I’m 62, he’s 68. We’re getting divorced… After 35 years of marriage
My name is Margaret Cunningham, 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 children grown, the house full of memories, and a quiet old age ahead of us. I believed we were happy. Yes, there was routine, yes, romance had faded. But we were a family.
At New Year’s, as usual, the children left us their cat and went off to celebrate in the Lake District. William and I stayed behind. During those long holiday days, he mentioned wanting 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 returned—nothing seemed amiss. Then, a few days later, he calmly told me he’d filed for divorce. No drama, just cold certainty. “I can’t do this anymore. I’ve met someone who understands me. Someone who can… heal me.”
I was numb. At first, I thought he was joking. But he was deadly serious. While I’d been keeping the home, washing his shirts, and cooking Sunday roasts, he’d reconnected with an old flame—a woman he’d dated before we married. She’d found him online. She lived near his sister. That “visit to the graves”? He’d spent three days with her.
She was a widow. According to him, she “had everything”—a three-bedroom flat in London, a cottage in Cornwall, multiple cars, and… psychic abilities. She practiced alternative medicine, healed with herbs, gave massages, read auras, and could, as he put it, “detect illnesses at an energy level.” Even cancer, if caught early, could be “prayed away.”
She’d 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 crumbled.
He demanded I rush to the registry office and file for divorce. I refused, saying I wouldn’t take part in this farce. So he filed himself. I only learned about the court date by chance, from an acquaintance who worked there. Shaken, I confronted him.
In his affidavit, he claimed we “hadn’t lived together for six years” and “hadn’t shared a bed in fifteen.” All lies. Yes, there was distance between us, yes, we’d become more like flatmates—but we lived under the same roof, shared chores, talked, made decisions together. I can’t fathom how the man I’d spent my entire adult life with could erase me so easily for some charlatan with aromatherapy oils and promises of “energy cleansing.”
Now, I wait for court. Sleep evades me. Some days, I can’t even get out of bed. Everything is falling apart. The divorce itself isn’t the worst of it—it’s the betrayal. He still lives in our home but speaks to me like a stranger. Cold. Detached. As if I’d been a burden all these years. When I, like a fool, begged him to reconsider, he just shrugged. “Margaret, we’ve been flatmates for years. I want to be with someone who values me.”
I’m afraid. Not for myself. For the woman I was—the one I no longer recognize in the mirror. How do I go on when everything I thought was solid turns out to be an illusion? When you’ve spent sixty-two years as a wife, only to become an unwanted old woman in a single winter?…
Life’s cruelest lesson? Some foundations you trust aren’t stone—they’re sand. And when the tide changes, they wash away without warning.
