absorbed, depressed, angry, self-loathing, and lonely. Routinely.
I was raised to think I was a filthy person and God would only love me if I behaved. I mostly behaved. Then I met a man who told me God would love me anyway. I converted to fundamental Christianity and married the man. I was eighteen. That was seven years ago.
He is, for most intents and purposes, a good man. He means well and he loves me but he suffers from the faults of most young men in our religion: the head of household syndrome. I’m expected to be a certain way, so I am. He doesn’t realize he does this unless I tell him, and I’ve stopped bothering to tell him after so many years. But I am not really that person, and the longer we’re married the more trapped and broken I feel about burying the real me, the messed up person I already described. He knows all my scars, but as a Christian he doesn’t understand mental illness at all. He pleads with me to trust God more. He says if I just try harder, he knows I can get better. He says I have such potential.
I don’t blame him for my discontent (entirely). We were told we were too young to marry, but despite my own misgivings, I married to prove everyone wrong. We’re both incredibly stubborn. I thought if I could be the person I was supposed to be, I would make myself okay. I would be better. It was a lie I told myself.
I love him. He would never hurt me, and I don’t want to hurt him. But I don’t know how to stop this charade, how to heal, or how to make him understand. I spent a week in a psych ward for depression a few years ago because I just needed to put the brake on and knew that the only way to get through to him was something drastic: either I killed myself or I got help. I got help. However, the mask was back in place as soon as I was released, and my therapy was a joke. Nothing changed, and I feel myself reaching the breaking point again. I no longer have any urge to kill myself, and can recognize my own warning signs, but I do need a break. Pretending is tiring. My health has suffered over the past few months. We finally bought our first house, and most days I sit around it weeping.
I have thought of leaving so many times, but I don’t want to hurt him. He has worked hard to allow me to stay home (though we have no children). If I left, he would become a pariah in our church community, where we are currently leaders. I don’t want to do that to him. He does not believe in divorce, unless I cheated on him. I no longer know what I believe. I have tried talking about how I feel before, but we’re on two different planets. If I confronted him about how I feel now, he would feel betrayed by me, and I would feel horrible. He in the past has refused counseling, saying our/my life is great and we don’t need it, even if I do. My fear is that, as usual, if I say something, we seem better for a time, and the cycle continues. I am tired of the cycle.
Where is the line, Sugar? When you want the life you have to work but it doesn’t, and you aren’t sure it can, and when you want a completely different life, too, because human beings are complex and it’s never that simple, which way do you go? Do I stay and rub myself out until maybe I am the person I was always expected to be? Is this just what it means to be an adult? I never had a good example of a marriage until I was already married, in my in-laws, and we do not look like them. But could we, in time? How long do you try before you admit you will never be that person? I accept the responsibility for making such a mess of my life. It seems inevitable in hindsight. But that doesn’t get it cleaned up.
Thank you.
Signed,
Standing Still
Dear Sugar,
I am a woman in my late twenties who has dated the same guy for almost three years and lived with him for almost a year. All of my friends seem to be getting married and I feel as though I should be considering marriage, too. However, the thought of marrying my boyfriend makes me feel panicky and claustrophobic. He has mentioned once the possibility of us tying the knot, and I think he sensed I was not comfortable discussing it, so he didn’t mention it again.
I’ve not had many boyfriends—one steady relationship in high school, a few very short-lived relationships post-college, and now this one. My boyfriend is the sweetest person you will ever find, and we have some things in common, but I don’t feel like those few things are enough. I find myself fantasizing about dating other people. I find my respect for my boyfriend waning. I don’t know if this is a temporary feeling, or if this relationship is not meant to continue for the long term. I’m bored with him and I’m afraid I will get more bored as time goes on. I’m also afraid that there really is no one better out there for me, that I should be grateful for what I have, and that anyone I would be seriously interested in would be unlikely to be interested in me in the same way (seems to be the case, judging from experience). I hate feeling like I’m doing my boyfriend a disservice by not loving him as much as he loves me.
What do I do, Sugar? Thank you for your help.
Signed,
Claustrophobic
Dear Sugar,
I’m a woman living in limbo. Actually, it feels like hell. You see, I’ve been contemplating leaving my long-term relationship of ten years but I am in total paralysis. My husband loves me, adores me, worships the ground I walk upon—despite the fact that I am oftentimes distant, morose, and completely repulsed at the idea of having sex with him. Oh yeah, I also cheated on him.
A year and a half ago, a flirtatious dalliance with a co-worker turned into a tumultuous affair that created a shitstorm in my personal life and an aftermath of what seems like irreparable damage. To be fair, there’s a sizable litany of details about my marriage going back plenty of years, but I’ll give you the basics.
I met my husband almost ten years ago when I was in my early twenties. We got married after six years of dating because marriage was the next step. We’ve had our ups and downs, but my husband gave me stability, he was devoted to me, and I was convinced that nobody else could ever love me as deeply as he did. Having said that, if I were to be completely honest with myself, things never felt quite “right.” I know that looking at the fall-out of a relationship in hindsight isn’t usually helpful, but I have a shitload of woebegone journal entries to corroborate that feeling, so bear with me.
I’ve come to realize that I’m seriously incompatible with my husband. I’ve had to deal a lot with my anger and frustration towards him (because I feel we’re on totally different pages in our communication styles), as well as major issues with his drug use and how I view his masculinity and my own sexuality (we essentially stopped having regular sex two and a half years into our relationship). There has been enough contentment and comfort that I’ve been able to stay with him, which also has to do with my philosophy that marriage isn’t all puppies and rainbows, and it requires hard work and endurance.
There are other issues that have arisen during our marriage: I began to discover a community and creative passions I couldn’t share with him; my husband decided he wanted kids, even though I had already told him I didn’t; and I became his sole source of emotional support. In response to the mounting pressures of our relationship, I began to numb myself to the niggling sense that something was wrong. I immersed myself in anything and everything that would mean I didn’t have to face up to not being happy in my relationship—ranging from alcohol to spiritual retreats to drowning my sorrows in work.
A couple of years ago, I started to wonder if this was what I had to live with for the remainder of my life (and yes, we had had conversations about how to improve our sex life and the lack of passion/sense of stagnation in the past, but to little avail). I figured that if I felt numb, I still had plenty of intimacy stuff that needed to be worked through, and I needn’t make my relationship a theatre upon which to enact all my primal insecurities, fears, and daddy issues. All the same, the growing sense of desperation and loneliness kept rising.
Long story short, after close to eight years of being completely faithful to my husband, I met Mr. Trouble. He turned my life upside down. We had a whirlwind affair that introduced me to a passion and sensuality that I hadn’t even known existed. I eventually told my husband about the affair and I also told him that I didn’t know if I could remain married—not so I could run off with the new guy, mind you, because I always thought of him as merely a catalyst rather than someone I wanted to actually be with—because the affair had triggered an awakening within me. While the affair tore at my conscience, it made me feel like I had confirmation, at last, that I wasn’t crazy. There HAD been something missing in my marriage.
Of course, my husband was devastated. So was I. In the interest of making a fully informed decision and honoring him, we’ve been trying to patch things up for the last year and a half. We tried couples counseling and had a trial separation (neither was very helpful). I’ve been utterly confused and angry with myself; my heart has been detached and I’ve been unhappy for a long time. My husband has so many hopes for us, but unlike a lot of people who describe the fire in their marriage fizzling out after a few years, I can honestly say that there was never any fire between us. I never felt a truly soulful connection was there. There was never any passion or romance or chemistry—just a scared, confused twenty-two-year-old who was afraid of being alone and decided to stand by the first person who ever stuck around.
All of this is doubly complicated by my affair, which had a few false finishes but finally ended a few months ago. I used to think that I felt love for this other man, then that turned into obsession, and now I feel like I’m torn apart by withering hatred, and anger at myself for being taken in by someone who was obviously just using me. Getting over him has been a major trial for me because admitting that our relationship was just a lame sexual fling (even though it felt like so much more) would mean relegating myself to the fact that it wasn’t the clarion call I needed to figure out how I truly felt about my husband. It was just a cheap, unethical rendezvous with someone who had little interest in me beyond the sex.
My entire life has been ripped apart by this. On certain days, I feel strong and resolute; on others, I feel like a selfish, unfeeling cow who is incapable of truly loving someone. In following what I think is my intuition (leaving my husband), am I deluding myself and making the affair more significant than it actually was? Is it possible for me to have a life that feels fuller, has more feeling, and doesn’t force me to numb myself so much? And how can I possibly bear leaving, when that means I would absolutely break the heart of someone I love so much? More than anything, I wish I had it in me to learn to accept what happened and accept myself, as well as make sense of the whole mess, but I just keep spinning in that hamster wheel of indecision.
Signed,
Leaving a Marriage
Dear Sugar,
I have deep faith in what you write. Thank you. I’m having some trouble getting over some trouble. There are truly harrowing experiences that your readers share, through you, with us. This isn’t one of those. It’s simple trouble. Someone shared love with me (starting when we were twenty-one), and then he took it away (when we were thirty-four). It wasn’t always love, and we weren’t always aware, and towards the end, my partner and I slammed against a wall of (im)maturation, and we realized that skimming across the surface of our individual and shared issues would no longer cut it. After all these years, I thought we were getting there together. I was ready and excited to dig in and get to know ourselves more deeply and make plans for the future. I thought my partner was too.
I was wrong. He told me he’d been thinking that he needed to leave. And then he left.
So ever since reading your column Tiny Beautiful Things I’ve been thinking about that situation and about what I would tell twenty-year-old me about the relationship path she was about to get on. From the old side, the hurt side, the trying to understand what happened side, and the poisonous “when could I and should I have done something differently to prevent this from happening” side. I’m still trying to teach myself to unlove this man. But even to type that pushes bruises. It’s been a while, but I can still feel howling gales and crippling nostalgia and am mourning the future we never had.
And I still have a question about your column. I want to understand you because I think it could help me. I want to know why you don’t need a reason to leave someone you love. “Wanting to leave is enough.” Why is it enough, Sugar? Why can’t “the terms of the relationship change” from within? Why can’t you come to know yourself and be/get ready for love with the person you love?
Why couldn’t you? I think what happened with us must be like what happened to you, in some way, when you were in love with your first husband but weren’t ready to love one person, as you wrote about in your column Scared & Confused. Maybe my boyfriend was experiencing something like you did, and I am experiencing something like your ex-husband. Except you were so young; we were approaching middle age. You “didn’t want to stay with a man I loved anymore but I couldn’t bring myself to acknowledge what was so very obvious and so very true.”
But why? And what was true? I don’t sense it’s because you thought the next person would be better, would fix something or fill some hole in you. A person could careen from one partner to the next forever, avoiding self-accountability and chasing what ifs. Why was it obvious and true for you to choose to leave? And how did he feel about it? When is leaving the right thing to do, and when is it a failure? I think it would help me—the one left—to know.
I’m living my life day by day. It goes by, the past couple years. But among many shining truths of strength and resolve that I try to live out is one that keeps my heartsick and keeps me from living fully. I still love him. I feel like something horrible wrenched me from my life, and I split, and the real me is elsewhere, in a life shared with him where I trust and am loved and have this core of peace. I still ache to get back there, but I can’t find it. Some days I want to poster the damn telephone poles with my own picture. I’m trying to understand why he left me. I worry that if I don’t I’ll always be stuck looking for myself.
