Wife Says Her Divorce Lasted Longer Than Her Marriage — 'Made It 50 Years Without An Argument'
Our wedding was New Year's Eve and by April, I knew it was over.
gengdev, 6015548 | Canva My marriage was comparable to those whack celebrity unions that only lasted a few minutes. I Googled “shortest celebrity marriages” and we were right on track with Pamela Anderson and Kidd Rock.
Our wedding date was New Year's Eve, and by April, I knew it was over.
During our two years of dating before marriage, we were that couple. The couple everybody looks at and wishes they could be like. We were so in love that we always said if we ever split up, we’d have to be neighbors so we could continue “borrowing a cup of sugar” forever. It was that good.
I remember one particular night during our courtship, we went bar-hopping and I drank too much. I spent the majority of the night inside a bathroom stall hurling my guts out. He stayed in the ladies' room with me for hours holding my hair and rubbing my back. In between heaves, I could hear other women in the bathroom saying, “He’s been in there with her all night. What a good man.”
Indeed, he was. That’s the kind of man every woman dreams of, no? The man who has her back no matter how shamefully she behaves.
Our relationship started long-distance.
He’s from Florida, and I’m from Canada, so our dating years consisted of many trips back and forth to see each other for a week at a time. Long-distance always kept things fresh and new, but as we learned the hard way, this hardly equates to knowing each other well enough to marry. We did it anyway.
In the final hours of 2005, we pulled a last-minute shotgun wedding on New Year's Eve. We hired a justice of the peace, threw on winter boots, and tied the knot in a beautiful, snow-filled park in my hometown. Nobody knew about this secret celebration but us, my son, and a couple of best friends.
Our real wedding — the public jubilee — had already been set for June 2006. My mother helped me fine-tune all the details, such as booking a venue and making handmade invitations and decorations. My sister accompanied me in wedding dress shopping and footed the bill for my “Yes to the dress” moment. Exciting times were upon us.
The reason for the shotgun wedding six months before our real one was to get a jump on his immigration paperwork. Since he was American, there would be a visa process to get him into Canada. Our clever plan was to quietly marry, start the paperwork, and then attend our official wedding in June. Our family and friends would be none the wiser.
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Hindsight is always 20/20 — if we’d only held out until our real wedding date we would’ve never gone through with it.
In a long-distance relationship, there are several personality traits you’ll never become privy to because you’re not together full-time. For instance, I learned he was a total mama’s boy. He was only 24 when we met, eight years younger than me. That should have been the first red flag.
Each time I visited him in Florida we stayed in hotels because he still lived at home. When he’d come visit Canada he expected me to cook three meals a day. He also didn’t understand how to put effort into step-parenting my son, who was 12 at the time. He thought buying a kid an iPod equated to being a hero, but aside from that, he was very ill-equipped to deal with a pre-teen stepchild.
His emotional immaturity was the demise of our relationship.
I’m not sure what my husband’s expectations were as a step-parent, but our marriage only lasted until he subtly made me choose between him and my son. I chose my son every time.
I never held the breakup against him. Of course, I was angry for a while, but after the anger subsided, we began communicating again as friends. And friends we have remained for nearly twenty years. To this day, we still text each other every New Year's Eve and say, “Happy anniversary, baby!”
We stayed legally married for over 13 years after our whirlwind marriage.
Pure indifference on both sides kept us from pursuing a divorce. It wasn’t affecting my life any. I figured with him being younger, he’d probably want to remarry someday, but that was never the case.
Finally, in 2019 I decided to untie the knot and free myself from the invisible string attaching us. I filed for divorce. To this day, we still joke about how we could have made it to fifty years without a single argument if we had both remained too lazy to divorce.
My only regret is that I never got to wear my wedding dress.
Kristi Keller is an award-winning destination writer whose work has been featured in Forbes Luxury Travel Guide and Our Jamaica magazine. Her blog, Wildhood Wanted, is about squeezing in your cardio by running from adult responsibilities.