My best friend and I are very different when it comes to relationships. Not only our taste in men (which has almost no overlap), and what we tend to tolerate in romantic relationships, but also how we respond to the things that happen to us. She tends to take a more dramatic approach. She can be petty, make a scene, and holds a grudge. In contrast, I need to be seen as the bigger person. I strive to be fair and non-reactive, to not let people see me get upset, and while I’d love to say this is maturity, I know that some of that is actually concern about how I am perceived and caring what others think about me. I believe that both approaches have their merits and their downsides. We probably are a good balance for one another, but it has led to our fair share of arguments and there are things we may never see eye to eye on.
One of those things is how I continue to engage with the people who have hurt me. She would greatly prefer that I stay angry and cut people out of my life, because she sees anything less as them getting off easy and freeing them of consequences. She also fears that these people will continue to hurt me if I continue to give them access. And she has a point.
I have in past posts referred to something that happened in the Summer of 2024. It’s not a secret, but to date I haven’t written it down. I feel like maybe it’s time to put it “on the record” here so my side of the story is preserved somewhere. Because it really does inform a lot of what happened next and where I am now two years post divorce.
Part 1: What Happens in Mexico…
After we decided to divorce, we continued living together for about a year. This was a period where we didn’t see other people out of respect since we were still living together, but we also weren’t trying to repair (we had separate bedrooms, etc). Essentially, we were broken up – but untangling our lives very slowly. When you’ve been together more than a decade – there’s a lot to untangle. We had a home to sell, my ex husband needed a better paying job before he could afford to move out, and he also had a cancer scare that required surgery during this period. We both wanted time to figure out what life looked like on our own. His reasons were mostly practical. I was scared about financially being on my own too, but my reasons were more emotional. I needed more time to accept this was really over. I was in no rush to be alone.
I think this slow separation worked for our family because we weren’t splitting up to be with other people, and we still cared about one another. I am grateful for this period because our son was able to accept the changes slowly, and I felt like I wasn’t losing my partner all together. Instead, we were shifting into a friendship and coparenting relationship that felt very positive.
And it probably couldn’t stayed that positive if different choices had been made, but instead – as is probably more the norm with divorce – things got messy.
We did eventually separate physically, and in North Carolina you are required to live apart a year before you can file for divorce. This was when things really started to change and become real, but I truly feel that I made things as easy as possible for him. He felt guilty for hurting me, and I felt guilt for having moved our family to NC where I had a support system and he had none (at least no one that wasn’t connected to me). So I tried to ensure he didn’t lose the support he did have here. I encouraged my family to continue to treat him the same and include him in family events. I told our mutual friends that no one had to choose sides, and we even continued hanging with our mutual friends in group settings. I always expected that this would evolve over time – after all, we’d eventually start dating other people and it would be weird to spend so much time together socially. But neither of us were jumping into serious relationships, so this went on for months.
Unbeknownst to me, a few months into our separation, my ex husband started a physical (and later emotional) relationship with someone in our friend group. She was my friend, and she was married (albeit in an open marriage and her husband initially was fine with the arrangement). Although I was also friends with this couple, I hated it when he started spending the majority of his free time with them. They weren’t exactly “responsible” adults – and seemed to be a bad influence on him (and by extension, possibly a bad influence on my son). They were ‘open relationships, drugs and alcohol, strip clubs and age gaps’ kind of people. He started partying more and I chocked it up to his new found freedom and him trying to live the single life he missed out on in his twenties. It worried me, but I tried to stay out of his personal life as long as it wasn’t putting our son in danger. As much as I believed he wouldn’t be acting so recklessly if he’d never met this couple, I also had to accept he was a grown man and making his own choices. Maybe he just wasn’t the person I thought he was?
He and my friend hid their “arrangement” for months. I suspected something was going on, but both laughed the accusations off – never quite denying, but always implying they were just friends. I second guessed myself, and ignored my intuition. Then the truth came out on a family vacation.
When we were still married, my ex husband and I went on a trip to Dominican Republic intended to celebrate my niece’s graduation from high school. It was a big group that included my niece, her dad (my brother) and his girlfriend, her mother (my close friend) and her step dad (my ex husbands close friend), and my nephew (her brother). It also included two other couples that were close family friends and this was our main social group at the time. When my nephew graduated two years later, a similar trip to Cancun was planned with basically the same group – plus some additional family members. This time, another niece and her boyfriend, as well as my son, were coming along. My ex husband was invited, but said that he didn’t really have the money to go on the trip, so I decided to go to Mexico with my son who was 11 at the time. It would be his first time out of the country, and what better opportunity than a fun family trip with your cousins. If my ex had said he was going, it would have been a harder decision for me to make. I’m not sure what I ultimately would have decided, but I was relieved that I didn’t have to worry about navigating that.