Signed,
Trying
Dear Women,
I chose to publish your letters together because placed alongside each other I think they tell a story complete enough that they answer themselves. Reading them, it occurred to me that allowing you to read what others in a similar situation are struggling with would be a sort of cure for what ails you, though of course I have something to say about them, too. As Trying noted in her letter, I struggled with these very questions mightily in my own life, when I was married to a good man whom I both loved and ached to leave. Your letters brought me back there, to the most painful era of my life.
There was nothing wrong with my ex-husband. He wasn’t perfect, but he was pretty close. I met him a month after I turned nineteen and I married him on a rash and romantic impulse a month before I turned twenty. He was passionate and smart and sensitive and handsome and absolutely crazy about me. I was crazy about him, too, though not absolutely. He was my best friend; my sweet lover; my guitar-strumming, political rabble-rousing, road-tripping side-kick; the co-proprietor of our vast and eclectic music and literature collection; and daddy to our two darling cats.
But there was in me an awful thing, from almost the very beginning: a tiny clear voice that would not, not matter what I did, stop saying go.
Go, even though you love him.
Go, even though he’s kind and faithful and dear to you.
Go, even though he’s your best friend and you’re his.
Go, even though you can’t imagine your life without him.
Go, even though he adores you and your leaving will devastate him.
Go, even though your friends will be disappointed or surprised or pissed off or all three.
Go, even though you once said you would stay.
Go, even though you’re afraid of being alone.
Go, even though you’re sure no one will ever love you as well as he does.
Go, even though there is nowhere to go.
Go, even though you don’t know exactly why you can’t stay.
Go, because you want to.
Because wanting to leave is enough.
Get a pen. Write that last sentence on your palm, sweet peas—all five of you. Then read it over and over again until your tears have washed it away.
Doing what one wants to do because one wants to do it is hard for a lot of people, but I think it’s particularly hard for women. We are, after all, the gender onto which a giant Here-to-Serve button has been eternally pinned. We’re expected to nurture and give by the very virtue of our femaleness, to consider other people’s feelings and needs before our own. I’m not opposed to those traits. The people I most admire are in fact nurturing and generous and considerate. Certainly, an ethical and evolved life entails a whole lot of doing things one doesn’t particularly want to do and not doing things one very much does, regardless of gender.
But an ethical and evolved life also entails telling the truth about oneself and living out that truth.
Leaving a relationship because you want to doesn’t exempt you from your obligation to be a decent human being. You can leave and still be a compassionate friend to your partner. Leaving because you want to doesn’t mean you pack your bags the moment there’s strife or struggle or uncertainty. It means that if you yearn to be free of a particular relationship and you feel that yearning lodged within you more firmly than any of the other competing and contrary yearnings are lodged, your desire to leave is not only valid, but probably the right thing to do. Even if someone you love is hurt by that.
Trying, in your letter you write that your trouble is simple, but I can see that your grief is extraordinary. I’m so sorry for that. I’m sorry you got your heart crushed. My inbox is full of emails from people who are suffering for similar reasons and there’s nothing I can do for you or for them but say there are better days ahead. Time will heal this wound, sweet pea. I know that for certain, though I also know that feels impossible to you right now. There is more love to be found and you’ll find it someday and everything you learned from your thirteen years with your former boyfriend will contribute to your ability to do it better next time around.
I don’t know why he left you. I can’t even properly answer your question about why I needed to leave my ex. I was tortured by this very question for years because I felt like such an ass for breaking his heart and I was so shattered I’d broken my own. I was too young to commit myself to one person. We weren’t as compatible as we initially seemed. I was driven by my writing and he begrudged my success in equal measure to his celebration of it. I wasn’t ready for long-term monogamy. He grew up upper middle class and I grew up poor and I couldn’t keep myself from resenting him for that. He was more politically correct in bed than I wanted him to be. My mother died and my stepfather stopped being a father to me and I was an orphan by the age of 22 and reeling in grief. I had biological father wounds and biological grandfather wounds and in order to heal them I needed fifty men and three good women to have sex with me.
All of these are reasons are true enough in their specificity, but they all boil down to the same thing: I had to leave. Because I wanted to. Just like Playing It Safe does and Standing Still does and Claustrophobic does and Leaving a Marriage does, even if they aren’t ready to do it yet. I know by their letters they each have their own lists and all those words on all of those lists boil down to one that says go.
I imagine that’s what it boiled down to for your former partner, too, Trying. That like me, he came to trust his truest truth, even though there were other truths running alongside it—such has his deep love for you. You ask: “Why can’t ‘the terms of the relationship change’ from within?” And my answer is that they can. In successful long-term relationships they usually do. But in order for that to work all parties involved must be willing and capable of making that change. And for some reason they sometimes aren’t, no matter how hard they try or wish to be able to.
I didn’t just up and walk out on my ex-husband one day. I desperately wanted to not want to leave. He knew I was ambivalent, in spite of my true love for him. I agonized in precisely the ways the women who wrote the four letters above are agonizing and I shared a fair piece of that struggle with my ex. I tried to be good. I tried to be bad. I was sad and scared and sick and self-sacrificing and ultimately self-destructive. I finally cheated on my former husband because I didn’t have the guts to tell him I wanted out. I loved him too much to make a clean break, so I botched the job and made it dirty instead.
The year or so I spent splitting up with him after I confessed my sexual dalliances was wall-to-wall pain. It wasn’t me against him. It was the two of us wrestling together neck-deep in the muckiest mud pit. Divorcing him is the most excruciating decision I’ve ever made. But it was the wisest one, too. And I wasn’t the only one whose life is better for it. He deserved the love of a woman who didn’t have the word go whispering like a deranged ghost in her ear.
While you’re probably in no mood to be philosophical about the devastation your boyfriend’s leaving has caused you, Trying, I think it’s worth saying that it’s far better to be alone and therefore open to new, more fulfilling love, than it is to be involved with someone who half wants out. If your former boyfriend didn’t ultimately love you the way you love him his leaving was a kindness that someday, far from now, you’ll be grateful for. And it’s a kindness that you, Playing It Safe, and you, Standing Still and you, Claustrophobic and you, Leaving a Marriage may just have to muster the courage to mete out. Even if that kindness delivers a fatal blow.
It wasn’t until I’d been married to Mr. Sugar a few years that I truly understood my first marriage. In loving him, I’ve come to see more clearly how and why I loved my first husband. My two marriages aren’t so different from each other, though there’s some sort of magic sparkle glue in the second that was missing in the first. Mr. Sugar and my ex have never met, but I’m certain if they did they’d get along swimmingly. They’re both good men with kind hearts and gentle souls. They both share my passions for books, the outdoors and lefty politics; they’re both working artists, in different fields. I argue with Mr. Sugar about the same amount as I did with my former husband, at a comparable velocity, about similar things. Others have praised both of my marriages as admirable; in each, I’ve been perceived as one half of a “great couple.” And in both marriages there have been struggles and sorrows that few know about and fewer still were and are capable of seeing or understanding. Mr. Sugar and I have been neck-deep together in the muckiest mud pit too. The only difference is that every time I’ve been down there with him I wasn’t fighting for my freedom and neither was he. In our nearly sixteen years together, I’ve never once thought the word go. I’ve only wrestled harder so I’d emerge dirty, but stronger, with him.
I didn’t want to stay with my ex-husband, not at my core, even though whole swaths of me did. And if there’s one thing I believe more than I believe anything else, it’s that you can’t fake the core. The truth that lives there will eventually win out. It’s a god we must obey, a force that brings us all inevitably to our knees. And because of it, I can only ask the four women who wrote to me with the same question: will you do it later or will you do it now?
Yours,
Sugar
113 responses
“Go…Because wanting to leave is enough.”
What terribly dangerous advice to give carte blanche. Though I’ve never been married myself, from what I’ve heard *every* marriage has moments where one or both parties want to leave. That’s life, that’s how it goes. But if everyone leaves because they want to, no marriage would last. No family would survive unbroken. Our words, our promises, our vows would all be rendered worthless. How sad. How dangerous.
What of committment? What of the beauty of that? What of the feeling of joy that comes from sticking to your promises, to working through the hard stuff (the REALLY hard stuff)? What of not hurting others just to buy yourself some temporary happiness? What of the joy of the struggle?
“Wanting to leave is enough.”
Thank you for this, Sugar.
Thank you Sugar. I’m struggling so hard with this very same question, and have for many, many years. The only difference being there are children involved, and wanting to leave doesn’t seem like a good enough reason when there are smaller hearts to break too.
((Hugs)) to all the letter writers. I have been on both ends of ‘go’. Trying; I promise that one day you will say to yourself “Wow, I didn’t think about him yesterday or today.”
Our Sugar is 100% correct. She may write like a motherfucker, but we all have to live every single day like a motherfucker. Believe it.
Yes, a thousand times yes. I have such issues with a world that has taught us that love is the end all and be all of everything. That if you have that and you’re not happy that you’re ungrateful. That there’s nothing more important than love.
But none of that is true. Life doesn’t begin or end with love. Yes, I think that it’s an important part of life. But sometimes, a lot more often than most people are willing to admit, it’s not the most important thing. Sometimes, there are other things that have to come before love, like yourself and your happiness.
Sugar, I agree that it’s a hard lesson to learn, but that in learning it and living it, you become a person who’s true to themselves. Thank you, once again, for a wonderful article.
YEE-OUCH! That’s what I thought when reading this. I’ve got to think on this one a bit. I bet you’ll get some push-back Sugar.
Oh Sugar. You are spot on, as usual.
It would be interesting to see someone with children describe or respond to this particular topic. I suspect it changes the situation drastically.
I’m about to get married. We’ve had our struggles too. My core says stay. I hope that doesn’t change. I wish the best to all of you. It’s true: your core knows.
Oh, Sugar. How do you do that? How do you pluck out the very thing that I am struggling with at this instant in a wonderful and confusing and crazy life?
I am deployed on a ship, far out to sea. One day the man I love very much (I can’t bring myself to put it in the past tense yet, try though I might) decided he wanted out, for no particular reason other than the fact that he did not want to make choices based on our relationship (we are both military). And it hurt. It still hurts. It has only been six days.
There is enough out here in the middle of the ocean to keep me busy. I didn’t know if there was enough to help me heal, though, Sugar, until I read this, tonight, after watch and before sleep.
And all I can say is thank you. Thank you so much, Sugar, for telling me what I didn’t want to hear but needed to–that this freedom is a gift, and someone someday will love me better and I will love him better because of this hurt. Thank you for making me cry and thank you for making me realize that there is a path, and it is in front of my feet.
An almost banal, overly sentimental situation.
