I Miss a Future That Never Happened

To the man I married,

Sometimes I think I miss you.

Then I close my eyes and ask myself a different question.

What exactly do I miss?

I miss the future I believed we were building together. I miss believing that you were in love with me. I miss the way you smiled at me. I miss thinking you liked being with me. I miss imagining that one day we would look back on the hardest years of our marriage and say, "We made it."

I miss what I thought we were becoming.

And maybe that is the hardest realization of all.

Because the thing I miss most is not something I ever truly lost.

It was something I believed existed.

Even now, my heart still reaches for you.

I don't understand it.

Why do I still want to feel your arms around me? Why does some part of me still long for your embrace? Why, after everything I know, does my heart still search for the comfort it once found in you?

What is wrong with me?

Nothing, perhaps.

Maybe this is simply what grief feels like.

When you hugged me... it felt real.

When you kissed me... it felt real.

Whether those moments meant the same thing to you as they meant to me, I may never know. But to me, they were real. They became places where my heart rested. And perhaps that is why letting go has been so difficult.

There were good moments.

I won't rewrite history just because history also wounded me.

There were times you made me laugh. There were times you held me, and I felt safe. There were conversations that filled me with hope. There were days when I looked at you and believed I was seeing the man I would grow old beside.

For a long time, I clung to those moments.

And yes...

Life is made of moments.

But marriage is made of something deeper.

Real love is not simply collecting beautiful moments together. It is choosing one another through every moment—the joyful ones, the ordinary ones, the disappointing ones, and the painful ones. It is remaining faithful when feelings change. It is protecting what has been entrusted to you.

I can honor the beautiful moments without allowing them to erase the painful ones.

They mattered.

They were part of our story.

But they were not enough to carry a marriage.

Maybe those moments were real.

Maybe they weren't.

I don't know anymore.

What I do know is this:

I loved you with more than moments.

I loved you with my future.

And perhaps that is the part of me I have been grieving all along.

— The woman who married you 💜