A few weeks before the trip was scheduled, my ex came to me and told me that he changed his mind, and wanted to come on the trip after all. To save money, he’d just come for a shorter amount of time. He explained that he had FOMO since his close friends and son were all going, and that he didn’t want to miss our son’s first big trip out of the country. He indicated that while he wanted to come, I could veto. He was checking with me first since I had decided to go with the understanding that he wasn’t coming. If I didn’t want him there, he wouldn’t come. I thought this was very considerate, and everything had been amicable up to this point, so I agreed that he could come – under the condition that it was truly a family-focused trip (i.e. that he wasn’t coming to party/get super drunk, the focus would be our son’s experience, and that he wouldn’t hit on other women in front of me because that would make me uncomfortable). He agreed, and the whole trip was set up to be a surprise where he arrived a few days later than everyone else.
He arrived in Mexico a couple days after all of us, and immediately started drinking and treating it like a party. I called him out on and that started a fight between us on Day 1. He toned it down after that, but he was annoyed and barely spoke to me on the trip. In that state of hypervigilance, I started picking up on little things that were happening – like the fact that my friend would text someone nonstop when he disappeared to his room even though her closet friends were sitting right next to her. I suspected that at the very least, he was complaining about me to her. That bothered me. She was my friend, why was she letting him vent about me to her? My ex acted like I was ruining his fun, but I didn’t want our son to see this side of him. My ex has always seemed to have a lack of awareness for how his actions are perceived or impact the people around him. He seemed to miss the looks of recognition that our son gave him, failed to notice when our son was uncomfortable or bothered by something. I knew our son wasn’t ready to see either of us with someone new and was more bothered than he’d say out loud when he saw his dad flirting with someone else. I know my ex views this whole situation and himself differently, but I’m just being honest with how I perceived it at that time.
Needless to say, I didn’t have much fun on this vacation. I’d spent a lot of money on the trip, and I was spending my vacation trying to hide how miserable I was from my son, while also shielding him from witnessing this version of his dad, all while trying to ensure he had a good time. Meanwhile, the fact that he and my friend were “together” became very obvious on this trip. She had a substance abuse issue and was wasted the entire trip – and therefore, not careful about hiding it. Every person on the trip witnessed something that made it painfully obvious they were together. I felt that he humiliated me in front of my entire family–all of whom were worried about me, and once we were home shared with me what they’d each witnessed. This trip also brought to light that it wasn’t just physical – they had feelings for each other and were trying to figure out how to be together. I felt betrayed by my friend, lied to by my ex, and like he had also betrayed his close friend (her husband). I called them both out on it when we got home, and they admitted that it was true. I was hurt and angry – and I wasn’t quiet about it.
I felt like after all I’d done to make things easy for him, he’d chosen to do something selfish and messy and found a way to hurt me again. This time around, I wasn’t going to just be quiet and act like I was okay. I was no longer going to protect him from the consequences of his own actions. I told him how I felt, and then I set some major boundaries for myself. Outside of that, I just let things play out. I didn’t ask anyone to stop hanging out with anyone else, or do anything on my behalf. I simply stated what my boundaries were (the major one being that it was important to let me know if they were invited to things so I had the choice to opt out). But of course, my family was really angry at him. He could have dated anyone outside of just a few women that I was close to without there being any issue, but instead chose to pursue my close friend and then to be extremely careless about it. They watched me bend over backwards to make things easy for him, and then hurt and humiliate me in return. The other friends in our circle were also really upset – they all felt either lied to, or that it was just wrong what they did – period.
Initially, my ex was super defensive about it. He didn’t think he’d done anything wrong since we weren’t together and they were both consenting adults. He may have been right about that, but it had consequences none the less. The fact remained that they hid it because they knew no one would approve. They lied to everyone, and they behaved inappropriately. He broke his promise about the trip to me, and he was basically in the process of stealing his friends wife for Christ’s sake. The whole situation was fucked up.
His response? Initially, it was to be angry and pull away. He blocked me and my entire family on social media. He took the stance that we were too connected and he wanted to live his life without fear of judgement and he set out to build a life completely separate from me. He stopped attending family events, and we didn’t let our social lives overlap much over the next few months.
In November of 2024, our divorce was finalized. Our marriage was officially over.