A man and a woman in a relationship (for this instance I’ll use the “terms” man and woman only out of convenience, since they were not ready to accept these roles and play them properly or with dignity of adults.) They have everything to be happy, from outside it looks like a perfect idyll, and yet the relationship is as dysfunctional as it can be- at least on of them, the woman, knows that they are not happy, that she is not happy despite the man’s constant denial of the fact or rather his inability to notice what should be apparent to the eye of an outsider. Perhaps he IS happy after all, at least during the moments when everything’s quiet and things are going seemingly well. He is happy because she’s there, with him, he couldn’t have possible asked for more, and yet what troubles her is the awareness, the knowledge of the fact that his happiness is because of her, by the mere fact of her existence, and her proximity to him. This makes her extremely uncomfortable and restless, she realizes she does not want the responsibility of being the sole provider of someone’s happiness. Even if this someone is the man she loves more than anything in the world. Here is where the discrepancy lies. He’s content, does not want anything else, she’s trapped, feels burdened with the responsibility of being the reason of happiness she knows she cannot bear it anymore, especially when she knows that she no longer has or wishes to be giving anything any longer. One day she leaves.
He’s devastated. He’s lost, hurt and unhappy. One moment he has what seemed to be perfect happiness, the next moment everything is gone and the world he thought he knew is no longer the same… He doesn’t fully comprehend the fact, only notices the emptiness of the rooms and the cold spot in bed. She’s gone, miles away, and for the first time in a long while she realizes that she can breathe freely. She’s happy.
Another story
A man and a woman, apart. Separated because of the will of the woman, in the most painful manner ever possible to imagine. She runs away to a place where he won’t be able to reach her- halfway across the world, and only when she knows she’s beyond his reach, she finds herself finally at peace with herself and happy. She’s like to shove this happiness to his face, for he was the one to accuse her constantly for not wanting to be happy… “You just like being unhappy. That’s the only way you know how to be…” A statement that’s been haunting her for as long as she could remember, and perhaps her departure was partly because of this, and out of spite to prove him wrong, that no, she can be perfectly happy and content, that it IS possible to be ultimately happy, and that her source of happiness does not come from the outside, but lies within her.
“In our nearly sixteen years together, I’ve never once thought the word go. I’ve only wrestled harder so I’d emerge dirty, but stronger, with him.”
Yes, Sugar………exactly 🙂
Oh my. Your words are always pretty brilliant, but never have they spoken so directly to me when they were needed most. Thank you.
Lauri – I did it with a child as a factor. It makes it even harder and changes the equation and the bottom line is that we are all better off. It was difficult and ugly but I still put my daughter first and foremost in everything I did. Fourteen years later, her Dad is happily re-married. I am still happily un-married. Her step-mother has been supportive and nurturing to her. She has a baby brother she adores. I am the person I wanted to become. My daughter is well equipped to become the person that she wants to be. In the long run, the best gift I could give her was a well-adjusted, happy Mom.
No, one can’t fake the core. Or the fear that keeps some shackled to that core one is trying to fake.
Wise and encouraging, as always, Sugar.
I’ll probably be in the minority here, but I think that the response to this was a bit off. There are a lot of times in life that “because I want to” actually isn’t good enough and I think that causing such devastation is one of them.
The issue is that these people got themselves into a situation that there was no good way to get out of. What is very infrequently emphasized is that when you’re in a relationship, you have an obligation to your partner to make the best, most informed decision that you are capable of making. You have an obligation to know yourself and your motives before you do things that impact two lives very drastically. Once the decisions are made, there is no way easy or painless way to get out of them. And the person that will be most hurt is not you. There’s so much more emphasis on “doing what you want” than “figuring out why you want that”. And that’s unfortunate because it’s the latter that will help you sustain a good relationship. It’s the more stable of the two. Wants change all the time.
Doing what they thought they wanted at the time is what got all of these four women and one man into this mess. A mess that can only be cleaned up by leaving.
I was in a similar situation when I was 19 and with a child Lauri. Sure, I was young, but I had already been through a hell in my life that most people will never, thankfully, have to go through. My battlescars were deep, but they also made me stronger and more in tune with my needs than the average 19 year old. I had a great guy. My family loved him, my friends loved him. We were living together and engaged. He would literally do anything for me. I loved him, but the “go” was a whisper in my heart all the time. And yes, Sugar, you hit it dead on…there was a list of reasons, but ultimately, I just wanted to go and didn’t know how. And honestly, it wasn’t my daughter that kept me from leaving until I did…it was everything else. I thought I had it perfect and was I ever going to find someone to love me like that again? Because I knew that I was a good mother and he was a good father and my daughter would be okay whether I stayed or left. I knew we would share our parenting responsibilities and if he threw me a curve ball and didn’t want to, I knew I could do it on my own. So…Lauri…for me…Sugar’s response, the women’s letters, they don’t really change much when you have children. Children are always a factor, but if you’re a good parent, you know that children need love and support and they can get through a hell of a lot more than society gives them credit for when they have that. And children pick up on stress and unhappiness even before we adults admit to the stress and unhappiness. The answers, the questions, these things don’t change when you have children…people just use the children as an excuse. Is it better to stay when you want to go just because you have children? It’s not. Who is it better for? Children know…they truly KNOW when one parent just isn’t THERE…and that messes them up a hell of a lot more than taking them out of that situation does. So anyway….I left. I followed the “go” and I left. And eleven years later, I am now happily married (for six years) to my other half and the “go” has never once entered my core..even during our most horrible fights. My daughter: her father is still as present and responsible as he was when we were together. My hubby and I have two children together…and I found the person that I’m meant to be with. Ladies…you will find love and happiness. Best of luck to you all.
Thank you, Sugar. Reading this has made me understand, a little bit more, what happened in my last relationship, where I fought like a crazed banshee to make my boyfriend love me the way I wanted him to. I realize now that he never loved me that way in his core, even when he told me he did. I still ask “why?” and “was I not good enough?” but your letter makes it clear that it was never about that. I’ve been there, too, in a relationship with a good man who I nevertheless wanted to leave. I did and broke his heart. I still wonder if I did the right thing, but your letter says ‘yes.’ Thanks for helping me drop a puzzle piece into a hole that has been eating at me for years.
Oh, also, this post did make me wonder if the corollary is also true: Is wanting to stay also enough?
Great column, Sugar. Loving and strong. Not to quibble, Kristy, but Sugar doesn’t give her advice that “wanting to leave is enough” cart blanche. The whole column explains what she means by that statement. She even says, “Leaving because you want to doesn’t mean you pack your bags the moment there’s strife or struggle or uncertainty.” Thank you, Sugar. I like what you said about not faking the core.
YES!
I beat myself up endlessly but I needed to go. At some point I realized I was honoring both of us by leaving. Was it hard? OH MY GAWD it was like having a knife plunged through my heart. The only thing I knew was that I could not stay. Seeing the hurt in his eyes damn near killed me. In the end, though, I could not continue the farce, could not keep up the mask. Crying myself to sleep every night was not making things any better. I had to *go*. I am slowly on the mend. I am closer to the me I love and it feels so good! Lesson learned: do not allow myself to ever ever EVER wear a mask again. If I can’t be wholly and completely who I am, ever-changing, quirky and sensitive, then it’s a situation I can’t stay in or even enter into. Thank you, Sugar, for putting it so beautifully into words. I have a dear friend who needs to read this, so I will be sharing with her.
As someone who faked it for over 18 years… yes, wanting to leave is enough — and it was enough.
As always, thank you for saying the things I need to hear.
@Kristy- There is a difference between struggling with a relationship and actually needing to leave it. There is being impossibly angry and frustrated with your partner but knowing in the bottom of your heart that you don’t want to leave, and then there is knowing deep down in the core of your bones that you’ve got to go. I don’t think Sugar’s advice is dangerous nor is it carte blanche, but rather is comfort for those who need it, for those who have been looking for permission to leave and don’t have the strength to give that permission to themselves. This is not my current situation, but I have danced on both sides of this coin over the course of relationships, as I’m sure many readers have, and sometimes you do need permission to help you make a decision you do not feel brave enough to make without knowing someone out there is in your corner.
Have children. The only thing it changes is bearing additional guilt, sadness and worry.
If you’re mid 50s, happily married for 30 some odd years, and out of the blue your husband ditches you to follow his bliss (which involves a younger woman), it’s hard to sort out your identity apart from his, much less muster the optimism that somewhere down the road a better relationship awaits. I’m just saying.
I am “Trying”…not actually her, but in the same situation. I was with him five years, and it has only been three months since the break up, but I feel like the hole will never be filled…feel like I’ve lost myself completely.
What makes the situation almost worse, is that he is still around, telling me that “some day it might work” but I can see he is not willing to do the work necessary for that to actually happen. He is hoping to just wake up one day and feel that “magic sparkle glue.” He doesn’t understand it takes work. I listen to the thing I want more than anything in the world tell me I can have him, eventually, but I have to have the strength to accept that he is not the person I am supposed to be with.
I had a lot of internal and external struggles about this relationship, and fought with him and myself about it for a long time, but at my “core” I could never leave. In the end, his core didn’t feel similarly.
It’s the most horrible feeling in the world.
I could have written a letter like this about a year ago. I chose to go, and it was painful. Still is. I loved my husband, and continue to care about him deeply. We have been able to salvage a friendship that will likely remain. And while it’s often hard, I have no regrets, and know that it was right for me to call it quits.
My therapist told me when I was struggling with this that there was a study of couples who had been happily married for 50+ years. There were three things that were necessary to make a successful marriage:
1. Similar values
2. Similar goals
3. A sense of humor
I would also add:
4. A satisfying sex life (with your own definition of “satisfying,” be it sweet lovemaking 1x/month or daily kinky sex)
For people who are struggling with this decision, I highly recommend Mira Kirshenbaum’s “Too Good to Leave, Too Bad to Stay.” It asks you a series of questions about your relationship. It helped me clarify and pinpoint the issues we were having, and I was able to figure out which issues were dealbreakers and which ones could possibly be worked on. In the end, it was clear that I could no longer stay.
And above all, please be gentle with yourselves in your time of indecision. It’s an agonizing place to be….
Whether to stay or leave is such a hard decision sometimes. I’ve also been on both sides of “go”. It isn’t simple.I’ve also known plenty of people scared of commitment who have used “leave if you want to” to rationalize leaving. They may even truly believe it is their core telling themselves that even when their history and context suggest other fears may be driving the thunderous “Go!” in their heads. It can be incredibly difficult to know whether it is your core talking or your fears, especially when you don’t know yourself that well. I would say if you’ve felt this for most of a 10-year relationship you probably should go possibly regardless of the reason. Life if too fleeting to be unhappy that constantly. It is also true that loving someone who is consistently wanting a way out and hearing “go”–and many long-term relationships include brief spurts of that as well–then that’s a pain of its own that ultimately hollows out what you thought you had.
I wish my parents divorced about 13 years before they actually did (which is when I went to college). They were miserable. My sisters and I were miserable. No one felt safe. No one was speaking to each other. My dad was beating up the dog. My mom was beating up herself. I turned toward alcohol and drugs. My older sister planned her escape. And my younger sister’s middle name became depression.
I believe that if no one is physically hurting anyone else, and if no other form of serious abuse is going on, and especially if there are children involved, then serious efforts should be made.
