The Murder of a Marriage

by anonymous contributor.

… Soon, another priest in our regular parish told him the same.  After all, they said, “everyone who applied for an annulment gets one.” …

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I remember when it began. My dear husband had clearly changed and became cold and distant. I could see him distancing himself from me.  Eventually our whole life together – our children’s whole family life as they had grown up – became something that he rewrote to erase it all.

I truly felt that our past was destroyed, killed, murdered, snuffed out. All our happy memories of our life together were now labeled as a mistake that he was making right by abandoning me, his wife, and mother of his children. I was trashed and my shortcomings paraded constantly to our friends and family in his desire to justify what he was doing.

He wanted to have more children, he claimed; but when I suggested that he have them with me (his wife) he told me I was old, no fun, and my body was too old, and I could no longer “keep up with him running.” I was able to go on daily runs, but I apparently wasn’t fast enough, anymore, for his standards.

However, none of that mattered. The only thing that mattered was that he was “doing right’” by chasing his desire for a newer model, hot, young, wrinkle-free, hard-body-version that was going to bring him the “happiness and contentment” that he had not had for a single moment – in the nearly 30 years we had been together (dating and then marriage).   Plus, he found her – that new model, younger, wrinkle-free-hard-body, who could keep up with him on marathons. This all seemed rather plastic to me, being California and all, but that’s just my opinion.

Meanwhile, our children’s family had been murdered. No one remembers our anniversary. Shortly after our separation, I mentioned to my sister-in-law that I’m pained by no one acknowledging our anniversary and she told me there is nothing to celebrate. Meanwhile, she and her children remember and acknowledge her anniversary, even though she had been a widow for many years.

I am not supposed to have good memories of my husband and our life together. I am not supposed to still have feelings for him. The secular message is that I am supposed to have moved on and have only anger and hatred for him – the father of my children and my husband. The new hard-body replacement wifey clearly is watching me any time I am around them, she cannot stand to allow my husband and I to have conversations.  I am – like our marriage – supposed to have been murdered/erased.

Even our local Catholic marriage tribunal is doing their best to try to change the past and erase our marriage. After my dear spouse submitted a petition that had absolutely no grounds, they still pushed forward. Despite clear evidence that the libellus/petition was lacking the requirements set forth in the canon law, they still pushed it as a case that they accepted. They rejected my request to reject my husband’s petition.

Thankfully, and all glory to God, at this moment, this baseless, groundless petition for annulment has not progressed –at least not yet.

Years earlier, even before we were separated, when my husband had first changed, he had been talking to one of the local priests (who I, with naive trust, had hoped would help us heal whatever was wrong). Instead, that priest put the idea in my husband’s head that the “solution to his search for contentment and happiness” (that he claimed was impossible with me) was to go get our marriage annulled.  Murder it. Erase it. Soon, another priest in our regular parish told him the same.  After all, they said, “everyone who applied for an annulment gets one.” EVERY couple this priest had referred to the tribunal had gotten their marriage annulment. The priest literally seemed to BRAG when he told me this when I confronted him the next day. My heart sank at the betrayal. First, I was betrayed by my dear husband, whose affections had been distracted by some hot young hardbody (one of the many actress model artists who had 1000, mostly male, followers on her multiple online websites). It IS Los Angeles, after all, and these women are a dime a dozen. Then, I was betrayed our pastors, in whom I had put my trust.

Murdering one’s marriage is a good analogy. They murdered the safety I once felt with my dear husband in our marriage and life together.  I had never, once, even imagined that we would ever divorce.   I developed anxiety that I had never had before.  I felt so safe back then, before all this re-writing history to erase the life we had, and abandonment, had begun.