Tough Love: Did My Ex-Husband Ever Love Me?

Dear Abigail,

My marriage ended recently, and explaining what went wrong to friends and family has been tricky. From the outside, it looks like your typical midlife crisis. My husband became increasingly unhappy with most things in his life—his job, where we live, and me. When he said he wanted out of our marriage, he told me that he never loved me. To my friends, he is, of course, rationalizing. He’s just spinning a story to justify his decision.

I think he’s actually telling the truth. The thing is, for almost the entire duration of my decade-long relationship, I had a nagging gut feeling that my husband didn’t think very highly of me. It was only in the first few months after we met, while we maintained a long-distance relationship, that he seemed over the moon about me. But as soon as we ended up in the same place and began dating in person, his enthusiasm waned. He grew anxious about my flaws, eager to teach me to improve them (he always considered me pretty poor at conversation), and, over time, his dominant feelings toward me seemed to be irritation and resentment. By that point, however, I had come to admire his integrity, intelligence, and faith, and I was desperate to reclaim his early devotion. I didn’t think I could find anyone else better than him, so I stuck around as long as he would have me.

And he stuck by me, too. Despite his complaints against me, he would affirm that he loved me, and we got married. I continued to feel deep down that he didn’t think much of me, but I explained away those feelings by telling myself that we had different love languages. I figured he had to love me on some level—he had committed to me in marriage, after all—and that was good enough.

According to his explanation, he initially thought we were a good match—compatible on paper. So he pursued me. But he ultimately found that he couldn’t really connect with me and, for that reason, never loved me like he wanted to. As much as this devastated me to hear, it fit my experience. I think it’s the truth.

This truth is hard to work through and recover from, though, when almost everyone I talk to about it refuses to believe it. I know it seems like a very strange tale. I also know that, out of their love for me, my friends want to insist on my irresistibility. Surely my husband must’ve loved me at some point, they say, because I’m just so lovable. Even the therapist that I spoke with briefly about it couldn’t hide her skepticism.

Abigail, how do I know what’s true? And how do I recover from it? This marriage gave me two beautiful little boys, and I don’t know what I will say when they ask me one day why their dad and I aren’t together.

—Bella, 37

Bella,

You’re not crazy for wanting to know why your husband left—for wanting to pinpoint a satisfying reason beyond “midlife crisis,” whatever that means. You need reasons because we all do. Our desire to know why misfortune befell us is among the most ancient and deepest yearnings of the human heart.

And yet—life doesn’t always give us an answer. Your husband may not even fully understand why he was happy once, then unhappy after. Why he’s unhappy now, or why he left. It brings to mind the poem by Dante Gabriel Rossetti:

From perfect grief there need not be

Wisdom or even memory:

One thing then learnt remains to me,—

The woodspurge has a cup of three.

As much as we want answers, as much as we want closure, nature sometimes withholds both.

Did your husband love you once and stop, or never love you at all? You drag yourself through the history of your relationship—as any woman would—searching for clues. And when you review the tapes, when you scan your emotional archives, you conclude that he never seemed all that delighted with or enamored by you. The explanation he gave on the way out the door, icy as it was, seems right to you: He never loved you.