My parents made serious efforts. Over and over. Again and again. Separated. Back together. Separated. Back together. Fight. Fight. Fight. Too much effort was made. They’d met in the 60s in their early twenties. They’d been in love once. But hadn’t, for whatever reason, been able to truly grow up together. I don’t know how long my mom was hearing “go” before she actually did. I know everyone, all of us, suffered for a long time because of her indecision and my dad’s inability to hold an honest conversation, to not drink, to be a nice man (he’s a very nice man now, who doesn’t drink, and is honest as far as I know).
Most of my friends who are divorced, knew *the day* they got married that they should not be marrying that particular person. They heard “go” when they were walking down the aisle. But ego and pride prevented them from listening. I don’t know how to account for that.
There are men in my past who I would have said “yes” too in my twenties had they asked. Yes, and I do. And it would have been an exhausting and painful, albeit reversible, venture. It’s by pure grace that it didn’t happen. And that other things happened instead.
All I’m saying is go if you need to, but don’t go just because you’re afraid of what you might find in yourself if you stay. Go if you can’t think of anything else. If when you imagine yourself in some sunnier day in the future, without your partner, and you feel awash with relief, GO.
Wow. Just wow. This dilemma reminds me of a song, “Where I Stood,” by Missy Higgins. “And I won’t be far from where you are if ever you should call/ You meant more to me than anyone I ever loved at all/ But you taught me how to trust myself and so I say to you/ This is what I have to do./ ‘Cos I dont know who I am, who I am without you/ All I know is that I should/ And I don’t know if I could stand another hand upon you/ All I know is that I should/ ‘Cos she will love you more than I could/ She who dares to stand where I stood.”
I can chime in about making the decision to leave when there’s a child involved. I did it & it was absolutely the right thing to do, though not at all easy and not done lightly. My son-now 14-has said from a very early age(we split when he was 4-5) that HE thinks it was the right thing to do. I was fortunate that my ex & I agreed to stay in the same state and that we almost never fought in front of him (the times he witnessed or overheard our fights still haunt me, and probably him too). But I believe that children are ultimately better off with parents who are happy, fulfilled, content, and modeling healthy relationships, even if their parents have to split up for that to happen. I left someone I loved, who loved me, because I had to, for so many reasons, and the person I’ve been with now for 7 years makes me happier than I could have imagined.
And as for the letter writers-I think one of the things that’s confusing to all of you is that there’s still love & kindness present in your relationships. We tend to think that people only split because the love is gone, or something truly awful has happened, and that often isn’t the case. Sometimes love is just not enough to make a relationship work. You all sound like you are dying inside, and it doesn’t need to be that way. Yes, you have to work on relationships. But what percent is struggle and what percent is joy?
As someone who’s been trying and trying to ignore the “go,” who’s come so close to wishing it away only to have it rush back in during our worst and our best moments, thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I might not be able to do what the voice is telling me just yet. But I think this column will give me the strength to at least acknowledge it, and let it inform my actions a little bit. You have a beautiful spirit, Sugar. You help me keep trying to get these things right.
There will always be times when you want to stay and times when you want to go. Nothing can be truly successful without complete commitment — no relationship, no job, no dream. I’ve been on both sides of “GO” myself and I’ve learned that, in the end, that lack of commitment will do much more damage to everyone. As always, I agree with you Sugar. My grandmother would say, “Instinct is the voice of God whispering in your inner ear.”
I was in the same situation as Trying a few years ago and you are right Sugar, eventually I recognized what my ex had done for me as a gift. I am a different, stronger, better, less-willing-to-settle, person now. My ex and I are ale to have a good friendly relationship now because of it and I am terribly happy. I had to tell myself “enough already” and get on with it! Good Advice!
I was in a situation, once upon a time, with a great deal of similarity to that of Standing Still. I left. It was horrible, and awful, and agonizing – for a while. It was the best decision I’d ever made. Christians are not incapable of understanding mental illness, nor of being supportive and sympathetic. The ones who say that they can’t do these things, or claim that God will provide all the healing needed without accepting the many other resources we have available to us do a disservice to the person they claim to love. Faith should never put blinders on us for it to work. I heard those messages too, and I nearly killed myself before I found out how to leave. Saving face for my ex’s sake, or for the sake of the church, or any of those other poisonous lies, was never worth my life.
My mum went. It’s messed up my whole life. Not the divorce, I’m fine with that.
It’s the fact they now both smoke.
The fact that they moan so much about each other to me.
The fact that my dad is so much tenser.
The fact that my new stepsister hits my baby brother, and my mum just turns a blind eye.
The fact that my mum’s partner swears in front of my little sister.
The fact that I’m always living a half-life, never really living my whole life at each house.
The fact that my mum cares more that I’m nice to her partner than that I’m happy.
There’s nothing wrong with going, even with kids. Kids won’t mind, if you don’t. But bad things so often follow.
Fuck. I have to leave my wife. Will I do it later or will I do it now?
It feels like almost every letter here is asking, “Am I obligated to feel this way?” “Do I have permission not to love him/her?”
I think I’ve asked myself those things a thousand thousand times. When I first saw you write “Wanting to leave is enough” in your Tiny Beautiful Things column, it tore me open. I knew it was true. I knew that I wanted to leave, so much. But I couldn’t accept that want as something that belonged to me. Wouldn’t wanting that make me a monster? Weren’t I obligated to try harder? To make it work? I broke myself trying to fit into someone else’s love. I lost sight of who I was, because I wasn’t honest with what I was feeling.
You touch on this idea of caretaking a bit in your “Here to Serve” paragraph. For some of us, it’s even more than that. We’ve learned to make ourselves needed, make others depend on us, because we can’t depend on ourselves. We don’t love ourselves. Some of us never have. And so we stay in these uneven relationships even when our core is screaming and pleading for us to pack our bags. Our partner’s love becomes a hateful reminder of our own deficiency. Our monstrous inability to love them back. The suicidal tendencies kick in.
I guess what I’m saying is: if any of the women who wrote these letters are reading this, it might be worth looking at this checklist:
http://www.coda.org/tools4recovery/patterns-new.htm
And fuck. Sugar. You really are something.
I think Sugar is right on with this one. She isn’t saying bail at the first moment. As for staying with kids, I don’t think a miserable/fake/unhappy marriage is the way to teach your kids how to have healthy relationships.
In each relationship I’ve left, after I got past the romantic infatuation, I would notice this nagging feeling that “things aren’t rightâ€. It was just there, deep in my gut. I really cared for and loved each person I’ve seriously been with. Each one was a possible future. But when I was honest with myself and stopped projecting my dreams onto that other person, that uneasy feeling—deep down there, trying to come out—would just bubble up. I think with each person, that feeling/intuition was created for different reasons, but it was always there trying to be heard. I tried to ignore it, bury it, or work harder, hoping it would go away. I thought to myself, “Maybe this is what they mean when they say every relationship has it’s ups and downs and challenges. That you have to work hard to make relationships work. Maybe this is the hurdle I have to jump and once I make it, everything will be OK.†But, in the end, I couldn’t shake the little voice that only got louder and louder over time. Eventually, I had to listen to it or I knew I would end up unfulfilled and unhappy. I think, but can’t be sure, similar feelings and intuitions were also why some people have left me.
Only you can know what your heart wants, but I think this column is a great exploration of it. I can tell you now, I don’t have that little voice in my current relationship. The only time I had it was six months or so in, at that point when relationships start to transition to something deeper. It was clear to me he wasn’t committed to moving forward and was seeming uninterested. We talked about it, he confirmed my suspicions, and I left. After a week or so, he came back and said he realized he was just protecting himself and wanted to try again. I told him what I needed to feel loved and we tried again.
I was wary at first, but it has now been over a year and I believe I know where he stands. There is no longer any little dark voice. There are small annoyances and there are big adult concerns like finances, but all of those things can be tolerated or managed. Someone once said to me “Sure, relationships take work, but your relationship should not be the hardest thing in your life; it should help you get through the hardest things in your life.†Do those things about him still make me a little scared sometimes? Have I struggled with some doubts? Sure…but my life is better with him and there is no voice screaming way down in the darkness to “goâ€. There’s only a warm, caring place. And that too is scary, because I know he could shatter that place if he chose to, but I think it’s worth the risk.
Whether you are in a relationship or not or trying to figure out to stay or go, I think it’s worth trying to explore that place.
Your core does know.
Lovely column as always, Sugar.
Sugar,
Thank you for this. I read all these letters and you know, they’re all just so familiar. They’re all things I consider, things that have happened, things that are happening, things I desperately, desperately fear.
But when I read your answer at the bottom, about the tiny clear voice that just would not stop saying, “Go,” it just reaffirmed everything for me.
I may think things about my loved one. I may fear things about us. We may fight and snip at each other and do things that aren’t nice — but never not once have I ever heard the word “Go.” And that, Sugar, that is exactly why I haven’t and why I will not go anywhere.
I am so grateful for all you do here.
Sugar, you are my Athena.
I’d love to see more men and women take a little time to live, to gain some perspective before making big decisions, and at the same time, I have always done what I wanted, made impulsive decisions. Some of them worked out well, some of them crashed and burned. I own every bit of it. I have no regret. There are a few things I would like to say I’d do differently, but if I were actually faced with that time control remote, I’d take out the batteries and dash it under a bus.
@Honey: I think yes, wanting to stay is enough. Well put, dear.
How can we be expected our relationships to be profound when we don’t understand the weights and measures, how it feels to get hit with a runaway truck, how disorienting it can be to find yourself suddenly one of a cloud of starlings?
Make mistakes, lovers. Be vulnerable, ferocious and humble.
Leave. Stay. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. It’s not where you got. It’s how you got there. Be sensible with your feet.
I think it is hard to find peoples’ lives *really* parallel. Yes with similarity but a blanket response is oftentimes a stretch. Love you Sugar:)
I could have written your response myself, that was me in my first marriage. I am so so happy I left, I am not ecstatically married (and dealing with the ups and downs of marriage that i WANt to be in) but happy, with two children, and I love my life, that was never going to happen with my first husband, my high school sweetheart who I married when I was 25.
Thank you so much for writing this, I am printing it out to give to my daughter someday.
I meant ‘now’ ecstatically married
When I was 11, my mom listened to the little voice and left my dad. I had been in denial, thought we had the perfect family, and was crushed. Even told my mom she should stay, that she was sacrificing our happiness for her own.
Twenty-one years later, I know that not to be true. Human beings are resilient, and moreover we are each responsible for our own happiness. It didn’t take long for me to grasp that my parents’ lives were taking drastically different trajectories. Mom had spent years trying to he someone she thought she was supposed to be; I adore the funny, flighty, passionate woman she is today. Both she and dad remarried to other people and I love my big, blended family.
Most importantly, though i wasn’t ready to understand it yet, my mom was teaching me to be true to myself even when it seems impossibly hard. Today I know I can do nearly anything that I need to in order to make my life go, and mom will still love me. Because she knows how difficult and how important to be true to oneself. As a child who went through just that sort of split, I often think about parents who want to leave and think “do it! If you have to go, go.” You’re showing your kids to pursue their most fulfilling lives by doing so yourself.
