I write about love, relationships, and divorce. I elevate awareness to the abuse men and women can experience while they attempt to dissolve a relationship.
I talk about the hardships and the heartache.
I also talk about self-responsibility.
My ex-husband did terrible things. Nothing will change or excuse that. I couldn’t influence him while we were married, and I certainly can’t influence him now that we are divorced.
I can be accountable to myself.
I can reflect.
I can learn how to love better.
I’m not strictly talking about loving others, I’m talking about loving myself.
I deserved better, and not only from a man I mistakenly married. I deserved better from myself. I deserved to understand how I was neglecting myself, in favor of loving another.
I gave into misery.
It wasn’t my own unhappiness.
It was an inability to make my marriage happy. It was the inability to resolve conflict with a man. It was one person trying, and another person with their feet dug into the sand. A person who wanted to be in control.
The only thing worse than being miserable…
Is fighting misery and prolonging it.
But I did it.
Many of us do it. It could be a marriage, a job, or some other aspect of our lives that is making us miserable. We don’t get out. We tenaciously attempt to salvage the unsalvageable.
We don’t give up because we’ve invested too many years.
We want the outcome we desire.
When I gave into misery, I stopped loving well.
I especially, stopped loving myself well.
I always say, “We indulge the ugliness in failing relationships, when we should be rescuing our own individual beauty, so that at least one of the two survive.”
We will experience misery in our lives.
It’s a part of the human experience.
But how we deal with that unhappiness, can be the difference in understanding what we deserve, rather than what we should tolerate.
I tolerated my misery.
That was my mistake.
The more my marriage crumbled, the more I gave into it. I rejected my truth. I tenaciously refused to give up. I made excuses for why I wouldn’t leave my husband.
I refer to that time in my life, as fighting God.
Because in order to abandon my misery, I had to accept an alternate path.
A path I didn’t want to go down.
But again, I discovered that the only thing worse than being miserable, is fighting misery and prolonging it. I wasn’t embracing my unhappiness and dealing with it.
I thought I was.
I thought marriage counseling, and pleading with my husband was attempting to regain my happiness. I thought fighting for my marriage was worthwhile. And it was, to a point.
But only a point.
You can only fight misery for so long.
It will take you down.
You will stop loving yourself well. You will stop loving yourself, to a degree that you may no longer like yourself. You will neglect your own self-preserving instincts.
You will forget that to love another human being well, you must love yourself first. You must be happy. You must feel good about yourself.
You have to rescue yourself, especially when you realize you are unable to rescue the person you love. You have to love you. You have to choose you. You have to prioritize you.
The only thing worse than being miserable…
Is fighting misery and prolonging it.
You have to love better.
You have to especially, love yourself better.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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From The Good Men Project on Medium
What Does Being in Love and Loving Someone Really Mean? | My 9-Year-Old Accidentally Explained Why His Mom Divorced Me | The One Thing Men Want More Than Sex | The Internal Struggle Men Battle in Silence |
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Photo credit: Alexander Krivitskiy on Unsplash