#apologies for this being kind of all over the place timewise but that's just how it fell out

[fhylie]

Eleven days ago, my divorce was finalized.

I want to lead with that, because if feels like I've been holding myself in for a long, long time. Probably unhealthily long. I think it's a signature of the relationship that I ended that I feel like me having emotions revealed to someone else can only end badly. 'Why not just avoid that,' I constantly say to myself, 'and then other people don't have to get hurt by me?' You can see the obvious wrongness in that line of thinking, I hope. Hiding my feelings from people was an unhelpful poison and only wound me up repeatedly back on myself until I could only snap angrily or float emotionlessly, usually the second.

In the interest of self-help, I want to try and lay out the course of what prompted me to end my marriage. Maybe having it out there will help, maybe it won't. What I don't intend to do is name names, because that's not really good for anyone. Frankly, the people that know me already know who anyone I'm about to describe is.

Let's start at the end and work backwards, I suppose. On October 23rd, 2016, I had a heated argument with my ex-wife about whether or not I was allowed to be friends with a girl I met online through FFXIV. We had been friends for a while before that, probably a good year or so, and my ex-wife knew that the two of us talked about our personal problems when we couldn't get past them ourselves. I think that my ex-wife deeply envied that connection, because over time I had come to not be able to have those sorts of discussions with her, and mostly this was because almost all of the problems I had been having had my ex-wife at their root.

Going through the list, the problem we had with the most immediacy was my ex-wife's refusal or inability to leave our condo, which meant that the condo we had bought together relied solely on my income, and that any and all tasks requiring interacting with the outside world fell to me. I don't want to suggest that we divided things in an equal way, either, as almost all of the cooking and most of the cleaning was myself as well. In fairness, she was always the one to do laundry, and she rarely asked for help with that. However, it was a status quo I had been handling for a very long time, and so it felt very natural, but not enjoyable in any way. With my public transit commute for work, my usual days began at 5am and I would be home at 6pm, a little later if grocery shopping was needed, after which I would handle the food. When we spent time together it was usually to play games or watch shows together, which usually meant I stayed up very late - a habit I still haven't broken.

Anyways, the reasons behind her habits were a deep depression and anxiety about other people which were brought on after her mother passed away some years earlier (I want to say around 2007-2008 but can't recall), as well as her development of fibromyalgia, which left her in pain and exhausted. Looking back, I feel like I didn't do enough to take care of the first part of things, but I don't know if I ever could have done anything about the second part. I don't know that I ever could have felt like I did enough, honestly, and for a long time my role in our relationship was of a caretaker. Besides that, her emotional problems had been present before her mom passed, and we were not physically intimate for a considerable time before this October argument; probably years. It's difficult to recall when, specifically. All of these things resulted in a grinding lack of confidence in both of us, but I feel like she was always less determined than me to carry on and do things that needed to be done, even before medical problems with a concern.

Let's continue backwards in time. At the time of our marriage in 2012, my ex-wife had a best friend, of sorts, who she had met online through various games, and during 2011 and 12 actually lived with us in Canada, sharing an apartment and then later our condo with us and her husband. They were American, so there were constraints on what sort of jobs they were able to obtain, but the best friend had moved here ostensibly to go to school at the local university, so that only mattered for her husband. He was a nice enough sort, liked to read books and talk about writing. A bit of a weird guy, awkward, but then so am I.

We never really got along, I think, because of the greater context of my ex-wife's and her best friend's relationship. Before the American couple moved in, late in my relationship I was still very unhappy with the burden of responsibility I had - still with those 13-14 hour work days in 2009 or 10. I did mention I had been doing this for a while. But the important part of that time period was that one night, my ex-wife tearfully confessed to me that she thought she loved the best friend she still had not met in real life, and who was also married, and that she didn't want to lose me because of it. She asked for permission to be polyamorous, and I was some kind of combination of emotionally dishonest, a big idiot, and afraid of losing someone I had been with since 2001, so I said it was okay. That was what I had always done: let her have what she wanted and thought would make her happy and paid the cost myself. It was why it had been okay for her to leave her job after her mom died, as well, to me, even though what I knew I should have done was push her towards better recovery instead of seeking solace from people online.

So the Americans moved across the continent from the far southeastern states and the best friend and my ex-wife began their relationship. Maybe to their credit there was a minimum of physical intimacy between the two of them while I was present, but again, let's keep in mind how often I wasn't. During this time I was still physically intimate with my ex-wife as well, though probably not often enough that it mattered enough for her to even seek out a second partner. My ex-wife maintained during our divorce proceedings and to this day that they were not ever physical, though I clearly remember her embarrassed conversations on the subject with the best friend while I was around. More to the point, I specifically asked the best friend after the October 23, 2016 argument about the physical nature of their relationship and was told that I was right, and that she was upset because she thought I knew.

