The Knowing

You can grieve a marriage long before it ends. Sometimes the mourning begins while you are still writing the holiday cards.

I want to tell you something that I think a lot of women understand but rarely say out loud: I had been mourning my marriage for years before it ended.

Not dramatically. Not in a way that anyone around me would have noticed. I was still writing the holiday cards, still planning the trips, still fighting for our anniversaries every single year. I was still showing up. Still loving him. Still trying to find the words to express to him how lucky we were to have the life that we had built together. But underneath all of that effort, there was a knowing. Quiet and persistent and impossible to fully silence. A knowing that no matter how hard I tried, no matter how much love I poured into this marriage, no matter how many ways I attempted to show him what we had, it was not going to be enough. Because the only thing I could work on any harder was myself.

So that is what I did.

For the past couple of years before he left, I had been doing the work. Not in any formal, scheduled way, but in the in-between spaces of a busy life. Audible after Audible while I folded laundry, while I drove home from school drop-off, while I moved through the quiet parts of the day that no one else saw. Workshops and meditations and podcasts. Books I read in the margins of a life that rarely felt like mine. I consumed anything I could find that might heal the broken parts of me, help me locate my own story, or simply make me more comfortable in my own company.

That last one mattered more than I knew at the time. Learning to be comfortable alone, genuinely comfortable, not just resigned to it, was one of the most quietly radical things I did in those years. Because the loneliness inside a marriage is a particular kind of loneliness. It is the kind that has no clean explanation, no obvious source, no name you can give it at a dinner party. It lives alongside love and routine and the outward appearance of a shared life, and it is very easy to convince yourself that what you are feeling is something else entirely. Getting comfortable in my own company was, in some ways, how I learned to stop abandoning myself in order to outrun it.

Looking back now, I can see the shape of what was happening, even if I could not see it clearly then. There were too many stepping stones laid out in front of me for it to feel entirely coincidental. Something, some combination of instinct and grace and whatever you believe guides these things, was preparing me. I believe that now. I believe I was being quietly strengthened in the years before he left, nudged toward my own resilience before I would need to rely on it entirely. I could see, with increasing clarity, that my two daughters would be launching into their own adult lives within a few years, and that if I was going to have a life I loved on the other side of that, I was going to have to build it for myself. Not as a backup plan. As a necessity.

There was always a part of me that wished he would see it.

The beauty and simplicity of a life well lived. Travel and memories and raising children and watching them become these remarkable, complicated, wonderful preteens on the verge of adulthood. Hosting our friends and neighbors. Serving our community. All of that makes for a beautiful life. I believed it then, and I believe it now, perhaps even more fiercely now that I am on the other side of losing it.

But if you are chasing excitement, if you are chasing money and power and adventure and secrecy, then a simple, well-lived life will never be enough. It will always feel too small. Too quiet. Too ordinary. And the person standing in the kitchen at the end of the day with a warm meal and a how was your day will start to look like part of the scenery rather than the reason you come home.

I did not fully understand that then. I do now.

When I started connecting with midlife women about the menopause transition, when I began building what would become Women Mastering Midlife, I still wanted to keep the glossy eight-by-ten version of my family intact. The professional photo on the wall. The image of wholeness. I talked about perimenopause and nutrition and hormones and sleep, but I never talked about the quiet erosion that time can inflict on a marriage. I never talked about the things I had stopped questioning.

The late nights. The extra travel. The explanations that did not quite add up but were easier to accept than to challenge.

I look back now and I see so many moments that I let pass without saying anything. Moments where something felt off, where my instincts were nudging me, where a question formed in my mind and I swallowed it before it reached my mouth. And I ask myself now, with the clarity that only comes after: why didn’t I say something?

Was it because I wanted to keep the peace?

Was I scared that if I pulled on one thread, everything would come unraveled in a way I could not control?

Was I afraid of what it would do to my daughters, the thought of them living in two separate houses, splitting holidays and weekends, carrying the weight of a broken home on their still-growing shoulders?

Was it financial insecurity, the quiet math that runs in the background when you have not worked outside the home in over a decade?

Or was it something deeper than all of that? Some combination of love and habit and hope that kept me getting up every morning, setting the coffee maker, packing lunch, saying goodbye at the door at five in the morning. That kept me taking the lunch bag and the coffee mug every evening, standing at the door with a warm meal and a genuine desire to hear about his day.

I do not have a clean answer. I think it was all of it, tangled together in the way that long marriages tangle things, until you cannot separate the love from the fear from the duty from the denial.

I am not writing this to assign blame or to catalog what went wrong. I am writing it because I think there are women reading this who recognize something in what I am describing. The knowing. That low hum of awareness that something is not right, paired with the daily decision to keep going anyway. The strange, exhausting work of grieving something that has not yet ended, of mourning a future you can feel slipping away while you are still standing in the middle of it, folding laundry and signing permission slips and pretending that the life on display is the life being lived.

If that is where you are, I want you to hear this: the knowing is not weakness. It is not denial, even though it can look like it from the outside. It is the sound of a woman trying to hold her world together with her bare hands while slowly, painfully coming to terms with the fact that she cannot hold it together alone. And that she was never supposed to.

The work I did in those final years was not a sign of failure. It was the first real investment I made in myself in a very long time. All of it, the books and the meditations and the hours of listening while the rest of my life moved around me, was pointing me toward the same understanding: that I deserved to build a life that did not depend on someone else’s willingness to show up for it. That my joy, my sense of purpose, my future, those things were mine to create. Not mine to earn by being good enough, patient enough, quiet enough.

I spent a long time being quiet.

I do not know, and will probably never know, exactly what I was being prepared for or by what. But I think about those years differently now than I did when I was living inside them. What felt like loneliness was also, in some quiet way, becoming. What felt like treading water was also building something I would later need to stand on. All of those hours, the small, private, unremarkable ones, were laying a foundation I did not yet know I was going to need.

That is the thing about the knowing. It does not always come with a plan. Sometimes it just comes with a nudge: go deeper, get stronger, learn to be enough company for yourself. And if you listen, even imperfectly, even while still showing up for everything else, it does its work.

I am still learning what it built in me. I suspect I will be for a long time.

If you have ever mourned something that was not yet gone, if you have ever known before you were ready to know, you are not alone in that. And the fact that you kept going anyway is not something to be ashamed of. It is something to honor.

*This is my personal narrative, told from my perspective and my point of view. It is not the full story. It is mine.*