I’m 62, he’s 68. We’re getting divorced… After 35 years of marriage
My name’s Margaret Elizabeth, 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—the kids are grown, the house is full of memories, and ahead lies a quiet retirement for the two of us. I believed we were happy. Sure, there was routine, and yes, romance had faded. But we were still a family.
At Christmas, as usual, the kids “left” their cat with us and went off to celebrate somewhere in the Scottish Highlands. William and I were alone. During those long holiday days, he said he wanted to visit his parents’ graves in his hometown and stop by his sister’s. I saw him off without a second thought.
A week passed. He came back—nothing seemed unusual. Then, a few days later, out of the blue, he told me 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 keeping the house tidy, ironing his shirts, and cooking his roast dinners, he’d reconnected with an old flame—a woman he’d dated before we married. She’d found him online. She lives near his sister. And when he went to “visit the graves,” he’d actually spent three days at her place.
She’s a widow. And according to him, she’s “well off”: a three-bed flat, a cottage in the Cotswolds, a couple of cars, and… psychic abilities. She practises alternative medicine, apparently—herbs, massages, aura readings. She can, as he put it, “sense illness on an energy level.” Even detect early-stage cancer “before it shows.”
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 rush 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 chance—through a friend who works there. Stunned, I went and confronted him.
In his petition, he claimed we’d “lived apart for six years” and “hadn’t shared a bed in fifteen.” Lies. Yes, there’d been distance between us, and sure, we’d become more like flatmates—but we still lived together, shared chores, talked, handled life as a team. I can’t fathom how the man I’d spent my entire adult life with could erase me so easily for some fraud peddling crystal healing and promises of “spiritual cleansing.”
Now I’m waiting for the hearing. I barely sleep. Some days, I can’t even get out of bed. Everything’s crumbling. The divorce itself isn’t the worst part—it’s the betrayal. He’s still in our house, but he speaks to me like I’m a stranger. Cold, detached, as if I’m a burden he’s endured all these years. When I begged him, like some naive fool, to reconsider, he just shrugged. “Margaret, we’ve been roommates 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 no longer recognise in the mirror. How do I go on when everything I thought was solid turns out to be a lie? When you’ve been a wife for sixty-two years, only to become a worthless old woman in one winter?…
