I Wanted to Be Your Wife

To the man I married,

There is a particular kind of heartbreak that I don't know how to explain.

It isn't only that I miss you.

It isn't only that our marriage ended.

It's the unbearable thought that perhaps everything I believed was sacred between us was never experienced the same way by you.

That thought has broken something inside me.

Sometimes I sit quietly and wonder whether my touch was ever special to you. Whether my kiss ever meant something uniquely because it was mine. Whether making love to your wife carried any weight in your heart beyond the moment itself.

Those questions haunt me.

I don't ask them because I expect answers anymore.

I ask them because my heart is trying to understand how something that felt so sacred to me could leave me feeling so discarded.

When I loved you, I gave you everything I knew how to give.

Not perfectly.

But honestly.

My affection.

My admiration.

My tenderness.

My loyalty.

My body.

My trust.

I never withheld my heart from you.

Looking back now, I sometimes wonder if all of that simply passed through your hands without ever truly being received.

That thought makes me physically sick.

It makes me wonder whether what was extraordinary to me was ordinary to you.

Whether the things I treasured were things you barely noticed.

That is a pain I struggle to put into words.

And I know now that you cannot heal it.

Not because you are incapable of saying the right thing.

Because the wound itself no longer belongs to you.

It belongs to my own grieving heart.

Sometimes I look back and ask myself whether there was ever a moment when we were standing inside the same marriage.

Whether we were loving the same relationship.

Whether we were even dreaming the same future.

I don't know anymore.

As more time passes, I find myself remembering words you spoke that I tried so desperately to forget.

"Everything I do and everything I say is so that you leave."

"I want to push you away."

"I'm done with you."

"You will never be the wife that I want."

"I married someone so old, what was I thinking."

Those words did not disappear after they were spoken.

They made a home inside me.

For so long I kept trying to argue with them.

I kept believing they couldn't possibly be true.

Now I no longer argue.

I simply mourn.

Sometimes I ask God why you didn't simply let me go if your heart had already left.

Why hold on to someone you no longer wanted?

Why keep asking me to stay while making me feel unwanted?

Those questions may never be answered in this life.

Perhaps they don't need to be.

What I know is this:

I kept trying to become someone who could finally be enough.

Not because you asked me directly.

But because somewhere along the way I began believing that if I loved you better, perhaps you would finally choose me with your whole heart.

That day never came.

There were moments when I convinced myself that perhaps I was the problem.

That perhaps I wasn't beautiful enough.

Gentle enough.

Interesting enough.

Holy enough.

Enough.

Now I see how cruel that became.

Not because I was perfect.

But because I slowly began measuring my worth by whether I could earn the love of the man I married.

No wife should have to live that way.

I wish I could forget you.

Not because I hate you.

Because remembering hurts.

And yet...

even after everything...

my sadness reminds me of something beautiful.

It reminds me that when I stood before God and promised to love you, I meant every word.

I wanted to be your wife.

I wanted to spend my entire life becoming better beside you.

That dream died.

But the sincerity with which I loved you did not.

No matter what became of us...

that love was real inside me.

And I thank God that no one can take that truth away.

— The woman who married you 💜