Not every divorce happens because of abuse or betrayal. Sometimes it has more to do with regret and comparison and wanting a second chance to live out a phase of life that has already elapsed. There is nothing wrong with self-discovery and introspection; it is actually quite healthy and a valid thing to engage in. However, for some women, this introspection leads them to the conclusion that they missed out on their youth because they got married. They are hit with a strong desire to relive their youth and the days that escaped them. This inclination has less to do with growth and is more connected to their dissatisfaction, which is amplified by fantasy. Read on and learn about the uncomfortable reasons why some women walk away from their marriage because they feel like they missed out by getting married early right here.
Romanticizing A Youth That Was Never That Glamorous
Memory tends to be selective for these women. They imagine that the life they had missed out on was intensely glamorous, energetic, fun, and vibrant while effectively screening out the more painful and negative aspects while reminiscing about it. Real youth is messy but these women subscribe to the notion of fantasy youth, which becomes incredibly intoxicating for them.
Confusing Stability with Boredom
These women end up comparing the stability that their marriage and spouse afford them with boredom and dullness. Predictability starts feeling downright unexciting to them. They start to feel trapped and stagnated in their marriage and perceive emotional safety as a cage. They want excitement and this leads them to look for it even outside their marriage.
Social Media Fuels Envy
These women constantly see travel posts, pictures of nightlife, and selfies of others bearing the captions of them living their best lives and can’t help but feel jealous. Reality distorts for them when they start making comparisons with their own lives, which they deem to be immensely boring by comparison. Marriage feels like a prison to them and the prospect of leaving it to enjoy the many exciting ventures that the world of social media promises them becomes pretty enticing.
Resenting the Sacrifices They Made Voluntarily
Many women willingly choose to get married and become mothers in their early, younger years. It isn’t until quite a while has passed that they start seeing these choices as losses instead of commitments, especially if their friends and contemporaries opted for a different path. They reframe their sacrifices in a negative light and that is where the actual problems start.
Chasing External Validation
Attention feels incredibly invigorating and addictive to these women, especially if they believe that they had missed out on their wilder, younger years. They start seeing divorce as a way to regain that desirability through dating apps, hot new suitors, compliments, flirtation, and so on. They crave external validation and they get irrevocably fixated with it.
Blaming the Marriage for Personal Restlessness
These women end up feeling restless, dissatisfied, and unfulfilled in their marriage. This doesn’t automatically mean that their marriage or partner is to blame but that is just what they do. They fail to take into account that this discontentment they are experiencing might come from stress over aging, identity confusion, or the constant comparisons they make. Instead, they choose to blame their marriage and the demands of commitment that it evinces for their restlessness and dissatisfaction.
Equating Freedom with Recklessness
Freedom doesn’t require these women to abandon their commitments but that is just what they end up doing. For them, discovering themselves translates to destroying their marriages, completely divesting themselves of responsibilities, and effectively avoiding redefining them. They equate the price of freedom with the deliberate relinquishing of their marriage, not exactly a wise move.
Ignoring Long-Term Consequences
It sounds pretty empowering in theory to reclaim your youth. However, divorce tends to affect finances, the custody of children, damages social stability, and even affects long-term security for all involved. These women ignore the long-term consequences for the short and fleeting moments of excitement that they experience over their divorce and the promise of excitement and thrills that wait at the other end of it.
Believing Time Can Be Reversed
Youth is one season in a person’s life and once it is gone, it can never be brought back. This is something that these women simply don’t understand. They futilely try to recreate moments of youth by emulating the way they acted at 22 while being in their late 30s or early 40s. This simply sets them up for more disappointment because time has passed them by and no matter what they do, they can never recapture their youth nor the excitement that they are looking for.
Confusing Novelty with Happiness
New experiences feel intense to these women. However, they mistake this intensity for happiness and fulfillment. It is nothing more than a novelty, and as with everything new, be it a new partner, a new city, or an updated lifestyle, the feelings of happiness are fleeting and temporary. Once the adrenaline settles down, the excitement quickly gives way to regret over having left their marriage for something that was so short-lived and impermanent.
Feeling Entitled to More without Defining the Term
Sometimes these women can’t explain what they mean by wanting more in their lives. They can’t tell whether they want more excitement, independence, or admiration. All they know, vaguely, is that something is missing from their lives that has left them dissatisfied and that eventually dismantles their emotional connection within their marriage. They do it by looking for that “more” elsewhere and that leaves their marriage in shambles.
Devaluing Loyalty and Shared History
These women begin to downplay the significance of the years of shared struggle, growth, and memories that they created with their spouses. They render them as something that was ordinary, forgettable even, ignoring the fact that ordinary doesn’t necessarily mean meaningless. It is a fact that substituting long-term profundity with the fleeting excitement of short-term novelty often follows regret, a realization that these women arrive at when it is too late to do anything to fix the damage that has been done.
Letting Peer Influence Shape Major Decisions
These women let the opinions and suggestions of their so-called friends delude them into looking for something better while deciding to ditch the familiar comfort of their marriage and spouse. They believed it when their divorced friends purported to be living their best lives after divorce and having achieved empowerment and meaning. That is a decision that most of these women end up regretting, especially when it leaves them alone, resentful, and lamenting over what they sacrificed only to end up in this state of isolation and pain.
Confusing Identity Crisis with Incompatibility
It is common for everyone to engage in midlife reflection. However, not all personal awakenings need to or have to follow the destruction of one’s marriage. Both spouses can attain the growth that they are looking for while remaining married and agreeing to pursue it mutually.
Underestimating the Emotional Cost of Starting Over
The prospect of dating again isn’t glamorous or exciting for either men or women. Most of the time, it leaves one drained and exhausted, what with modern dating being so complicated, competitive, disappointing, and destabilizing. The freedom that these women found so liberating and intoxicating following their marriage can start to feel isolating and exhausting after a while, especially when no good suitors, who certainly aren’t a substitute for their exes, keep showing up on their dates.
Final Thoughts
Wanting growth isn’t a bad thing and it also isn’t wrong to crave autonomy. However, dissolving your marriage simply for the unlikely promise of finding happiness and thrill out of it is simply not advisable or feasible. Missing out on youth, never having had wild, raw experiences, and not having done anything unexpected aren’t sufficient reasons to destroy a marriage and suffer the fallout that follows it.
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