All
Sugar – I recently discovered your column by reading the reprint of some of your letters in “The Sun.” You are so wise! This column #77 is dead on correct. I struggled for many of the 20 years of my marriage — married to a “good man.” Everyone around us thought we had such a perfect marriage. He was contented with what we had — and told me I did not know how to “settle.” Yet, there was a constant negative energy (heaviness) in our house. My children felt it. I felt it. Only my spouse did not feel anything. (Or maybe it was just that — it was there but he did not or could not let himself feel. Interestingly, now my former spouse has peripheral neuropathy – cannot feel in his feet and legs.) But my insides were dying. I made the most agonizing and painful decision of my life when I left him ten years ago, but I know it was right. My children are happier and healthier physically and emotionally. My physical health is really good. (It was getting worse and worse while I was in the relationship- asthma, migraies, back aches, couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep). And, yes, I can look back and there were red flags even at the time we married. Our insides know even when our heads don’t recognize the red flags. Just one thing to add: I think it is really true that if a person does not listen to his or her soul (insides), the soul (insides) will start screaming through the body. I am thankful that I finally listened before my body collapsed. I am sending the link to this column and all the responses to my daughter. I want her to know what you said, Sugar, and what the other wise people posting on this site have said. I want her to listen to her insides/her soul in each and every relationship of her life. Many thanks to you, Sugar, for your wisdom. Mari
One commenter wrote “It isn’t simple. I’ve also known plenty of people scared of commitment who have used “leave if you want to†to rationalize leaving. They may even truly believe it is their core telling themselves that even when their history and context suggest other fears may be driving the thunderous “Go!†in their heads.”
It’s true – it isn’t simple and we do have to go down and down to find out what is really close to the core feeling and what are other fears floating close to our ears. I was in a long term relationship and every day I heard “Go!” in my ears.. Staying and trying and counselling didn’t ouch the “Go!”. I thought it might well be inexperience, old scar material, immaturity. But the only way I could get the maturity and experience was to leave and live. There is not one day that I regretted leaving. And yes, as Sugar says – is it any honouring of a partner to be wishing half the time that you weren’t with them.
I also echo other commenters that I wish my parents had divorced earlier – younger – with more resilience and a better chance of building lives they loved. As it was they waited till they were in their late 50s and struggling with depression.
We have to give ourselves the space and chance to learn.
yup. I have had the word “go” in my ear for as long as I can remember. And I always do. And I have never regretted it. I don’t think listening to your intuition is ever a bad thing, but that is coming from someone who listens. You rock, Sugar. That is what my intuition is telling me right now.
Sugar, this is the first column of yours that’s brought tears to my eyes, and I’ve loved so many of them so dearly. This just really hit me. Especially that last bit about the core of you. I wholeheartedly agree. Thank you thank you thank you.
Oh such an enormous yes to this: “He deserved the love of a woman who didn’t have the word ‘go’ whispering like a deranged ghost in her ear.” There is something incredibly, silently sinister about the impulse to string someone along for one’s own benefit and safety, because of our own fear of risk or selfish wish not to be the bearer of bad news. Or because we somehow think half-assed love is enough for our partners. Or think that, in some warped love for us, our partners prefer us less than whole, unfulfilled, under-satisfied. We don’t necessarily see it that way, because for so long women had no other choice; for centuries we were trained to tolerate what we may not desire (thank you Sugar, for pointing to that). How long have we been cowering to a culture in which marriages of convenience or “providership” or “for the children” have so completely superseded unions based on passion, transparency, intimacy and authenticity–and with children deserving as much from their parents? Who, if anyone, is truly benefiting from that old model? What are we really protecting and promoting when we play into that archaic plan? And how are we indoctrinating our children, if we have them, by staying in a marriage that breaks the soul and fosters bad faith in each other’s “love”?
The most amazing thing about a woman liberated is that she offers the same liberation to everyone she loves, too–whether or not they are ready for it, whether or not they understand it. And that liberation may have more to do with integrity than the decision of whether or not to leave–though the closer you step toward–and speak aloud–your own integrity, the more clear the decision to stay or go may become.
Sugar, your courage is always an inspiration.
Thanks, this is so affirming and empowering to women! Rock on!!
I’ve been married twice. The first time, my entire being throbbed with “go” for what seemed like every moment of that marriage, and even before the marriage, too. Considering we were together for nine years, that was a lot of “go.” But I was young and proud and scared and I believed that I had an obligation to stay and try even though I was miserable and he treated me terribly and I secretly hated him. But I had always been told that wanting to leave wasn’t enough, and I believed it.
But then I did, and I am remarried again, to the man who gave me reason to leave. And in the five years we’ve been together, “go” has never crossed my mind, not even in our worst moments. I am in this for as long as he wants to be in it with me, not because I feel obligated to do so, but because that’s what I want to do.
I’ve been on both sides of this, and I agree – it is enough to want to leave.
I agree that Sugar is dead on. I spent a couple of years in my mid-twenties in a relationship with a truly wonderful guy, but with time I realized some of the essential components of lasting love were missing. He treated me very well, and I knew that were I to spend my whole life with him, I could count on him to be a caring and devoted partner. We also had strong physical chemistry, and we had a lot of fun together. But gradually I came to understand that we didn’t have a satisfying enough intellectual connection for me. We didn’t get excited and passionate about the same kinds of things. And he was often very passive and non-confrontational, which seemed to facilitate a stagnant sense of false-happiness.
I was afraid to leave him because he treated me so well. It was hard to identify something he was doing that was “wrong,” and I felt I was lucky to have found such a loving and attentive boyfriend. I was afraid if I left I would later regret giving up a good thing. I was disappointed in myself for having doubts about the relationship, and I hoped that with time they would go away. I went through about eight months of stress and agony internally, wishing I’d wake up one day and feel sure I should be with him. To some extent he was aware of my doubts, but he stayed with me anyway.
Eventually it got to a point where there was no choice but to break up. Coward that I was, I dragged the miserable relationship out until he finally found the strength to end things with me. And upon our breakup, which I’d feared and dreaded for so long, I was surprised to find that all I felt was relief. Since then, not once have I wished we were back together; not once have I missed him terribly and questioned if our breakup was a mistake. I cared about him a lot, but I was compromising who I was to fit into that relationship. No longer having to endure the stress of deliberating within myself about what to do was worth breaking up for. I could finally relax, and in the end, your own mental and emotional health should be of higher priority than your affection for another person.
I married my husband at 23 despite the little voice whispering “this is a terrible idea.” On paper it wasn’t – we were very well suited even then – but the voice wouldn’t stop whispering “go” even during the best times.
I did. I was not graceful about it. The thing I regret most now is not that I went, but that I devastated him in the process.
Nine years later and we’re married again. Without the years of separate life experience spent carving out our individual selves, which we never would have gotten had we stayed together and let our immaturities feed each other, I wouldn’t be able to face down that voice saying “go” (because, in hard times, it can come back – I went once, it worked, why not again?) and say “Hell no, this time I don’t want to.”
What Sugar’s saying, I think, is that for leaving to be the right thing to do, the little voice has to be saying “go” not just at the bad times, but all the time. Doing the crossword puzzle together in bed with an underlying sick feeling of “is this all there is?” That’s when it’s clear that nothing either of you do to work on the relationship would ever be enough.
“Go – because wanting to go is enough.” Wow. Powerful. Everyone has caught it. We might not agree with it but it is captivating advice.
I do agree with this advice. I listened to the little voice in my head grow from a whisper to a shout in the span of a few years until I had to do something. I searched for reasons to stay with my partner because I couldn’t think of a “good enough” reason to go. And I am so glad that I cared enough about myself to listen. I didn’t know why – there were a million reasons we couldn’t work and then simultaneously it felt like there were really no tangible reasons. And reading this tonight I am so grateful that someone has said it – that someone has voiced The Good Enough Reason to Go – that just wanting to is enough. That’s advice I wish I had heard years ago. Advice I will share with the women in my life to encourage them to listen to the little voice they are trying desperately to ignore.
I have to say that in my first marriage, “go” was in my heart pretty much from the first year on; and it must have been in his, too, because he hurt me pretty badly over the 19 years we were married. Or maybe not; maybe he just liked hurting people.
After a long stretch of being single, I have since remarried, and sometimes, now, I hear “go”…but not all the time, like I did before, and only when I am feeling echoes of that earlier, horrible marriage. I don’t know how this will turn out, but then again, I am constantly surprised by the things that happen.
Dear Sugar,
Honey,
Thank you thank you thank you thank you!!!!!
I am in the midst of “going.” On some days, I still feel something tugging me back, but I know it’s only fear. A fear of being alone, of hurting my ten-year-old son by leaving his dad, a fear that I’m throwing away the only good relationship to ever come my way. A fear of being a bad person, of being selfish, of thinking only of my own happiness. Of hurting the people I love most.
But on the days when I feel strong, I know I am doing the right thing. I have been hearing “go” for many years. Then I had a child, and there was barely time to think for a good long while. But the “go” eventually came back, louder than ever. The interesting thing is: my son accepts it; he seems to understand instinctively that it’s about being who I really am. He trusts me; he trusts who I am, trusts who he is, who his father is, he trusts in us all enough to understand this.
We should never underestimate our kids’ ability to see far, far more than we give them credit for. My son sees through people when they’re putting on a brave face, or an act, or simply aren’t themselves. Kids are smart, and sensitive as hell, and what they need the most from the adults in their lives is that these do not serve them some kind of half truth. They need the real thing, the real emotion, the real deal. And they deserve nothing less than that.
And I know I can be a better mother if I’m happy, true to myself, and authentic in my emotions.
Thank you Sugar, and thanks to all the letter writers and commentators for coming at exactly the right moment for me. It’s like you all knew that I needed you, today.
Sugar, why is this not the same advice you gave to the letter writer of column #58, The Light That Just Entered The Room? https://therumpus-production.mystagingwebsite.com/2010/12/dear-sugar-the-rumpus-advice-column-58-the-light-that-just-entered-the-room/ I have always been haunted by that letter and your response to it. Like maybe it fit and maybe it didn’t. Now, i’m pretty sure, at least, that it doesn’t square with the advice you usually give, at least. It seems to me that woman’s letter could be published alongside all these other letters, as part of the same story. Her situation was no different. She wanted to leave. It sounded like she wanted to leave a lot and like her “go” was at a fever pitch. It just sounded like she wasn’t obeying the “go” because her disability made it hard for her to, made it feel impossible, made her feel helpless in the face of its call. Why didn’t you tell that woman to find the courage in herself to “go, even though there is nowhere to go?” Why didn’t you tell her that it would be now or later — but instead to prop up her unhappiness? Why was it so different because she was physically disabled? I don’t think it works any better in that situation. Heartbroken was hearing a go. A messy, inconvenient go. It was so weird that you told her she had to stick it out because of the logistical consequences. I stopped reading the column for awhile after that letter because I was so mad — but also just heartbroken myself.
Now, seeing the column returning to the topic, I’m just confused. It seems like you have contradicted yourself at best. At worst it seems like you’re saying some people get to obey a “go” and have ownership over their freedom… and others have to make do, grappling in the mud forever.
heartbroken, i hope you found your truth if you are still reading. I hope this is the column you read and act on, if you haven’t already. Sugar, what gives?
