Happy Silver Anniversary, Ornoth

[ornoth]

Twenty-five years ago was my wedding day. I wasn’t going to write anything about it, but I suppose a few off-the-cuff thoughts would be appropriate.

It was the best of times; it was the worst of times: our relationship was the proverbial two-edged knife. I’ve always tried to treasure the amazing joys it provided; and these days I look back on the intense pain it ended in with a lot more compassion, both for myself and for the woman who accompanied me.

Lord knows neither of us were emotionally mature enough to manage that relationship very well. In that sense, the marriage was a crucible of self-learning. There’s nothing that will reveal your own faults more starkly than sharing your life with another person. But it also showed us our potential and our worth, as well.

Marriage caused us both to experience a lot of growth… it’s just sad that so much of it came as a result of our relationship’s unforeseen and rapid collapse.

For me, one of those lessons was that some questions will never have adequate answers. Why did it fail? How much was my fault? How much hers? How much was real and how much was fake? After the divorce, I found it difficult to deal with not having any answers; as a child I had wanted to live forever just so that I could see and know “how it all turned out”. With my marriage, I saw it and lived it, but I will never fully know what happened.

Another lesson has been that you can’t go back. I daresay we both lost a lot of our innocence when we separated. Many years have passed since then, but although time heals, deep wounds also leave enduring scars. The simple, complete faith I had in her—and she in I—isn’t something that I could ever extend again. You never love as deeply and vulnerably as you do before you’ve had your first heartbreak.

Looking back, the flaws we never saw seem obvious now, and trivial when compared to the connection and potential that we shared. If I were to remarry (an extremely unlikely event), would I make better choices now and avoid the mistakes that destroyed the most precious thing I ever had? I’m wise enough now to know that, no matter how much I’ve matured emotionally, it’s impossible to say. But certainly I’ve stopped believing that any woman is Snow White, and no man—even me—is Prince Charming.

The joys… they were amazing, fulfilling, and I will treasure them every day of my life. They haven’t invented words to describe how happy I was on that day 25 years ago. But those few years of joy came at the price of many more years spent bearing the pain of the breakup.

You might find it unsatisfying that I can’t resolve those two extremes and synthesize them into a single emotional state—positive, negative, or neutral—but that too is the complex nature of marriage and divorce. There is no unambiguous “bottom line”. It was what it was: the most amazing, the most painful, and possibly the most educational experience I’ve ever been through.

And that’s really all I can leave you with.