I’m sixty-two, he’s sixty-eight. We’re getting divorced… After thirty-five years of marriage.
My name is Margaret Elizabeth, and I’m sixty-two. My husband, William, is sixty-eight. We’ve been together for over thirty-five years. By now, life seemed settled—the children grown, the house filled with memories, and ahead of us, a quiet old age together. I believed we were happy. Yes, there were days of routine, yes, the romance had faded. But we were a family.
Over Christmas, as usual, the kids left their cat with us and went off to celebrate in the Lake District. William and I stayed behind. During those long holiday days, he mentioned he wanted to visit his childhood village—to pay respects at his parents’ graves and stop by his sister’s. I saw him off without a second thought.
A week passed. He returned, appearing no different. Then, a few days later, he calmly announced 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 stunned. At first, I thought it was a cruel joke. But he was deadly serious. While I’d been keeping the home, washing his shirts, and cooking his meals, he’d reconnected with an old flame—a woman he’d known before we married. She’d found him online. She lived in the same town as his sister. And when he’d gone to visit “the graves,” he’d spent three days with her.
She’s a widow. According to him, she “has everything”—a three-bedroom house in the Cotswolds, a cottage in Cornwall, a car collection, and… the gift of a medium. She claims to practice alternative healing, using herbs, massage therapy, aura readings, and, as he put it, “sensing illness at an energetic level.” Even early-stage cancer, she boasts, can be “wished away.”
She’s promised him health, devotion, and, as a bonus, the cottage and a vintage car—if he divorces me and marries her. Just like that, in three days, everything we built over decades crumbled.
He demanded I rush to the registry office and file for divorce myself. I refused. I wouldn’t play along with this farce. So he submitted the papers alone. I only learned of the hearing by chance—through a friend at the court. Shaken, I went, demanding an explanation.
Yet in his petition, he claimed we “hadn’t lived together for six years” and “hadn’t shared a bed in fifteen.” Lies. Yes, there was distance between us, yes, we felt more like flatmates—but we lived under the same roof, shared bills, talked, handled life together. How could the man I’d spent my entire adult life with erase me so easily for some fraud with essential oils and promises of “spiritual cleansing”?
Now, I’m waiting for the court date. I barely sleep. Some days, I can’t drag myself out of bed. Everything is unraveling. The divorce itself isn’t the worst of it—it’s the betrayal. He still lives in our flat but speaks to me like I’m a stranger. Cold. Detached. As if he’s been tolerating me all these years. When I begged him to reconsider, like some naïve fool, he just shrugged. “Margaret, we’ve been roommates for ages. I want to be with people who appreciate me.”
I’m terrified. Not for myself. For the woman who’s been with me my whole life—the one I no longer recognize in the mirror. How do I carry on when everything I thought was solid was just an illusion? When I spent sixty-two years as a wife, only to become, in one winter, an unwanted old woman?…