As a side note, the best friend is probably not a trustworthy witness for any of this, since she had/has her own emotional problems, but to be honest, I can't bring myself to be angry at her. It's not her fault I was bad enough at relationships to let it get that far. I know that after she moved away from Canada due to the cost of living here and other things related to her husband's family she had a serious breakdown, and I hope that her experiences with us didn't contribute to that. She was a good person, I think, when her presence wasn't actively fucking up my relationship with my ex-wife.

After the Americans had been around for a while, my ex-wife had decided to finally seek the benefit of psychiatric help after shutting herself in since 2007, so this would have been about 4 years, I think, of that, and less than a year or so of being with her friend. I remember feeling upset but not upset that she listened to advice about seeking help from her friend and not me, but she was getting help, so it was a net good, wherever it came from. I wanted what was good for her, and this was an extremely positive step.

After starting on antidepressants, there was a very brief spark, I think, of the person she had been nearer to the start of our relationship. She had energy, she had positive emotions, both of which had been very rare. She left the house at first with me and then on her own and looked for work, and then got a job which she stayed at for a long enough period for us to be able to move from the small apartment we were sharing with 2 other people into a good sized condo. I felt like things might have started to get better. She asked me to marry her, saying that the new mental clarity she had had from the drugs had led her to realize the depth and importance of everything I was doing for her, and thinking a dark time in my life was finally over with, I said yes. We got married in the spring of 2012, and the best friend was in the wedding party. I'm not actually clear if she was maid of honour, but it's not really important.

Then my ex-wife stopped. The antidepressants weren't enough, the counselling sessions didn't help so she stopped going, the fibromyalgia got worse, and there were too many things she didn't like about her job. I started going with her to her counselling sessions, paid for by her employer in an effort to get her back to work, to make sure she was doing them. There were maybe two times after that where she bothered to go. After a time she lost her job and, over that time, lost her willingness to go outside for any reason. The Americans moved away due to a death in the husband's family and the cost of living in this town, as I mentioned above, and I remember helping them pack their boxes and move their things into a van to go all the way back across the continent, marking one of the only times that my ex-wife came outside of the condo for any reason that year. While they were leaving, the husband took me aside privately and expressed his concern that we might not be able to afford the condo, to which I smiled tightly and said we would manage. We did manage, barely.

I became very depressed over this entire ten year time period, and I think my depression echoed hers. I felt like I wasn't good enough, that my job wasn't enough financially and so I felt like a failure there, and that I wasn't enough emotionally and so that was what made my ex-wife seek out this other relationship. Other failures in my life with education and friendships didn't help much either. I cut off contact slowly with friends, cancelling our then weekly D&D games citing my inability to run a game and manage the increasing emotional demands of my relationship. They all knew my ex-wife was jittery about having people over, even if she was friends with some of them and sometimes had played with us. In truth that was partially it, but I was also feeling ashamed at my failures and didn't feel like I could hold up being a good host anymore. It was easier for me to run away from that, and so I slowly faded away from that group of friends.

When I started playing Final Fantasy XIV at the start of A Realm Reborn, it wasn't the first MMO I played. I had played World of Warcraft for some years with the very same friends I was moving away from emotionally, not to mention my ex-wife and her best friend. I met some of the other people at PAX in Seattle a few times as well. I guess what I was unprepared for was the tremendous difference in community between WoW and XIV. Apparently, Blizzard games don't have the most friendly fan bases, and the way I had conducted myself in public forums with endless levels of concern trolling and meme yelling in trade chat certainly didn't exclude me from that judgement. But even at the outset, XIV felt different. Maybe it was because it was new, maybe it was because I was lucky, but I hit upon TALE, the free company I am with now and the one I would like to have said I always stayed with, and they were this strange group of wonderful people and roleplayers. Some of them were weird as hell, but so was I and they put up with my brand of weirdness. I had resolved to have a way better online persona in this community, and it paid off hugely.

My ex-wife and I and the best friend were all members in this time period. We all made friends and roleplayed with people in TALE and out. The ex-wife and her best friend both liked to ERP on their male characters with each other (not new behaviour, mind you), whether or not I was around. It shocked some people when it came up that we were long term dating, then married, since they knew about the other relationship first. When their relationship became more distant after the best friend moved away, my ex-wife found various new ERP partners and I didn't bat an eye, because I had been dealing with it for so long. She had stopped asking me if it was okay a long time ago, anyways. To their credit, some of those partners which found out about our relationship messaged me to ask if it was okay, which I said it was, because what basis did I have to start having a problem with it now?

I met a friend living in the same town as me through TALE. I met people I'm going to Fanfest with this year through TALE as well. I even met people that I felt like I could talk about my personal feelings regarding my relationship with. Some of them were the ERP partners of my ex-wife; I think it's significant to note that they didn't stop. A small few of them, great people all, actually had tips to try and make things better, or were disturbed that the gamer couple relationship they had seen from the outside and admired wasn't what they thought it was and wanted to prop it up since I was very open about wanting to fix things and being willing to take on anything I could to do so. One of those was a girl my ex-wife started an argument about.

