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So no one gets married to get divorced, and I did.
I got married to one of my best friends.
I'd known him for 12 years.
We loved each other, and I felt good about marrying him.
And it was OK for a while, but after several years
and a couple kids and stresses of life and law
school and jobs and debts, connecting
got harder and harder.
His goals got more and more different from mine.
And in some ways I felt like I was just in this situation
where I was trying to meet his needs
and trying to meet his goals, and I just didn't get fed
emotionally or spiritually.
I just felt really lonely.
In this time, he also got addicted to prescription drugs,
and it was pretty ugly for a while.
And then finally, we got to a critical point
where he just had to stop.
And he stopped.
And the acute withdrawal from prescription drugs is horrible.
It's scary.
And after that, what happens is, you
get dysphoria, which is a word I hadn't heard before,
but it's actually the opposite of euphoria.
So imagine someone really happy--the opposite of that is
depressed and this emotional detachment that is kind
of unbearable.
So he just emotionally disappeared for years.
As a result, because I couldn't emotionally connect with him,
I started emotionally connecting with other people.
Not like an emotional affair with other people,
but I spent more time with my family,
and I spent more time with my friends.
And I just connected with other people because he
couldn't connect with me.
I am a girl who was raised with this concept
that we get married and we stay married,
and that I guess this was my challenge, that I was supposed
to carry this load and help him get through it even if we
couldn't emotionally connect, even if I didn't
get kind of the help or the support
that I felt like I needed.
On top of this, I am a divorce attorney mediator,
so I get divorce.
I actually know how horrible it is.
I didn't have any illusions that the grass was greener
on the other side.
And I was committed to him.
I loved him, you know?
I didn't have a partner, though, and it was really hard.
But on the other hand, he wasn't cheating on me.
He wasn't, you know, addicted to porn.
He'd worked through his drug addiction, which is amazing
because that's a super hard thing to do,
and I was super proud of him for that.
And I didn't come from a family of divorce,
so I didn't know how to do it.
And honestly, I was terrified.
I'm the oldest child as well, so I
was terrified that I'd just disappoint everybody.
I stuck it out.
And I stuck it out for a long time.
And then, randomly, he was going to leave.
That was devastating.
It took me to this point where I'm like,
"Wow, like, I've loved you, and I've struggled,
and I've sacrificed everything for you."
And so he left me.
And as hard as that was, to realize that this thing that
was never supposed to crumble was crumbling,
it was this amazing gift, too, because I could move on.
It's a hard message to convey, just because everybody's
divorce is so different.
It's not like there's a common story.
I mean, there are certainly themes to divorce.
But if you can be partners and make something work, great.
You know, fight for it.
Divorce is not fun for anybody.
But the advice that I'd give is that God has a plan,
and it's not always the blueprint
that you think it should be.
And so just listen and ask and be open to different answers.
It's all God.
It's all the Atonement.
Sometimes those ways aren't through the joys
and the blessings and the gifts, but really
through the challenges and the opportunities
that we have to embrace them and learn from them.
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