I Never Had You

To the man I married,

I would have given anything for the two of us to truly have been in love.

Not the idea of love.

Not the hope of love.

The real thing.

I would have given anything for you to have loved me the way I loved you.

Sometimes I wonder if there was ever a moment.

Was there?

I don't think there was.

Perhaps there was affection.

Perhaps there was attachment.

Perhaps there was gratitude.

But love...

I no longer know.

I truly fell in love with you.

And strangely enough, I fell even deeper after Augustus was born.

I will never forget that day.

If I had died then, I think I would have died believing I was the happiest woman in the world.

Holding our son...

Looking at you...

Imagining the rest of my life beside you...

My heart melted in a way I didn't know was possible.

I thought,

"This is it."

"This is my family."

"This is forever."

Looking back now almost feels unbearable.

I was standing inside one reality while believing I lived in another.

I cannot understand why you allowed me to believe that you loved me the way I loved you.

That question still echoes inside me.

Why?

Why let me dream?

Why let me hope?

Why let me build an entire future around a love that now feels as though only one of us was carrying it?

Sometimes I cannot believe I am crying over someone who seems so untouched by all of this.

I look at where we are now...

and I wonder if I was the only one mourning long before we ever separated.

I spent so much energy terrified of losing you.

Only now do I realize something that feels almost impossible to write.

I wasn't afraid of losing what I had.

I was afraid of losing what I desperately hoped we would become.

Because the truth is...

I don't think I ever truly had you.

Not in the way a wife longs to have the heart of her husband.

That realization has shattered something inside me.

I believe you now when you said you were not in your right mind when you married me.

Those words used to destroy me.

Now they simply make me grieve.

Not because I know every reason.

Not because I finally understand everything.

But because they force me to accept that perhaps we entered this marriage carrying completely different realities.

You became one of the greatest lessons of my life.

Not because I wanted suffering.

But because you taught me something I pray I never forget.

Love cannot be begged into existence.

It cannot be earned through exhaustion.

It cannot be convinced.

It cannot be negotiated.

When someone freely chooses to love you, they simply... love you.

Not perfectly.

But willingly.

I chose you.

Freely.

Every day.

And I kept choosing you long after my heart had become tired.

As the days continue to pass, I know this truth will become clearer.

Not because I want to stop loving you.

But because reality has a way of gently insisting on being seen.

Looking back, I realize there were so many moments that should have awakened me.

So many words.

So many actions.

So many little signs.

I saw them.

I simply refused to believe them.

Hope can sometimes become its own kind of blindness.

It hurts to admit that.

There were moments when I started believing I simply wasn't enough.

That perhaps someone else could have made you happier.

That perhaps something was fundamentally wrong with me.

I carried that burden for far too long.

Then I remember something you once shouted at me.

"You don't deserve any respect! Who would ever be happy with you? No one!"

Those words have echoed inside me more times than I care to admit.

Not because they were true.

Because I loved you enough to wonder if they were.

That may be one of the deepest wounds you ever gave me.

Not the sentence itself.

But the fact that I allowed it to become part of the way I saw myself.

I don't believe those words anymore.

I'm still learning to let them go.

But I know now they never defined who I was.

Even after everything...

I cannot rewrite history.

I loved you.

Deeply.

Honestly.

Completely.

God knows I did.

Whether you ever truly understood that...

I suppose I will never know.

But I know.

And perhaps...

that is enough.

— The woman who married you 💜