I’m 62, he’s 68. We’re getting divorced… after 35 years of marriage.
My name is Margaret Anne, and I’m sixty-two. My husband, William, is sixty-eight. We’ve been together for over thirty-five years. You’d think life would be settled by now—kids grown up, the house full of memories, a quiet retirement just the two of us ahead. I believed we were fine. Sure, there was routine, sure, romance had faded, but we were family.
At New Year’s, the kids, as usual, left their cat with us and went off to celebrate somewhere in the Scottish Highlands. William and I stayed home. One evening during those long holiday days, he said he wanted to visit his hometown in Devon—to see his parents’ graves and stop by his sister’s. I didn’t think much of it and waved him off.
A week passed. He came back—nothing seemed different. Then, a few days later, out of nowhere, he said he’d filed for divorce. Calmly, no drama. “I can’t do this anymore. I’ve met someone who understands me. Someone who can… heal me.”
I froze. At first, I thought he was joking. But he was dead serious. Turned out, while I’d been looking after the house, washing his shirts, making his Sunday roasts, he’d reconnected with an old flame—a woman he’d dated before we met. She’d found him online. Lives in the same town as his sister. And when he went to “visit the graves,” he’d actually spent three days with her.
She’s a widow. And according to him, she’s “got everything”—a three-bed flat, a cottage in Cornwall, a couple of cars, and… psychic abilities. She does holistic healing, herbal remedies, massages, reads auras, and, as he put it, “detects illnesses at an energy level.” Even early-stage cancer, she can “talk away.”
She promised him health, care, and—as a bonus—the cottage and a car if he divorced me and married her. Just like that, in three days, everything we’d built over decades fell apart.
He demanded I hurry to the registry office and file for divorce. I refused. Told him I wouldn’t be part of this farce. So he filed himself. I only found out about the court date by accident—from a friend who works there. I showed up, stunned, and demanded answers.
But in his petition, he claimed we “hadn’t lived together for six years” and “hadn’t shared a bed in fifteen.” All lies. Yes, there’d been distance, yes, we’d become more like flatmates—but we lived under the same roof, shared meals, talked, sorted bills. And I can’t understand how the man I spent my whole adult life with could erase me so easily for some charlatan with essential oils and promises of “energy cleansing.”
Now I’m waiting for court. I barely sleep. Some days, I can’t even get out of bed. Everything’s crumbling. It’s not even the divorce that hurts most—it’s the betrayal. He’s still in our flat but talks to me like I’m a stranger. Cold, detached, as if I’ve been a burden all these years. And when I, like some naive fool, begged him to reconsider, he just shrugged. “Margaret, we’ve been like strangers for ages. I want to be with people who value me.”
I’m terrified. Not for me. For the woman who’s been with me my whole life—the one I don’t even recognise in the mirror anymore. How do I move forward when everything I thought was solid turns out to be a lie? When you’ve been a wife for sixty-two years, only to wake up one winter a discarded old woman?…
