I am sixty-two, he is sixty-eight. We are getting divorced… After thirty-five years of marriage.
My name is Margaret Elizabeth, and I am sixty-two. My husband, Albert, is sixty-eight. Together, we shared more than three and a half decades. By now, life should have settled—the children grown, the house full of memories, a quiet retirement ahead, side by side. I truly believed we were content. Yes, there were daily chores, yes, the romance had faded, but we were still a family.
At Christmas, as usual, the children left their cat with us and went off to celebrate somewhere in the Scottish Highlands. Albert and I stayed behind. During those long winter days, he mentioned he wanted to visit his childhood village—to tend his parents’ graves and call on his sister. I saw him off without question.
A week passed. He returned, seemingly unchanged. Then, a few days later, he announced calmly, without drama, that he had filed for divorce. “I can’t go on like this. I’ve met someone who understands me. Someone who can… heal me.”
I was stunned. At first, I thought it a cruel joke. But he meant every word. While I had been tending the home, washing his shirts, cooking his roasts, he had rekindled an old flame—a woman he had known before our marriage. She had found him online. She lived near his sister. His solemn visit to the cemetery had really been three days spent with her.
She was a widow. And, according to him, she had “everything”—a three-bedroom house, a cottage in Cornwall, multiple cars, and… the gift of mediumship. She supposedly practised herbal remedies, gave massages, read auras, and—as he put it—”could sense illness in the body’s energy.” Even cancer, in its earliest stages, she could “ward off.”
She promised him health, devotion, and, as a bonus, the cottage and a car—if he left me and married her. Just like that, in three days, everything we had built over decades crumbled.
He demanded I go to the registry office at once to file for divorce. I refused. Told him I wouldn’t play along. So he filed himself. I only learned of the court date by chance—from an acquaintance who worked there. Shaken, I attended, demanding answers.
In his petition, he claimed we “hadn’t lived together for six years” and “hadn’t shared a bed in fifteen.” All lies. True, there had been distance between us, yes, we had become more like flatmates—but we still lived under one roof, shared meals, talked, managed our affairs together. How could the man I had spent my entire adult life beside cast me aside so easily for some charlatan with her healing oils and promises of “energy cleansing”?
Now, I wait for the court date. Sleep escapes me. Some days, I can barely rise from bed. Everything is falling apart. It’s not the divorce that terrifies me—it’s the betrayal. He still lives in our home but speaks to me like a stranger. Cold. Dismissive, as if I were a burden he’d endured for years. And when I, foolishly naïve, begged him to reconsider, he only shrugged. “Margaret, we’ve been like strangers for too long. I want to be with people who value me.”
I am afraid. Not for myself. For the woman who stood by me all these years—the one I no longer recognise in the mirror. How do I live when all I thought was solid proves to be an illusion? When I was a wife for sixty-two years, only to become an unwanted old woman in the span of a single winter?…
