I love my husband — that’s why I’m divorcing him (2024)

The tears started before we’d even reached the end of the street on the day I asked my husband for a divorce. Afterwards he told me he knew what was happening the moment I asked him to go for a walk at 8am in the pouring rain on the second day of a brand-new year.

“Rich, I think it’s over for us. And I think it has been for years,” I said. “I still love you but I’m not in love with you any more and I don’t think you’re in love with me either.” He didn’t rail, or shout, or cry. Instead he listened quietly and calmly.

“You’re so brave,” were the first words out of his mouth. And then we planned how we were going to break apart our 21-year marriage.

I met Richard 27 years ago. I was 25, he was two years younger. I fell over him in a nightclub called Adrenalin Village in London. I mean that literally, by the way. He was sitting on the floor. I was sober. He was not. He was handsome and funny and, perhaps most crucially, told me he wasn’t impressed by the girls dancing in fluffy bikinis on the podium. (Which later turned out to be nonsense — he loved a woman in a fluffy bikini.)

We did what most people in the late Nineties did when we found someone we quite liked: exchanged numbers, went on dates, then moved in together when it felt like we were one another’s people. Seven years later we got married.

The first few years of that marriage were, for the most part, fun. We worked hard and partied hard, spending our weekends on European mini-breaks and taking holidays in far-flung places. As a husband Richard was not only funny but kind, clever, hard-working and above all immensely social. I could throw him into any situation and he’d make friends. That’s one of the things I loved most about him.

But things, as they sometimes do, became more difficult when we started trying for a family. I struggled to get pregnant naturally, so we ended up on the emotionally fraught and intensely medical path that is IVF. And although we eventually had a wonderful baby daughter, I struggled with motherhood and the demands of a new baby. Richard, meanwhile, spent three months sleeping in the spare room.

When I look back now I think the first cracks appeared then, but we did what most people do and papered over them with the busyness of life. Twelve years later those cracks came for us both.
Lockdown was when I began to notice it. So much time together made me realise, with almost shocking clarity, that over the years we had morphed from lovers to housemates. It was no one’s fault, we just had. I chose to spend time with my friends over my husband; he chose to spend time with his over me. Add to that a daughter on the verge of adolescence with newly diagnosed mental health problems and it’s easy to see how quickly we went from being a married couple to two people who had taken their eyes completely off that marriage.

By the time lockdown ended and the world opened up again it was clear we had been unconsciously untangling our lives for years, leaving us as different people wanting different things.

When you hear about divorce you hear about affairs, betrayals and hearts that have been broken and tattered. But that wasn’t me and Richard. (Sometimes I used to wish he had been unfaithful, because then I would have had a clear reason to leave him that no one would argue with.) But there was so much good about our marriage. There still is. We still make each other laugh, still support each other’s careers. We still have a great time on a night out. It was my birthday a couple of days after I asked him for a divorce and he took me to Claridge’s, where we got riotously drunk together. We are still kind to one another. We still have interesting, engaging conversations. Most of all, we still love each other.

• A morning cuppa for your spouse? Why rituals are key to happiness

So why are we divorcing? Because as a 53-year-old woman I realise we both deserve more.
In 2017 I left my 22-year career in communications to retrain as an executive coach. Part of that training involved having my own coach, someone who would help to break me wide open mentally. For a whole year they worked with me week in week out, helping me figure out what I valued, what I needed and, above all, what mattered most.

The next year I launched my own executive coaching business and over the next six years spent my days listening (and helping) other people to work out what gave them fulfilment in their careers — and their lives. The irony wasn’t lost on me. I would go home and realise that the things that mattered to me most did not float my husband’s boat in the same way. At some point I wanted to move out of London and live somewhere I could hear owls hooting at night. Richard can’t see his life outside London. Having conversations about the future energises me. It does the opposite for Richard. The truth is, I had changed and I wanted him to change too. He didn’t want to. He was quite happy how he was.

The constant compromise weighed heavily on me. I felt as if I was living a lie since I knew I would be happier out of my marriage than in it. The problem was I was too scared to do anything about it.
Of course we tried everything to make it work. There were years and thousands of pounds of therapy. (Even our therapist wanted us to stay together!) I, meanwhile, read every book and listened to every podcast I could to try to piece us back together. It didn’t make a difference.

Instead, over the years the thought of leaving Richard began to feel like a familiar staircase, one that I would walk up, reach the top, get the fear and quietly walk back down again, into the loneliness.
Finally, at the end of 2023, a few things happened that made me realise that if we truly loved each other the best thing would be for us to walk away from the marriage.

First, a therapist we had been seeing about our 15-year-old neurodivergent daughter told us it was likely we needed to support her well into her university years. I had always thought the best time to leave the marriage was when she went to university, which was only three years away. But here I was being told it could take a good while longer. The thought of so many more years of loneliness was too bleak even to contemplate.

Then New Year’s Eve came around. We were at a party with friends we had known for years. But on the stroke of midnight, while everyone else reached for their partner, it was clear Richard and I had the least interest in spending midnight with one other.

And then came the final straw. I spent the holidays in bed with a stomach bug and realised something that I hadn’t thought about before. Which is that I would not want my daughter to stay in a marriage where the love had run out. In coaching sessions I often ask people who are struggling to make a decision, what advice they would give to their child. I would have had no hesitation in advising my daughter that she deserved happiness, whether that was on her own or in another relationship. That she deserved better. That life is short, and that we need to grab it with both hands. And that’s how we ended up breaking apart our marriage a few days later on a cold, wet London street in the early hours of the new year.

• Will I ever date again? Life after divorce at 50

Except we haven’t walked away in the traditional manner. It’s been four months now and neither of us has even packed our bags. We slept in the same bed for the first few weeks as we figured out the practicalities. (We will stay in the family home until our daughter finishes her GCSEs.) When we both joined Hinge in March he asked me to write his dating profile for him. “You know me better than anyone else,” he said. And he is right, of course.

Naturally telling our daughter was easily the worst thing I have had to do in my life. Richard told her as we sat together on the sofa with the dog at our feet. She ran out of the house barefoot, into the street, leaving her smiley face slippers behind. And other people have found it hard to take, oscillating between a mixture of bewilderment (“But you’re Lisa and Rich!”) and sadness. It broke my 79-year-old mother’s heart. And one of my sister’s, who has known him since she was 15. They adore my husband and they know what a good man he is. They also worry that I will be lonely. And alone.

But what they didn’t know was that being lonely in a marriage is so much worse than being alone. Only my husband and I know that.

Our divorce has now been registered with the courts. We’re using a brilliant legal service called Amicable, which works on behalf of both of you to manage your divorce and avoids the combative nature of a typical lawyered-up process. Because we both processed the end of our marriage while we were still in it we have moved on at a speed that has shocked some people. I have met a wonderful new partner. It’s early days but he feels like home. Richard, meanwhile, is dating. He asked me what he should wear for his first date and I was the first person he spoke to after it. Nowadays as he leaves the house to meet a potential partner for a drink, I wave him on his merry way. I have no feelings about him dating, other than curiosity and wanting him to find happiness. My friends find this fascinating; some of them can’t quite believe it is true.

I wrote this piece because you don’t hear much about good divorces. We all know the horrendous ones, but not so much the kind, respectful, calm ones. Of course this could all end up as a sh*t show. Neither of us knows what the complete end of this marriage has in store for us. But we are finally putting all the care and thought and love into ending our marriage as perhaps we should have done into keeping it going all those years ago. Because when you love someone as much as we love and respect one another, isn’t that how it should be?
lisaquinncoaching.co.uk. Lisa Quinn writes the Substack newsletter Rework

Related articles