I’ve always cringed at the term starter marriage and its ugly implications, despite the fact that it’s now the most apt phrase I can use to describe my own. Looking back, it’s so easy to see how it happened—how the entire relationship was set up to fail from the start.

I was engaged at 23 and married shortly aft er my 24th birthday. All told, from fi rst date to our walk down the aisle, my husband and I had known each other for only a little over a year. We were really in love, but even I wasn’t so naïve as to believe that would be enough. I had read all the statistics and stubbornly ignored them. I was convinced that we were better than that, that we simply wouldn’t ever view divorce as a viable option, which is, of course, exactly what everyone else in my situation thinks..

We lasted through our first anniversary and half of one more year. A few weeks after his 30th birthday and a few weeks before what would have been our second wedding anniversary, my copy of our signed divorce decree arrived in the mail at a new home where I now lived without him, marking our split as legal and final..

In the short months leading up to our wedding, I had a nagging feeling that something might be wrong. Rather than explore it with my close friends and family, or in pre-marital counseling with my fiancé, or even with my own therapist, I chalked it up to the anxiety that I thought surely must accompany such a big life change and worked overtime to ignore it. This was something that was only beginning to take shape, some dark shadow to which I wasn’t quite ready to give light—something about the way my soon-tobe husband seemed to manipulate our conversations, the way he’d sometimes talk to me during an argument, his tendency toward being controlling and verbally aggressive in a way that made me distinctly uncomfortable..

A different kind of girl would have (smartly) seen those early markers for what would later become abhorrent emotionally and verbally abusive behavior, calmly returned her emerald engagement ring, and said goodbye. I let myself believe that my future husband couldn’t really be a man like that. He appeared decidedly and impressively self-aware, and he readily acknowledged that he had some issues he was still working on. This made me feel hopeful and confident, and it also made me more lenient. Most importantly, he was extremely convincing. When you love someone, who doesn’t want to believe the things they tell you?.

So I blamed my husband’s increasingly troubling behavior on his complicated childhood, and I convinced myself that my strong personality and ability to hold my own in an argument would allow me to push back against the things I was beginning to see in him that I didn’t like. I focused instead on what had drawn me to him in the first place: our matched very left-leaning political ideology, the job he held in social justice and advocacy that I greatly respected, his gifted intelligence, and the way he challenged me, I thought at the time, to be a better person. I foolishly thought that these qualities, coupled with the fact that (at least some of the time) we had a lot of fun together, would lead naturally toward a marriage built on mutual respect, equality, kindness, and our shared happiness..

It’s frightening how easy it is for someone to alter your entire reality. It builds around you slowly, brick by brick, until suddenly you're enclosed and cannot find the door that lets you out. Respect and equality didn’t grow between us over time. I was told repeatedly by my husband that these were marital sentiments I would have to earn from him through what turned out to be a complex process that felt increasingly unfair and unrealistic. Rather than seeing the incredible inappropriateness of someone berating me about my incompetence when I arrived four minutes late to pick him up from work, or who made me feel childish and small for crying when I was told again and again how stupid he thought I was, I slowly grew accustomed to what I naively called my husband’s “temper.” In moments of clarity, he freely admitted to these issues and made strides (and not insignificant ones) to overcome them. But it wasn’t enough..

By the end, a few days after his own friends intervened and sat me down to have my first really honest conversation about what was going on at home, what I found was that it was remarkably easy to leave. Once I saw things for what they really were, once that spell had been broken, I realized that the bond between us was irrevocably severed, that I would never be able to trust this person again, regardless of how much therapy or anger management he quickly agreed to. The choice was not agonizing; it simply came down to him or me, and I chose my own mental health and my desire to eventually participate in a truly healthy, equal partnership with someone else over honoring the vows I had once made to him..

This admission is also frightening. I promised for better or worse, and then when faced with worse, I walked away. I fully acknowledge my ex-husband’s culpability in this choice, but I can’t help but feel the great sense of personal failure that accompanies divorce—I should have seen those warning signs earlier; I should have stood up for myself more; I should have communicated more honestly with the people in my support network about what was going on; I should have urged my husband to get help in the beginning, before things got quite so ugly; I shouldn’t have married him at all..

In the aftermath of our goodbye, I believed briefly that it would be a long time before I’d let myself love anyone again, that what I needed was extensive time alone to become grounded, though in what, I wasn’t sure. My own self-worth? The qualities in a partner that I had mistakenly chosen to prioritize? What needed to be processed in order to move forward? This was compounded by the feeling that I had blown my one chance. In the future, how could I not now feel a little like a fraud? I promised someone forever, and then I broke that promise. What would I have left to give to anyone who came aft er? And how could I ever expect them to believe me?.

In truth, it was not nearly as diffi cult as I thought to open my heart again. Earnest in my desire to learn from my mistakes, I gave much greater consideration to what was actually important to me in a relationship. I sought mutual respect and a strong desire for equal partnership, someone who treated me kindly and with love even when we did not agree. I made these things more important than searching for someone who shared my exact political ideals and had a Master’s degree, and I’m ashamed to admit that my current partner, who is one of the most wonderful and amazing men that I have ever known, is someone who the pre-marriage-snobby-andelitist- graduate-student me would have turned down for a fi rst date several years ago. Th at most certainly would have been my loss.

My boyfriend and I are expecting a baby in March, the fi rst child for each of us. I am confi dent that he will be a great, loving father, something I could not say about my fi rst husband at any point during our brief courtship and marriage. (Th is was a position I thought he’d “grow into,” another clear red fl ag that I see now, in hindsight, I missed). My boyfriend and I have discussed our future together in great detail, but I’m determined to do things right this time. I will not rush into a marriage, no matter how sure I feel of things in this moment. I will have better boundaries. I will be more honest with myself about what is and isn’t possible, about which issues I feel can be worked on long-term and which I feel have to fi rst be negotiated before either of us can make a permanent, meaningful vow to share the rest of our lives with the person we love.

I can’t pretend that I have an appropriate context to make sweeping generalizations about anyone else’s divorce experience except my own. But I do know that it would have been easy to let myself feel bitter or resentful, to walk away from my fi rst marriage as someone jaded and cynical when it came to any future endeavors involving my heart. It would have been easy to close the door swift ly on a new relationship before it even had a chance to start, to grow guarded, afraid of how disastrously it could all fall apart. But I don’t want to carry that kind of ugliness around inside of me.

Instead, I am choosing to say yes. Yes to fear of what I don’t yet know, to giving up sole control of my life by letting someone else into it. Yes to possibility. I’m interested in learning where I misstepped, in discovering what I failed to do and bring to my fi rst marriage that contributed to its failure, so that my second will not suff er the same fate. I hope with sincerity that my ex-husband gets healthier, that he eventually fi nds happiness with himself and someone else. I hope that I’ve grown healthier too, more aware of my own needs, more knowledgeable about what both my partner and I deserve from each other. Now, as I look to the future with a person who pushes me toward self-betterment by using his own kindness and gentle, compassionate spirit as a mirror, what I feel the most is gratitude.

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KIRSTEN CLODFELTER
Kirsten CLODFELTER holds an MFA in fiction from George Mason University and currently teaches English Composition. Her writing has been published most recently in The Iowa Review, Brevity, Avery, and Modern DC Business Magazine.