I’m not grieving anymore. I’m angry.

Angry because the man who had an affair, walked away, and now acts like our marriage never existed still hasn’t signed the papers that would actually end it.

He gets to live untethered—emotionally, socially, freely—while I remain legally bound to something he already destroyed. And somehow I’m expected to “move on.”

As if healing works best when you’re still technically someone’s wife on paper. (huge fan of that system.)

How exactly am I supposed to start fresh when his last name is still attached to my legal identity?

Like...am I divorcing him, or is my name and freedom being held hostage?

The anger comes in waves. I’ll reach acceptance, make peace with the reality of my life now, start imagining something new…and then I’m yanked back by the reminder that I’m still not free.

It’s a messed-up cycle: acceptance, anger, acceptance, anger. Not because I’m stuck—but because the ending keeps being postponed. You can’t close a chapter that someone else refuses to acknowledge was ever written.

And honestly, at this stage, I’ve started questioning marriage itself.

Not just my marriage—marriage. As a concept. As an institution. As a legally binding agreement that somehow still expects women to carry the emotional, psychological, and logistical weight when things fall apart. (Insert eye-roll here.)

So, is it love? Is it a commitment? Or is it just a very romanticized form of repression where women do the emotional labor and men get to quietly opt out when it’s inconvenient? (Asking for myself. And future me.)

Feminist writers have been circling this for decades

The Second Sex argued that marriage historically positioned women as dependents (economically, socially, and emotionally) while men "retained autonomy." And even now, we insist it’s “equal,” but the fallout tells a different story.

When marriages fail, women grieve harder, wait longer, and are expected to be more graceful about it. Men… disappear. Or stall. Or rewrite the narrative. (Case study: my life.)

Then there’s All About Love, which makes a devastatingly simple distinction: commitment is not the same as love. Love requires accountability, care, and presence. Commitment without those things is just obligation wearing a tux. And once the emotional labor stops being reciprocated, marriage becomes less about partnership and more about endurance.

Which leads me to the part no one likes to say out loud: is marriage actually designed to protect women? Or to contain them?

Because when a man can have an affair, walk away, and still delay your freedom with the stroke (or non-stroke) of a pen, it starts to feel less like there was ever romance, and more like pure bureaucratic control. I am not emotionally attached to this man anymore, but I am legally tethered to him. And that tether only works one way.

So yes...I question marriage now. Not because I "failed" at it, but because I survived it.

And I wonder how many women mistake repression for stability, patience for strength, and legal limbo for love, because we’ve been taught that wanting freedom makes us difficult. (It doesn’t. It makes us basic humans.)

And let me say: there’s something uniquely cruel about someone who refuses to stay, refuses to take accountability, but also refuses to let you go. He erased our marriage from his story while keeping me trapped in the aftermath of it—like an emotional timeshare I never agreed to.

Turns out, though, the real revenge isn’t anger.

It’s peace. Growth. And the slow, deeply satisfying realization that I was always out of his league.