Thanks for the kind words! And, you’re absolutely right! I was nice and vague about my leaving. Unfortunately, the answer isn’t a simple one, and likely requires five blog posts to fully untangle. In short, I met my ex when I was 20, got engaged at 23, and married shortly after turning 24. Really, a lot of this boils down to lack of exposure and getting married before having a fully-developed brain/knowing who in the hell I was.

I went from a wanna-be housewife to someone very different after moving out of the small city where I grew up and the even smaller town I spent my college years in. Exposure to new beliefs and ideas eventually broke me down enough to question my own. When I did this, my political and religious beliefs changed. The more grown-up version of myself was no longer walking in sync with the man who didn’t waiver when presented with all the new. Which is okay — he didn’t have to change because I did.

A few years following our wedding, I felt a deeper and deeper urge to explore more, take more risks, and design a slightly less-traditional life. I invited him to do all of this with me, but in his heart of hearts, he didn’t want to. He liked his life as it was. Meeting in the middle would have meant both of us would have had to abandon some version of ourselves and how we wanted to live. We were still young and childless, so staying in a relationship that was keeping me from a life I wanted to live didn’t make sense. Despite realizing staying wasn’t right, I stayed and tried to suppress my wishes for longer than I’d like to admit — and was wildly unhappy and resentful because of it.

I’d like to think that the right kind of love supersedes dreams/ambitions, but I’m not sure that it does. It didn’t in this case. And I think that’s okay.