On Breaking Generational Curses With The Way We Love

When I was younger, I learned that 55% of marriages ended in divorce. And even at 11 years old, even when I had no idea what I’d be in for or put through, I swore my parents would defy the odds. But as I got older, I had only gotten more observant. I noticed how my mother rarely held my father’s hand. How she never kissed him on the lips. How she seemed more at peace when she was without him than she was with him. Their yelling and fighting couldn’t hold a candle to the volumes their actions spoke. And one day, it just made sense to me that they didn’t make sense together.

Because people in love don’t hurt each other on purpose. 

People in love don’t seek comfort and company in other people’s sheets.

People in love don’t stay together out of convenience or necessity. They stay because they choose to.

Up until recently, all I’ve known is sadness and anger and resentment. All I’ve known this whole time is that my parents weren’t right for each other, and so by design, I must be destined for the same fate.

I mean, I have a father so desperate to be loved that he’s had more partners than I can count and a mother so afraid of letting herself be loved that she takes every burden upon herself. 

What’s worse is as I’ve gotten older, more people than I care to admit I know have gotten divorced; I think everyone was just hurting very deeply on some level for so long and they finally decided they didn’t want to hurt anymore.

But the thing about me is over the years, I have repeatedly reopened the same wound. I’ve picked and poked and prodded until it pulled apart once more, until it hurt to the touch, until I felt the pain even in stillness.

I’ve been conditioned to feel like I don’t deserve to take up space in the world and to get what I’m given. I’ve always been so used to begging for crumbs, so used to being treated like a second choice, so used to molding and fixing and fine-tuning and detailing others into who I thought they already were, who I knew they could be if they only put the effort they refused to give me into themselves.

But now the wound is finally healing—now it’s turning pink, slightly puckered, still scabbed over, but it’s healing. And I only hope that if I marry the one I’m with right now, we’ll never get a divorce. I hope we choose to stay together, I hope we choose to love and to fight and to live as beautifully and simply as we can. Because, to be honest, I don’t know if I have it in me for a divorce. I’d like to think I’ve been through so much pain and heartbreak and trauma in my 26 years that I’ve finally been given a well-deserved reward. But the way I feel and the way I love flows through every vein, every fingertip, every hair follicle to its fullest extent. I love the way a river runs—deep and imperfect—and, sometimes, a bit too intense for my own good. I think that’s a good thing, though, because I know I’ll never stop loving the way I do.

And so, if the aforementioned statistic still stands, I’d really love to beat the odds my parents couldn’t and stay in that 45% for the rest of my life.