I’m going to break my own rule and respond to a question in the comments section (rules are for breaking after all). Misaballa, I gave these women different advice than I gave the woman in column #57 because they came to me with a different problem and very different life circumstances. The letter writer in #57 first presented a situation similar to these women (two people who fell in love, then grew apart), but then their relationship took a different turn.
A terrible thing occurred and the letter writer in #57 was left disabled and entirely dependent on her partner. As she wrote, “…without him, I’m fucked.†This isn’t just hyperbole. Anyone with a spinal cord injury of the sort the letter writer describes (or anyone who knows someone with an injury such as this) knows this woman needs an enormous amount of care. She can do almost nothing without assistance. And she needs financial support too. The letter writer’s husband is her sole source of support. She doesn’t have friends or family. Without her husband to care for her, she goes into a nursing home, which she describes as “horrific,†a place where she was allowed to sleep in her own piss. She says she and her husband had grown closer after she got her spinal cord injury, but she feared he felt burdened by all she needs him to do, a thing which I find entirely unsurprising. She details an emotionally unsatisfying marriage that is made extra hard by her physical disability. But when telling me what she most wants she writes, “Ideally? I want the big love he says he feels sometimes and that I do feel for him.†I didn’t advise her to stay, as you and some others seem to have interpreted. I advised her to try hard to find a more constructive way to think about how she and her husband might improve and change their relationship, given her challenging circumstances.
Would I have encouraged her to work hard if she’d not been financially and physically dependent on her partner for everything? I’m not sure. Each person has his or her own situation and I read the letters sent to me very carefully so I can respond to specifics rather than generalities. You asked me why it’s different that the letter writer in #57 is disabled and my answer is because it is. Profoundly. As heartbroken as all the letter writers in this column are, the stakes could not be lower when it comes to ending their relationships. None of them will be compelled to live in a nursing home for the rest of their lives if they leave right now. That’s what the letter writer in #57 would have to do and so I gave her advice with that in mind. The stakes for her are so very high that I encouraged her to do all she could to preserve the one (and only!) loving relationship in her life and if that failed, that she first take some steps to reach out for a network of support before she leave. I’d have been doing her a grave disservice to do otherwise.
And none of this is to say my advice is “right.” It’s simply the truth I can make of any given situation presented in any given letter.
Sugar – sometimes you say just the right thing that fits into that horribly ripped and broken spot of me. I’ve been hearing “go” like a chant in my head for over a year now. I cannot being myself to break our hearts, but in time, I know the chanting will get the better of me and I won’t have a choice. I am just so pleased to have a column of truth to fall back on now when the going gets rougher than I ever thought rough could get. Thank you a million times.
Ladies.. Go! When there is that nagging, dragging feeling that something isn’t right, then you must absolutely go. I also have been on both sides of this situation but found it most difficult to go even though I knew I should. After 30 years of saying “I don’t want a divorce, I just want it to be different”, I finally realized that I could not change anything or anyone but ME! For me to really change, to find myself and the life I wanted to live meant I had to go. I didn’t stop loving my ex (he was totally devastated) and I have had to deal with some guilt feelings about the hurt I inflicted, but I wish I had listened to that voice 30 years earlier.
Dear Sugar,
You are wise. I wish I knew that it was OK to leave because one wants to leave. I was given bad advice, I thought I had to stay, and I stayed entirely too long. I stayed to try and make things right, I stayed because I was afraid to be a single parent; I stayed because I thought I should. I was wrong. I wasted too much time arguing, fighting, trying to change and control a situation that was out of my reach. I suffered, and my children suffered because I was too focused on trying to stay married, than to pay attention to them.
Looking back, I wished I had left long ago. I was always a single parent, and I am a much better parent than I gave myself credit. My daughters confirmed this. They are now adults, generally responsible, independent, and happy. So, it’s OK to leave even if you have children. Don’t waste time.
While I usually agree with your advice, Sugar, this column left me cold. “Wanting to leave is enough” is dangerous advice. For some people who are unable to name the problems in their relationship because they are too to close to them to see those problems. I think most of these letter writers could take that advice. “Love is a choice” is something I have always held to, and when your core and your gut and your ‘true nature’ betray you and harm your relationship, sometimes making that choice to stay is the right one, even if sometimes you might want to let go. Trying, when people run, sometimes it has nothing to do with you and everything to do with their own head dreams of how life should be. When you talk to them, and you hear that should of them wanting to run back to you in their voice, it is the hardest. It gets easier from that point.
Dear Sugar,
Any thoughts about the correlation between the whispering “Go” and these women getting married too young? I am so grateful my mother told me not to get married before I was 30. I slipped under the wire at 29 but only because every fiber and pulse shouted “Yes” — 20 years later, I feel even fiercer in my love.
Dear hlynn,
I offer this observation with respect: I believe people who tell themselves love is a choice haven’t experienced true love. I was in a happy relationship and situation when I met my future husband — I didn’t choose it and the shitstorm of pain, guilt, heartbreak, and profound uncertainty that ensued isn’t something one would choose. He happened to me, he didn’t look good on paper — and many years later I am so very grateful for being hit by the runaway train of true love.
I am so grateful that my parents split up as early as they did. My loving and devoted parents were divorced when I was two. I neither know nor want to know all the details of their breakup, but it shared some elements with the stories told here. No, it hasn’t been perfect and it hasn’t been easy — but I would rather have happy memories of my parents apart than unhappy memories of my parents together. I’m lucky that they recognized this situation and split when they did: I was young enough to have no memories of their nasty divorce, I had supportive and involved parents at all the important times in my childhood, and they have had time to work out enough of their issues so that we can all work together.
I don’t know if leaving is always the right thing to do. In my family, I think that it led to just about the healthiest and happiest ending that we could have had. Luck and strength to everyone facing these tough situations.
@selkie: You may not choose love like one would a brand of paper towels but you do choose how you handle it. Leaving may be the correct choice but don’t pretend that the fallout of your choices just happened to you. Whether someone leaves or stays (or makes other life choices) they should own their decisions and take responsibility for their actions.
@Gretchen: Well-put and I agree. Luckily, I wasn’t married to the man I left, we were all young (early 20s), he and I are still and will always be friends — and he went off to find the love of HIS life as a result, with two beautiful kids to boot. A happy ending, for which I am grateful.
I love your column, Sugar, and as always you’re right on. This particular column, and column #75 hit close to home for me, and in light of having experienced sexual abuse in the past, and being able to understand to a degree Standing Still’s position, but also having experienced being married to a man who was denying his core voice that was saying “go,” AND now preparing to leave a situation where I myself have been ignoring the voice that was saying “go,” I will add this:
Someone once wrote to me these two words in just this way, “Let GO!” Perhaps it was the timing, or the context in which it was given, I don’t know, but the simple power of it shot straight through all my defenses, and all my reasons, and went right to that core. For what I heard in reading it was, “ALLOW go!” Allow the possibility of it inside me. Let it live and breathe within me for awhile. I realized that’s what I’d already been doing on this journey of mine, in minuscule steps, acclimating myself to that core voice, or spirit within me, that initially felt wildish, scary, and unsafe, and…crazy. Allowing go doesn’t necessarily have to be done in one dramatic decision, or a ginormous step, but you can do it that way if that’s your thing. We can start with just the possibility of it living inside us, instead of viewing it, or ourselves as “wrong” or “bad” for it being there. It’s there regardless, so we may as well make friendly relations with it, and simply listen to what it has to say, and act on it in small ways if need be.
I’ve discovered the core voice within me knows something I don’t, can see around corners I can’t, and seems to have the best interest of all concerned within it…even if it doesn’t initially appear that way. Listening to, then trusting it, even in all it’s seemingly wildish ways, is the first step to allowing GO in whatever form. I’ve found the core in us, it’s voice, is where love sits. Not listening to it is caging it, and it is the thing inside that is saying, “Let me OUT!.” Ignoring it, shoulding it, trying to stuff it in some itty bitty box to quiet it is the very thing that is giving us that trapped feeling. In allowing go in ourselves, we can then allow it in others, giving them the same freedom, which I’m pretty sure is one of the greatest things about love.
Thank you, so much, for this.
This is so brutally true and hard to escape, and I love every time when someone starts doing what they want:
“Doing what one wants to do because one wants to do it is hard for a lot of people, but I think it’s particularly hard for women. We are, after all, the gender onto which a giant Here To Serve button has been eternally pinned.”
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Wish you were around back when I needed this advice. Maybe I would have left sooner or at the very least, forgiven myself sooner. 5 years later though and living a life authentic, true to myself and my feelings, and it’s the most rewarding thing on the planet. Thanks Sugar ~ I hope these women take your advice to heart and have the courage to hear their own voices above all the noise.
I was one of the letter writers that Sugar featured, and I was chilled in the best possible way when I read her advice. I ended up leaving my marriage shortly after firing that missive, and because my wounds are still pretty fresh, I can’t exactly say that it’s been easy. But for the first time in years, I wake up ACTUALLY FEELING ALIVE. Sometimes hopeful, sometimes distraught–but never numb, and never like I made the wrong decision. It’s absolutely eerie, how right it feels…and to think that it took what felt like an eternity of hemming and hawing to get to this? Amazing.
Thank you, Sugar, for putting into words the thing that finally got me to take heed rather than relegating the “go” in my head to an equivocating phantom presence.
I absolutely loved the following:
“And if there’s one thing I believe more than I believe anything else, it’s that you can’t fake the core. The truth that lives there will eventually win out. It’s a god we must obey, a force that brings us all inevitably to our knees.”
I groaned under the onus of that truth for too long, but it’s proven to be my strongest ally in all of this. I can’t wait to see what lies ahead. 🙂
I tremble when I read the letters of those who seek your advice, desperate for help. I am always relieved when I read your responses, because you have no other agenda than to expose the deepest truth the seekers really already know but may be afraid or unwilling to acknowledge. You help them to see the story their lives are already telling and to trust it to lead them into an uncertain but authentic future. Bless you.
“Even if that kindness delivers a fatal blow.” this is what i’m afraid of if i get up and go, as he has mental illness… this being said, Sugar, I’m mustering the strength to face and accept my truest truth. i keep on coming back to your words at lunch, i’m sad, scared, yet i still love him.
@ Anonymous – I am so sorry that your parents and step-whatever are doing this to you. I grew up in a home like that – except my parents weren’t divorced and the siblings weren’t steps. It hurts. It damages your ability to feel safe and loved and not angry at people. Please hang on – it will get better. You can still choose to be a person who loves better than your parents and who finds friends who become a family that loves each other better than your first family did. (And eventually that will help you love your family in a way that doesn’t hurt you.)
@Fireneedsfire – Absolutely! I wish my parents had divorced. If you ask my mom, she stayed for the kids’ sake. Or she stayed because leaving would have killed my dad. Or because she had nowhere else to go. It depends on when you ask her. If she’d been selfish enough to leave we all would have been better off. Eventually she did leave and he won her back – but only after the damage was done, the kids were adults or almost adults. Their marriage is better now, but it’s still co-dependent and they still relate to us their adult kids in the old dysfunctional ways. So as the child of a technically not broken home, I’d say to @Laurie and others with kids – do whatever it takes to live a genuinely healthy life. Whether you stay or go, learn to be a healthy person and don’t let unhealthy people raise your kids. That is what really damages kids.
