http://therumpus.net/2011/06/dear-sugar-the-rumpus-advice-column-77-the-truth-that-lives-there/

There was nothing wrong with my ex-husband. He wasn’t perfect, but he was pretty close. I met him a month after I turned 19 and I married him on a rash and romantic impulse a month before I turned 20. He was passionate and smart and sensitive and handsome and absolutely crazy about me. I was crazy about him too, though not absolutely. He was my best friend; my sweet lover; my guitar-strumming, political rabble-rousing, road-tripping side-kick; the co-proprietor of our vast and eclectic music and literature collection; and daddy to our two darling cats. But there was in me an awful thing, from almost the very beginning: a tiny clear voice that would not, not matter what I did, stop saying go. Go, even though you love him. Go, even though he’s kind and faithful and dear to you. Go, even though he’s your best friend and you’re his. Go, even though you can’t imagine your life without him. Go, even though he adores you and your leaving will devastate him. Go, even though your friends will be disappointed or surprised or pissed off or all three. Go, even though you once said you would stay. Go, even though you’re afraid of being alone. Go, even though you’re sure no one will ever love you as well as he does. Go, even though there is nowhere to go. Go, even though you don’t know exactly why you can’t stay. Go, because you want to. Because wanting to leave is enough. Get a pen. Write that last sentence on your palm, sweet peas—all five of you. Then read it over and over again until your tears have washed it away.

I imagine that’s what it boiled down to for your former partner too, Trying. That like me, he came to trust his truest truth, even though there were other truths running alongside it—such has his deep love for you. You ask: “Why can’t ‘the terms of the relationship change’ from within?” And my answer is that they can. In successful long-term relationships they usually do. But in order for that to work all parties involved must be willing and capable of making that change. And for some reason they sometimes aren’t, no matter how hard they try or wish to be able to.

http://therumpus.net/2011/06/dear-sugar-the-rumpus-advice-column-77-the-truth-that-lives-there/

While you’re probably in no mood to be philosophical about the devastation your boyfriend’s leaving has caused you, Trying, I think it’s worth saying that it’s far better to be alone and therefore open to new, more fulfilling love, than it is to be involved with someone who half wants out. If your former boyfriend didn’t ultimately love you the way you love him his leaving was a kindness that someday, far from now, you’ll be grateful for.

It wasn’t until I’d been married to Mr. Sugar a few years that I truly understood my first marriage. In loving him, I’ve come to see more clearly how and why I loved my first husband. My two marriages aren’t so different from each other, though there’s some sort of magic sparkle glue in the second that was missing in the first. Mr. Sugar and my ex have never met, but I’m certain if they did they’d get along swimmingly. They’re both good men with kind hearts and gentle souls. They both share my passions for books, the outdoors and lefty politics; they’re both working artists, in different fields. I argue with Mr. Sugar about the same amount as I did with my former husband, at a comparable velocity, about similar things. Others have praised both of my marriages as admirable; in each, I’ve been perceived as one half of a “great couple.” And in both marriages there have been struggles and sorrows that few know about and fewer still were and are capable of seeing or understanding. Mr. Sugar and I have been neck-deep together in the muckiest mud pit too. The only difference is that every time I’ve been down there with him I wasn’t fighting for my freedom and neither was he. In our nearly sixteen years together, I’ve never once thought the word go. I’ve only wrestled harder so I’d emerge dirty, but stronger, with him.
I didn’t want to stay with my ex-husband, not at my core, even though whole swaths of me did. And if there’s one thing I believe more than I believe anything else, it’s that you can’t fake the core. The truth that lives there will eventually win out. It’s a god we must obey, a force that brings us all inevitably to our knees. And because of it, I can only ask the four women who wrote to me with the same question: will you do it later or will you do it now?

JUST LEFT SAYS: April 13th, 2014 at 11:30 pm I recently ended a 3.5 yr relationship. One day I acknowledged the emptiness in the pit of my stomach. I had felt it when we went on hikes and ate dinner. I realized half the time I didn’t enjoy hanging out with him unless we were with other people. I thought his love for me was all that mattered, but I realized his feelings weren’t more important than mine. Even though I know it was the right thing to do, it hurts knowing I broke his heart. I hope he’ll see this article and understand there was nothing wrong with him. It just wasn’t right.

http://therumpus.net/2011/06/dear-sugar-the-rumpus-advice-column-77-the-truth-that-lives-there/#comment-564892

Strange as it sounds, I don’t think you’ve done that yet. I can hear it in the pitch of your letter. You’re so outraged and surprised that this shitty thing happened to you that there’s a piece of you that isn’t yet convinced it did. You’re looking for the explanation, the loop hole, the bright twist in the dark tale that reverses its course. Any one would be. It’s the reason I’ve had to narrate my own stories of injustice about seven thousand times, as if by raging about it once more the story will change and by the end of it I won’t still be the woman hanging on the end of the line.
But it won’t change, for me or for you or for anyone who has ever been wronged, which is everyone. We are all at some point—and usually at many points over the course of a life—the woman hanging on the end of the line. Allow your acceptance of that to be a transformative experience. You do that by simply looking it square in the face and then moving on. You don’t have to move fast or far. You can go just an inch. You can mark your progress breath by breath.

http://therumpus.net/2011/06/dear-sugar-the-rumpus-advice-column-76-the-woman-hanging-on-the-end-of-a-line/