Written the night before the notice was sent. Anonymous, edited, published with permission. The letter is, the writer says, not a manifesto but the accounting of a particular night. The companion piece - written from the other side of the decision - is a letter on staying.
Dear D.,
Tomorrow morning my advocate will send the notice. I have read the draft four times tonight. I have not changed anything. I want to write this letter while I can still write it.
I am leaving because I have learned, slowly, over eleven years, that I am not in this marriage as a participant. I am in it as a function. The function has its hours and its tasks and its small recognitions, and I have performed them faithfully and not unhappily, and at some point, in roughly the past two years, the function has come to fill the entire room and the participant has had nowhere to live.
I am leaving because the version of me that I would like the children to grow up seeing, the version who is interested and present and unembarrassed, has not been available for some time, and I do not think she will be available again inside this house.
I am leaving because I am afraid that if I do not leave now, I will not be young enough to begin anything else when I do. The cost of staying is, finally, larger than the cost of going. It was not always.
I am not leaving because of any single thing. There is no single thing. There has been a long accumulation, and tonight is the night the accumulation has tipped.
I have read the practical pieces about what comes next. I have read before you send the notice twice this week. I know what tomorrow morning will set in motion. I know that the next ninety days will be the hardest of the year and the next three years will reshape every social relationship I have. I know that the children will know within the week and that the conversation with them will be the conversation I have been rehearsing in my head since March.
I have read mutual consent or contested? too. I do not know yet which one this will be. I am sending the notice and we will see who D. is when D. reads it. The piece said the question is rarely ideological; it is what the other party will tolerate. That is correct. I do not yet know what D. will tolerate. I am about to find out.
I will be kind in this. I will be kind to you in this. I will be kind to the children in this. I am asking you, in the letter I am writing tonight and that you will read weeks from now, to be kind back. There is a way to do this that leaves everyone recognisable on the other side, and I would like, if it is at all possible, for us to do it that way.
I will not be writing back tonight. I will be reading the draft once more in the morning. The advocate has said I can still change my mind until eleven a.m. I will not change my mind. I have already changed it; the change is what the last two years have been.
- Your wife, for one more night.
Leaving is rarely the loudest thing in a marriage. It is usually the quietest. It is the moment when nothing changes except the entire arrangement.