Behind every story of a liberating divorce is a tale of a couragous victory over tough times. Every couple has moments when they want to break up. Some of those couples are unable to resolve their differences and ultimately do. Others, like my parents, have times of great hardship but persevere. My parents struggled and fought over my brother’s drug use and trajectory in life, but eventually came to terms with each other and now are happily retired together. At a time, they wanted to leave. At a time, they imagined how great their lives would be if they weren’t bogged down by the other. However, in the end they saw that their problems could be solved by accepting the others’ faults, emphasizing their virtues, and they found ways to be grateful for what they have, even if it’s not perfect.
The question is not about “listening to your core” – advice that can be easily misinterpreted as justifying ephemeral or epicurian impulses- but rather about having a broader perspective. Relationships involve more than two people, conflicts involve more than the focal points of debate, and life involves more than our own personal trajectories. Don’t leave just because you want to leave, leave because the relationship is causing pain to most people involved, because the weeds of conflict are too deeply rooted to be purged from the garden of interactions, and because the relationship is pulling you away from the life you want to live. Relationships should be left because you have carefully looked at the whole picture and made the best decision given who you are, what you believe, and what your own complex situation is, not because one advice columnist encourages you to be like her and make the decision she made (as right as it may have been for her). If my parents received this advice at the wrong time in their marriage and acted on it, the entire family would’ve been worse off.
“Don’t leave just because you want to leave, leave because the relationship is causing pain to most people involved, because the weeds of conflict are too deeply rooted to be purged from the garden of interactions, and because the relationship is pulling you away from the life you want to live.”
Isn’t this just as subjective as the idea of “listening to your core”? Also, internal feelings are often mirrored by external situations and circumstances. You also make it seem like this is a decision that people come to lightly. It took me two years to closely examine my marriage and several years of the ten-year relationship to determine that it was the right choice to leave. I was so inured to the constant conflict (in the name of working things out and being a mature adult) that I’d normalized it, which made me absolutely miserable. At what point can you get through the fog of tears, pain, and genuine love and emerge with clarity on what to do? It’s a deeply personal decision.
BTW, I was one of the letter writers. I also don’t think that leaving a marriage in which two viewpoints are so diametrically opposed on things of consequence (i.e., having children) is an ephemeral or epicurean impulse. Ultimately, I didn’t leave because I wanted something better or because I thought the grass was greener on the other side. I left because I wanted myself back.
Everyday for the better part of 10 years, that voice was in my ear. It started as a whisper “You need to go.” In the last two, it was shrieking, because I was close to emotionally dead. Incapable of feeling anymore. Empty.
I finally left 2.5 years ago. And now – finally – there are days that I don’t agonize over having done it. I don’t think I ever won’t agonize.
But I’m emotionally alive again.
Sugar, you made me weep, again.
You can’t deny the core. Even if the leaving will hurt the other. Even if it will affect children. In the end, your emotional deadness will be worse, for everyone.
You can’t deny the core.
Ugh, this was like sandpaper to my Heart. I’m 26 with an 18 month old baby and I left my husband and father of my child last winter, because my core couldn’t lie. He is still heartbroken and begging me to take him back and every time I have to say “No” my heart breaks again. I think I’d rather be the one who was left. I pray every day that he will get over it- even a little bit. Being a single Mom ain’t easy, but it’s much easier than living a lie. Thank You for your validation, Sugar. I have no regret.
I’m suffering from a serious case of pre-study abroad insomnia, and I’ve been reading Dear Sugar for two hours and crying for reasons I don’t even bother to try to understand anymore (because I cry all the time now, and I never quite understand). A lot of the crying come from love, and the anticipation of missing the things I will love. In particular, my sweet, devoted, utterly lovable boyfriend.
Long distance relationships are hard. They’re harder for telephone-phobes. They’re a lot harder for people uncertain about their relationships, and when I fell in love with this boy, it was beautiful and it awoke something loud and strong and hungry inside of me and I never want to go back to not being in love. But long-term first loves are confusing. It’s hard to distinguish love feelings from lust feelings, and it’s hard to distinguish generic lovey feelings from I-am-in-love-with-this-particular-boy-and-I’ll-never-let-him-go.
I felt the weight of that all summer. Did I love him enough to forgo the best lovey feelings and lusty feelings that Europe could offer me for Facebook chat and Skype at odd hours of the night? If not, I wanted to end it here, in person. But as I was reading this column, tears were dripping off my nose and I was so so worried that the reason those tears were dripping off my nose was that I felt the truth in these words and I knew I needed to leave. (I mean figuratively. I do actually need to leave, literally.) But as I read more and cried more, I realized that that wasn’t it. Your words made it clear to me that I have no voice whispering go, or if I do I am very consciously duct taping its mouth shut.
I want to stay. I’m sure.
ALL Lies. You teach deception.
This column digs down deep into the wrenching, aching feeling that follows me around whispering and screaming at various times: LEAVE! And yet, there seems to be no “real reason” to go. And yet, I cannot fully invest in the relationship and stay. My question to the writers that be is whether anyone has experienced a genuine change from “Go” to “Stay”. I find that my partner holds a mirror to just those spots where I most need to grow.
I’ve heard the GO in every relationship so far, but now at 35, I’d really like to stay. I wonder if staying will be my redemption, the only way through the muck to really learning to love. Maybe the constant GO is the confused voice of a shame-based religious upbringing coupled with physical and emotional abuse, and finding a way to stay is the way that I can finally let my guard down, learn to love myself and learn to love another.
Can the serial GO be transformed into a restorative, healing STAY?
I had a relationship before I married my husband where I knew it was not bad enough to leave but not good enough to stay. We lived together and it took three years for me to decide love wasn’t enough. He wasn’t my match. I married my match (together for 12 and married for 7). It’s not always perfect or exciting (we have small children right now so it is often a little boring or stressful) but everything in me wants to be right where I am. Don’t get me wrong – I look forward to stuff that is more exciting, but I see it coming so I’m patient. Divorce has never crossed my mind, I don’t feel trapped, and no crazy whispers say GO. Mucked up stuff may happen down the line, but I’d like to think we have some of that glittery glue that holds us together enough that I’d want to go to do the work to fix things. If I settled with that other guy, I’m convinced I’d be divorced from him by now. It’s really just about how long you’re willing to settle for less than you want.
Trying, in your letter you write that your trouble is simple, but I can see that your grief is extraordinary. I’m so sorry for that. I’m sorry you got your heart crushed. My inbox is full of emails from people who are suffering for similar reasons and there’s nothing I can do for you or for them but say there are better days ahead. Time will heal this wound, sweet pea.
What do you do when this isn’t true, when time passes and it does not get any better? In fact, it’s worse because it just means it’s gone on longer. I was (I am) like “Trying.” He left, and it’s been nearly twenty years. Yes, twenty years. Nothing, nothing has helped. I’ve tried therapy, I’ve tried medications. Nothing has ever made one whit of a difference. I read letters about how people still carry a torch for an old flame despite being married to someone else and I can’t relate, because I find it utterly incomprehensible that someone carrying a torch could get involved with anyone else. I’ve never, ever been even the tiniest bit attracted to another person. I feel like I’ve lost my whole life.
People are saying that its harder to leave when kids are involved, and I’m sure that’s true. But it’s also so much more crucial to go. My parents stayed unhappily together until I left for college, which meant I lived with two angry, unfulfilled adults most of my life. So I was angry too. As Sugar said, you can’t fake your core. If you don’t want to be in a relationship, even if you have kids, especially if you have kids, GO. Your kids know you’re unhappy. What are you teaching them by staying?
Why I think this article can be dangerous: http://thefalliblegirl.com/to-cheryl-strayed/
Life can be very displeasing especially when we loose the ones we love and cherish so.
much.My husband abandoned me and my 2 kids and said he wanted new adventures.I asked what I had done wrong but he said nothing.He continued paying our bills but moved in with another woman I was so frustrated and atimes I will cry all night because I needed my husband by my side. all thanks to Dr Osaze, I was nearly loosing hope until I saw an article on how Dr Osaze cast a love spell to make lovers come back. There is no harm in trying, I said to my self. I contacted him via email and after 24 hrs my story changed. words will not be enough to appreciate what he has done for me. I have promised to share the testimony as long as I live because he brought back happiness and joy into my life.If you having any kind of problem in your relationship and you need your man back I RECOMMEND Dr Osaze.pls do contact hm directly on spirituallove@hotmail. com.
I am out here to testify of your great work, my husband is back to me with the kids and leave the other woman at his working place, with your spell and he is in love with me now as you said, and he said there is no need for divorce and he apologized for all the pains he cost me and my kids thanks to Dr.Magbu, if you need his help his email address is [Reunitingexspell@gmail.com], your spell work fast and I am so happy to share your testimony….. Stepanine Bale
I recently ended a 3.5 yr relationship. One day I acknowledged the emptiness in the pit of my stomach. I had felt it when we went on hikes and ate dinner. I realized half the time I didn’t enjoy hanging out with him unless we were with other people. I thought his love for me was all that mattered, but I realized his feelings weren’t more important than mine. Even though I know it was the right thing to do, it hurts knowing I broke his heart. I hope he’ll see this article and understand there was nothing wrong with him. It just wasn’t right.
i stumbled on this website and it has had me in tears. i left a longterm relationship after 12 years last feb and it is now 15 months later. i struggled with the guilt and the indecision and only wish i could have read all these letters at the time for some peace of mind and clarity. i really relate to ‘leaving a marriage’ it was my situation. i cannot believe i stayed so long. in the end my gut was screaming at me with bad abdominal pains for weeks. it has been cathartic to read all the letters and im finally understanding why this happened to me. i would like to wish all of you strength and courage in making your decisions.
i found this column when i needed it most. thank you.
I am going through this. I am married to the best person I have ever met. My best friend of ten years. I love him with all my heart and I want nothing more than to be enough for him. Maybe I am sabotaging this because I have NEVER believed myself to be good enough for him? Maybe I know I can’t be what he wants me to be. What everyone wants me to be. There has never been a fire there, between us. I can’t say passion has ever been present in our relationship. There has, however, been true, deep love. There is still love. But I am so incredibly unhappy and in need of passion. I don’t feel like myself. I feel like I’ve lost myself in order to be the person he needed me to be. I can’t be a mom and spend weekends at my in-laws. I feel numb. Even more than numb, I feel like a coward. What if he never recovers? What if I am too scared to do anything and I live 50+ years lying. I feel disgusting.
My friend sent me this article, and I will be forever grateful for it and for all the comments. I broke off my engagement to be with another man, and feel suddenly free to be me. But I also hurt a man I’d been friends with for 12 years and dating for six. I loved that man, but when we got engaged, I realized that if he hadn’t asked when he did, I would have left. And then I left anyway. For his best friend. Say I’m an awful person (you wouldn’t be the first), but I realized I was no longer “in love” with my fiance at the same time that I realized that the other man was the person who I’d been looking for my entire life. I don’t know where this new road leads, but I read this article and thought “I have to go, I can’t marry a man with the thought of another over my head. He deserves more than this.” My biggest regret is ruining what would have been a life-long friendship, but I will never regret following what I wanted and being with the person I’m with now.