I want to be clear that I think there was something to admire in our relationship. We had been together for such a long time, we were easy in each other's company, we did things together. If you didn't know the other things about our relationship and you took the way I acted about and the words I said as truth, it looked like we were a couple that was weathering the storm and our love was getting us through it. In the end, though, that wasn't true.

What my ex-wife saw is that I stayed up late to talk to a girl, I think probably more than a few times. It looked to her like I was cheating on her. Now, I know what the initial outside thought is: hey, didn't we just get through a million words about her polyamory and ERP habits? I'd like to contest that thought, but I can't. It always made the entire thing ridiculous to me, and it was the bedrock of why our marriage ended. So, having this problem with me speaking to this girl over IMs or in game, my ex-wife decided to implement controls.

At first, I was not allowed to speak to her on voice chat if my ex-wife was at home, which was always, and this became while she was at her computer, which was most of the time. This was fine, because I never got on voice chat except for raid stuff. Then, she discouraged us speaking over instant message while my ex-wife was around. Kind of weird, but I guess in an out of sight out of mind way it works. Typing to each other in game was apparently okay, because of... reasons? Once before October she got very angry that I was on voice chat at the same time as the girl while doing some content stuff with other people, which sparked a small argument about what it is I was allowed to do and who I was allowed to speak to. I felt beaten down.

I left TALE for a brief period and the both of us joined a different free company who are, by the way, wonderful people. I strongly recall someone saying something extremely minor to me and one of the officers very quickly PMing me to say was that okay? I think at this point my skin was so thick from dealing with emotional distress that I didn't even notice, but I played it off as sure, no, I'm not offended. Nevertheless, I had a difficult time really connecting with this new group of roleplayers, both because it was a new group and because I had a lot of misgivings with leaving my old one under very strange pretenses. Not that I didn't still talk to them sometimes, but we all know it's hard to feel included when you're not in the main channel of discussion. If you folks from the other company are reading this, I wish things could be less awkward.

So, October 23rd, 2016, after Thanksgiving and before Halloween. I'm still not exactly sure what made my ex-wife flip her lid, but I think it was partway between her delusion that the girl and I were hiding an affair from her and the fact that all of her controls were not having whatever the intended effect was supposed to have been. Either way, she just lost it and started messaging the girl in a public channel we were both in about how dare she do this to us and that I had lied to both of them about the things she said about what I was allowed to do. At the same time as acknowledging that I wasn't allowed to talk to her. Since the two of us were in the same room, the back half of this argument was the two of us yelling at each other in our condo. Her yelling and crying at the same time, and me trying to placate her and slowly but surely growing more frustrated until she gave the ultimatum that I had to choose my ex-wife or this girl I talked to online, and I told her fuck you, you can't tell me who I can be friends with, either you trust me or you don't. I stormed off with no explanation to the girl until much later. I sat in the bathroom of our condo with a spinning head and felt sick for a long time. I couldn't believe the violent physical reaction I was having to all this.

It was at that time that I first thought to myself that I had to try one more time, and if it didn't work I was going to get out.

A few days passed without resolution to the argument. I messaged the girl with what had happened, because she deserved to know, and found out that my ex-wife and her had spoken about this very same subject months earlier and been reassured that no, we were not having an affair. I supposed it made sense to my ex-wife that of course we would lie about it. At the end of those few days I told my now ex-wife that I wanted a divorce over the way she had treated not just me but many other people, but me most of all, for years. It was fucking hard to do and I'm not sure how I did it on that specific day.

She resolved to try harder, to start trying to leave the apartment if I would help her by going on walks, we resolved to go to couples therapy, where I got out many of the things I've said above. It didn't take. I sought my own help for depression and told a physician that I thought I was trapped in an abusive relationship. The person I was referred to was ... not good, for many reasons. My ex-wife did not try harder. She fought me every time I tried to get her out of the condo for a walk. She hated the times of day we could go (walking in the dark could be bad!) and was actively spiteful to anyone we interacted with if the walk was also to go and accomplish anything, like walking to the pharmacy for her medication. I knew nothing was going to change. It felt like she was just going through the motions to get me back to where I was before, and I couldn't be in that place anymore.

When I told her we were going through with the divorce, she cried and I felt numb. She asked me if there was anything she could do, and I told her if she had another relationship that she should absolutely not decide it was polyamorous partway through. Yes, a lot of allowing that is on me, but if there was any root to the failure it was that. She cried at that too.

I spoke with my parents and the real life friends I had cut off years ago and I was free. Some of them with strong views on the sanctity of marriage said I should stay the course, but I knew what the right decision was the entire time and I knew that telling her that the things she had done were okay was the wrong thing to do. I reconnected with a lot of people in my life and I kept talking to the girl and the rest of my online friends and I knew that everything was going to be okay eventually.

On October 12, 2018, which would have been my 17th anniversary of the start of dating my ex-wife, our divorce was finalized by the government of Canada, but if you ask me, that argument about whether I was allowed to choose my own friends was when it really died.