Cutting the deadweight

I realize that I am not alone in this, but in the last year or so, I have undoubtedly come to terms with who I am as a person and what I want out of this thing called life. To put it bluntly; I have been married for 14 years and as of this very moment, my plans are to be divorced by the end of 2021. Saying that I am ECSTATIC about coming to this decision would be a massive understatement. I have never been this certain about anything before and it is a feeling that I cannot really put into words, but I am going to try.

Recognizing that your spouse is deadweight in a crisis (or, let us say, a PANDEMIC) can change your entire perspective. In my case, it just opened my eyes to the fact that he has, to a certain extent, been deadweight not just since the pandemic began, but this ENTIRE TIME.

So, while I certainly cannot blame the end of my marriage on the pandemic alone; I CAN, however, say that it was the catalyst for what I will forever refer to as MY AWAKENING.

From a young age, my mother instilled in me that independence was vital. She taught me that I should always be able to take care of myself and that anyone who came into my life should only do so because I wanted them to and not because I NEEDED them to. That stuck with me. Because of this valuable life lesson, I have always been prepared to do things on my own.

Despite this, when I got married, I expected that part of me to change. Not much, perhaps just a little bit. But as it turned out, I was never given the opportunity to change. I never felt secure enough to allow myself to be anything other than independent. And in hindsight, that is unfortunate. After all, it is not a controversial take to say that marriage should, at the very least, be 50/50. I mean, we aren’t living in the 1950’s and I certainly don’t expect or want to be a “kept woman” or anything of the sort.

I have always worked and made my own money and if we are being totally honest, I have always been the main breadwinner for the duration of this marriage. I am the only one who maintained consistency when it came to employment and when there were times of struggle, I was the one who had to figure things out.

Of course, it goes without saying that I am not perfect and will absolutely take responsibility for my contributions to the demise of this “union” as well. A big one would be putting blinders on for far too long and refusing to evaluate things for what they clearly were. How could I have still been so stupid; I would think to myself. I spent so much time in therapy, working on myself and I had done so well, but I was still allowing myself to deal with this? I could not rationalize it. But I digress, nonetheless.

It all just hit me like a brick one day, when we were arguing about haircuts. Haircuts during a global pandemic.

(This was before they shut down the barber shops and salons.) I asked him if he really felt that it was smart to continue to go to a barber every two weeks when people were dying. He said that I was overreacting because of “my anxiety.”

I reminded him that my aunt had just died after contracting the very virus that I was afraid of him bringing home just from going to work each day. He said that “he wore his mask every day and he felt fine.”

I asked him to give me his list of grocery items so that I could order them online like I did for literally everything I needed, but he “preferred” going to the store himself.

I constantly pointed out that we were both high risk and that we should be extremely cautious about staying safe and he just did not seem to care. It even got to the point where he just started to blatantly lie to me about thing he would do and places he would go. When I would call him out on it, he would gaslight me and say he was lying so that “I wouldn’t worry.”

The final straw was when he told me that he was going to work overtime, but instead spent the entire day with his parents. Both parents have jobs in which they work with the public. Mind you, his parents live 20 minutes away and he had seen them a few months before all hell broke loose. My parents live 1,200 miles away and I have not seen them in almost 3 years, but his excuse was “he missed them.” He put us at risk because “he missed them.” I video chat with my parents when I miss them.

At this point, I had already stopped sleeping in the bedroom with him because I was going to do everything I could to protect myself since he clearly was not. I just thought to myself, if I cannot rely on him to keep me safe during a time like this, what could the future possibly hold? He is literally just tying me down. He’s DEADWEIGHT and it is time to cut him loose. And by the end of the year, that’s exactly what I’m going to do.