I wanted to share my story about how I learned to let go of my former relationship with the help of this article and your book Wild. I initially read this article in July when I was hearing “go” whispered in my own ear. I had a man with a kind heart who loved me dearly, but I was unhappy.I have a master’s and a heart of a free spirit. I wanted to travel the world and help others, but my relationship was holding me back from a life I wanted. When I spoke to my boyfriend about my goals, I was met with guilt and a lack of caring for him. It wasn’t until a month ago that he gave me a kindle and I began reading Wild that I knew for certain I had to let go. I felt as you had on the pages; longing to be alone. That was the last sign I needed to do the inevitable. I have since ended the relationship and began living for myself. I am no longer afraid of the vast loneliness I may feel. I am living for me and for a greater life I wish to have. I thank you so much for sharing your strength for all of us.
Two months ago I delivered that “fatal blow” to a wonderful man. I am completely racked with guilt and sadness about ending what was in all honesty, a great relationship.
I was never able to put my finger on exactly what was wrong, but even after 4 years together I knew that something was missing. Thank so much for putting into words what I could not. I have re-read this article many times and every time I cry, but every time I am reassured that I did in fact make the right decision. Both for myself and for him.
Thank you.
Thank you so much for this. This article is giving me strength at a time when I need it most, and I could not be more grateful to have found it now!
Oh boy am I glad to have found this. Everywhere I look women want to leave men who have done something wrong. But what about those who haven’t?
I have reached a point in my 12 year relationship where I find myself trying to find reasons to end it, where I am almost WILLING him to do something horrible, because ‘it just doesn’t feel right anymore’ just doesn’t feel like it’s a good enough reason.
But IT JUST. DOESN’T. FEEL RIGHT.
I was very young when we met (21) and he was much older (38). I’m now 33 and he’s 50.
There isn’t anyone else. I have no desire to “sleep around” or “party”. I am not bored, nor miserable. But I am not happy either. I’m trying to forgive myself and accept that sometimes what once fit doesn’t anymore. That sometimes things don’t have to be wrong to not be right.
He’s a good man who loves me more now than he did in the beginning and has always been a wonderful partner, but I know this relationship just isn’t right for me anymore and I’ve no idea how to explain that to him. Please help.
I had this bookmarked on my laptop for over a year. I went back to it and read it over and over again. Every time I would shunt it out of my head and try not to think about it. Because I knew it was going to hurt her, and that I would have to live with doing the hurting. And how can you, you know? How can you live with ripping someone’s heart out?
I read it again yesterday, walked home, and ended it.
Things are still pretty messy. She’s never going to forgive me. But I know I made the right choice, and that things will get better after this. And maybe I would have realized that sooner or later anyway, but this column is helping me come to terms with it, to lay it to rest, and to forgive myself. Because wanting to leave is enough.
Sugar, this is one of the saddest things I have ever read – your answer to the five women, sounds very wise with the wisdom of this age. But, naturally, we humans will always desire to abandon responsibility, inconvenience, boredom, and cast off all restraints, for something “better”, and the way these women wrote, and the above commenters for the most part, is simply selfish, self centered, fallen human nature expressing itself. Nobody wants to do what’s right, only what feels good. The Bible says there is a way which seems right to a man, but it’s end is the way of death. Bottom line is that it is written, “For the LORD GOD of Israel says That HE hates divorce, For it covers one’s garments with violence, Says The LORD of hosts.”
Thank you Sugar. Thank you, thank you. These are the words that I needed, tonight, tomorrow, and onward into more healing days.
Is “not wanting to leave” enough, too?
My partner has a mental illness that results in painful situations.
Would I leave him if he had cancer? Not a chance!
Would I leave him if he had cancer and didn’t follow doctor’s advice, resulting in more suffering for both of us? Not likely.
Yet this untreated mental illness harms both of us emotionally, financially, medically, mentally, and physically.
I don’t want to leave him. Yet, it’s starting to look like this mental illness will claim at least one of us. Most likely both of us.
Am I obliged to leave to save myself?
In reply to SHEL–
If you ever see this post, I am in almost the exact same situation. I know that you commented a year ago, but I’d love to know how you’re doing now.
Hello Women,
I recently left a man who proposed to me and I said yes, even though from the moment he showed me the ring box a corner of my soul had already decided what I needed to sense later.
It is hard. I imagine it’s harder for him, but to be honest I think I’ve been shoving all my hurt and pain and anger and pretending that things are better than they are. I miss him. I miss our life together. I miss going to the store with him and the way he made me feel, I miss that I could trust him to always love me. I could trust him to always want to hold me.
I had to lie to myself to get myself to listen to what I needed to listen to: Go.
That lie was that I wouldn’t miss him so much, that things would be fine because I am tough and that I needed to be worried about him more than I needed to be worried about me.
But I am not okay.
And I’ve been trying so hard to not see that.
A new guy already, moving, had to take all my things. Had to get my family to help me move. Now I’m back home for the first time since 18.
Every day has a sweet, painful, slow awareness. Like every breath I take I can feel the pain. But the pain lets me know that I am taking a breath.
Time is eddying slowly around. But there’s one thing I know.
I don’t regret. There are times I wonder, should I have stayed? But every time I start to think this… I know where I am now. I can start new. I’m not ready for another person.
My heart is breaking every moment, and joy feels like it’s so far between spaces. Especially this morning.
But it was the right thing. This pain, this burden, this new life. It is hard. It is the hardest thing I have had to do so far. And I don’t regret it.
Re-reading this for the n-teenth time… thank you, Sugar and commenters, for helping me feel less alone *and* less out of my mind for wanting to leave. In the beginning stages of actually going and will be re-reading this many more times to come.
This article has made all the difference for me. It’s given me clarity and comfort knowing I’m not a heartless hag for wanting to leave my boyfriend of 18 months. Very grateful for this.
This article has crippled me, I feel like I can’t move and I only have read about half of it.
This poem is by a friend who lost her beautiful husband, only in his thirties, to cancer. I wish you had thought more carefully about what you advised people to do, Sugar, because the hurt and sadness your advice has caused many good and undeserving people is karma which you will have to carry with you always. Here is another perspective:
[on staying faithful]
there is something broken inside you
that drives you to seek a new set of hands
to put you back together.
there is an insecurity that runs deep.
that seeks validation in
the smile of someone
who does not (yet)
see you as a
constant disappointment.
the lust of a different body to explore.
the reminder that you still got it.
someone else in whose arms
you feel you can come alive,
feel like yourself, again.
there is something about you
that cannot leave well-enough alone.
maybe it’s the panic
that sets in with boredom or stress.
the tedium of working to provide.
the tedium of working to keep a household together.
and so you begin
a double life:
a self-sabotage of chaos and secrets.
confirming
what you have whispered to yourself
all along:
(“you ain’t shit”)
here is the revelation
i pray
you will come to, one day:
no woman.
no man.
in the whole wide world.
can fix you.
no one can complete you.
satiate you.
make you truly happy.
choosing
to enter a committed relationship
is work.
back-breaking,
frustrating,
thankless (at times)
work.
it is choosing, each day,
to see the best in each other.
it is choosing, each day,
to ask for what you need;
giving what is asked of you,
as best you can.
it is walking the wrong way
on a moving sidewalk
that would lead you to infidelity.
actively distancing yourself
from temptation.
it is holding yourself accountable
for the way you react to flirtation.
the way you seek attention.
it is the space you purposefully place
between yourself
and would-be-soulmates
with whom platonic friendship is not possible.
it is seeing and naming desire
and asking yourself
what is not being fed within you.
it is knowing, reminding yourself that:
no man.
no woman.
in the whole wide world.
can compliment
all the ways
you are complex.
so stop seeking. stop swiping.
start being honest about your brokenness.
seek God’s hands
to (continually) fix you.
find a therapist.
establish a healthy routine.
surround yourself with friends
who listen to and challenge you.
feed your creative side.
travel.
seek thrill and satisfaction
in ways that
don’t hurt the people you love.
be transparent about your unhappiness.
be brave enough, this time,
to ask for the help that you need.
be brave enough, this time,
not to retreat.
(i implore you)
be brave enough.
this time.
to stay
faithful.
@STACEY,
I am into my third year of my first relationship with guy who also has a past (and perhaps present) of mental illness. I have been supportive and understanding but I am not sure if the love we have for one another will overcome his issues and mine. I have been consumed with our relationship and now that I am realizing the pain we are inflicting on each-other I am torn on what to do. Do I hold on because I know that there is love and room for growth in our relationship? OR do I move on because no one should feel alone (at least its how i feel due to his passive behavior) in the efforts for making the relationship grow?
How did you come to your conclusion?
ANNIE, the poem is perfect, hits most notes for me, thank you, thank you.
SUGAR, your response is what I needed to hear, thank you, thank you.
Thank you Sugar …
As soon as I read the last sentence … I decided I needed to do it NOW. I did. It was hard. I have shattered his heart and broken mine. But he will be better, he will succeed. And so will I. I feel empty. Sometimes guilty but mostly empty right now. But when I think back, the voice the screamed Go has silenced and I have devoted myself to self-love and care to heal. It’s not easy but like when my heart was shattered years ago by my first love, time will pass and memories and emotions will fade.
I am human. Sadness and happiness. Both and all emotions are part of the experience. Ups and downs. I will surer rise from this ‘down’ as the hardest part – breaking our hearts – has passed.
Thanks for allowing me to find my courage Sugar. Thanks so much â¤
Reading this made me ache for the women who wrote those letters. The two hardest breakups of my life were ones I initiated. The first one was my first long-term relationship; five and a half years of sweetness and laughter, but underneath was an undercurrent of deep ambivalence and dread. When I left her, it truly felt that I was breaking my own heart, and at the time it did not feel like a clear-cut choice, only that I felt that tug at my core that said “go.”
The second one was with a woman fourteen years older than me, who was controlling and manipulative and who made me think I would never be loved again by anyone but her. Figuring out I had to leave her was what I imagine it’s like figuring out that one needs to leave a cult–that the truths I’d been presented with were false, that my core personality and principles were being slowly eroded, and that there was a better version of myself I could find if only I could find the courage to escape. Even if escape meant a loss of physical and financial comfort, a loss of a social circle, a loss of status. But it was worth it.
I floundered for a year or so, with a string of flings that left me feeling exhausted and broken (the way I described it to my therapist was “I feel like I have a warped rotor”). But at the end of that year I found the woman who I know, as much as I *can* know, is the love of my life. We have had hard struggles and deep disagreements (for example, she is a Christian and I am a staunch atheist), but underneath everything, my core says “stay, this is your person, this is your home.” I have never felt this way before, not *truly,* though with my past relationships it was something I was trying to make myself believe.
To everyone struggling with this decision–I wish I’d ended both of those relationships sooner. I wish I’d been more okay with being alone. Because being alone means that the *possibility* of a love much truer and more real is out there. It was that possibility, that hope, that kept me going through the roughest points of both breakups. It will feel terrible and shitty for awhile, and then, eventually, it won’t.
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