Welcome to our series, The Divorce Diaries. In our past instalments over the last few months we’ve covered everything from the effect of lockdown on divorces to whether they’re contagious and have now spoken to dozens of women – including one whose husband announced he was leaving her to have an open relationship with a 19-year-old and another who was quite literally ghosted by her own husband.
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This week we hear from a Guest Writer from 9Honey who confesses that she thought she and her ex would spend some solid time being single again… until he quickly got a new girlfriend and the race was on…
I couldn’t wait to get out of my marriage. It had been going badly for two years when we both amicably came to the decision to end it.
I wanted to end things before we had kids and I was really keen to be a mum. So my then-husband Mark and I split, and it went as well as it could. There wasn’t too much drama and we managed to stay friends for a while.
We moved on with our lives, which was easy enough to do because we don’t have kids. But I was very upset to be told that he had met someone else and become engaged very quickly! Just four months after our divorce he met his now-wife. I couldn’t believe it.
We’d both said that we wanted to be single for a while, just to take it easy. I recall he said that after a six-year marriage – and prior to marriage we’d been together for seven years – he just wanted to be on his own. And he made a nasty comment to me, that he knew I’d be single “for ages” because he couldn’t imagine another guy wanting to “put up with me”! He said it with a smile on his face, but I could tell that he was really being serious.
A friend told me that she believed most men can’t cope on their own, especially if they are used to having a woman in the house, doing absolutely everything and really looking after them. She predicted that Mark would find a new woman as soon as he could. I didn’t believe her but she was right.
I found out through my former sister-in-law. We still caught up every now and then and she was the one that broke it to me, that Mark was seeing a new woman and was madly in love with her.
Then they got engaged, and that was when I really hit the roof. I felt awful that he found love so quickly and I was still alone.
That was the time I started internet dating and how I found my now-husband Brett. He was the first man I dated after my divorce and, even though Brett is absolutely the love of my life, I was so determined to get married as soon as possible – and a big part of that reason was to “get back” at Mark. My family was concerned that I was rushing things and, in a way, I was.
I just wanted to prove to my ex that I could find a fabulous man who would more than “put up with” me!
My former sister-in-law broke the news to Mark that I was engaged and, later, told me that Mark seemed “shocked.” It felt so good to hear that!
He ended up sending me his best wishes and I couldn’t resist a little dig at him for his nasty comment from a year ago, I texted him about how he must be surprised that another man will “put up with” me!
This article was reproduced with permission from 9Honey. To read the original article, click here.
