Getting a Divorce: Life After Getting Married Young

This one is going to be a bit tough to write. Getting a divorce was never something I saw for my life, and I was a firm “I don’t believe in divorce” person. For some back story, my ex-wife and I were high school sweethearts. We started dating right before my senior year of high school and dated on and off until we got married 3 years later. I was 20 and she was 19. The reality is we weren’t actually ready to get married, but she joined the military and we wanted to be able to live together. This is a very common thing in the military spouse world.

Our wedding day was beautiful and at this point in my life I have no regrets. My marriage taught me so many things and I wouldn’t be where I am without it. Being young and committing yourself to another person is tough. You’re growing and changing so much in your early 20s. I wish we had had the opportunity to do that growth without being tied to each other. Neither of us were perfect, obviously. In the end we had some fundamental differences that we just couldn’t get past.

Divorce is expensive and messy and I’m not here to glorify it. However, I am here to say that it was the best choice for me. Life after divorce is… interesting to say the least. I worked remote at the time so all of the friends I had lived hours away and I was very lonely for a while. This was tough to navigate. It sent me back to therapy (which I should have been in anyway). Making friends as an adult is HARD. Then, I decided to go back to school. My first year of school was tough. I commuted 45 minutes, I was older than all my classmates, and I really didn’t hang around campus that much. However, in my thermodynamics class I finally made my first friend and turns out, he was older than me! This really jump-started the life I have now.

Once you make one friend, it gets a lot easier. Then it kind of snowballs from there. Now, I’ve got a fantastic group of friends that I spend a lot of my time with. It has made school easier, life easier, you name it. I look back on the person I was leaving my marriage and who I am now, and I couldn’t be more proud of the growth I’ve experienced. Life is so much brighter now and I couldn’t be happier about it.