Wedding v2.0

I thought I would announce it here first, though my wife Frances has probably told all 7 billion of you the news already.

Last year, as perceptive blog readers will have already spotted, was a horrific year here in Camp Miserable. I learned an awful lot about myself, a great deal more about my wife, and I decided that I would get divorced.

After twenty-two years together, and still loving her despite everything we have done, I felt I owed it to Fran to at least go to couples therapy, in part to unravel the awful mess we have made of our lives, and in part to allow us to separate amicably, knowing that we had at least tried everything. She in turn went along certain that we would part, and that I would learn just how big a bastard I have been.

That however is not how things worked out.

I am not about to hang out all our dirty laundry in public, but in the space of a few short weeks we quickly learned that, whilst neither of us are yet ready for sainthood, the woman I have loved all these years was not the person that either I or she believed her to be. She had suffered a series of traumas in her childhood and adolescence which had left her suffering from post traumatic stress disorder, and almost entirely emotionally detached from her own life. In effect, despite her being a grown woman, enormously successful professionally, I had married and spent my life with, a terribly angry and damaged eight year old.

What had kept us together perhaps, is that when we first met, we spent the best part of a year becoming friends, and I had seen glimpses and fallen in love with the softness and vulnerability beneath her powerfully self-confident exterior. Once we were married though, that vulnerability and softness slipped away, she became trapped within her own unhappiness, just existing through each day, blaming me for somehow having trapped her within a life she would not choose. At first I felt I was somehow failing her, tried ever harder to do what she wanted, be what she wanted, until it became clear that what she didn't want, was me. After that I too buried myself within my own life, and like her existed day to day. If you do it for long enough, you can kid yourself that you are happy, that this is as good as it gets.

And yet, there always remained the sense that we were missing something, that we had somehow let something wonderful slip through our fingers. Always I was waiting for that something to come back.

Over the years I have dreamed of walking away, several times determined that it was the only sensible thing to do, sought an escape. But when it was there for the taking I couldn't go. Right up until a few weeks ago, despite the changes in her and our perceptions, I knew that I had to walk away, that we had simply done too much damage to remain together.

I didn't need to. Like a snowball rolling down a hill, as her perceptions and lifelong beliefs were swept away, the changes within her came ever faster, eventually becoming an avalanche. A wall once built for protection, but which had become a prison, had been knocked down. The sum result of which is that I don't need to change the person I live with, the person I live with has changed.

For her, it has been like meeting me for the first time, for me, it has been an end to my waiting, a reunion with the person I once believed her to be. Twenty-two years after getting married, we have met and fallen in love. The changes have not finished, therapy goes on, but they are all for the better, helping her, a new person, adjust to the new world into which she has been born.

On New Years Eve I asked her to marry me, and she cried and said yes. For me it will be renewing vows I wholeheartedly meant the first time around, for her it will be the first time. Provisionally it will take place at 2:00pm on the 31st March, at St Laurence's Church, Affpuddle, the place where it all began.

I can't promise every reader a personal invitation, but if you read this and want to witness a true-life happy ending, well you know where we'll be. We may not appear as handsome, beautiful or youthful as once we were, but its what is on the inside that counts, and that is better than ever.

Version 1.0 - Bug-fix due on 31st March 2012