I was 30 when I got married and 34 when I got divorced. In spite of the way it ended, I don't think there was any way to know at the time that things wouldn't work out. My wife was smart, funny, and pretty, and we shared a lot of interests. We were both voracious readers, enjoyed traveling, shared the same circle of friends, and neither of us was much of a drinker or partier. I suppose the problem was that we waited a long time to get married, and by the time we did, we had both almost reached that point where we decided on separate paths and different emphases in our lives.
Sandi was a teacher out of college, but she had enough of that after four years and decided to go back to law school when she was 26. I was a researcher at a hedge fund. I was good at what I did, but I've never had much professional ambition. I always preferred to work hard from 8 to 5 and have my nights and weekends to myself. So while my younger colleagues were busting their asses and getting promoted around me, I stayed where I was, largely forgotten by the company. About the time we got married, I explicitly decided that this was how I wanted it to be. I developed a lot of outside interests—running, swimming, foreign cinema, ancient history—and told myself that work would be a means to the end of enjoying life and my new interests. At about the same time, Sandi started getting noticed at the law firm where she was an associate. She started putting in long hours and weekends, and believed that contentment was always around the next bend. By the time she made partner two years into our marriage, she had developed a taste for the "good life," by which I mean expensive cars, jewelry, working vacations, and bad but popular restaurants—in short, all of the shit that is scientifically proven to not make people happy.
To make matters worse, our sex life had never been very good. I was very attracted to her, but she wasn't at all adventurous in bed. We were a bit on and off while we were dating, so part of me believed that she just needed a firm commitment from me in order to let herself go in bed. That turned out not be the case. I could never tell if she was fucking me just because that's what married people did, or if there was some part of her that really wanted me to fuck her. She was never a big fan of giving or receiving head, but it wasn't long after we were married that she basically stopped doing it at all. I had to ask her to suck my cock, and in my view, there are few things more demoralizing than begging for a blowjob from a woman who can't tell if she's more bored or disgusted by what she's doing. I tried telling her about fantasies while we were fucking—nothing at all very exotic—but she never once took the hint and reciprocated or acted on any of the things I told her.
Long story short, I couldn't take it anymore, and asked her for a divorce. It wasn't out of the blue obviously, and she certainly wasn't happy with me before that, but she felt wronged by my decision. She interpreted the fact that I had a lot of professional potential that I chose not to fulfill as somehow disrespectful towards her. Beyond that, because she wasn't very interested in sex, an unsatisfying love life seemed to her like a ridiculous reason to end a marriage. So we parted on ambivalent terms, she bought me out of our house in the suburbs, and I I eventually got a two-bedroom condo in the neighborhood where our first apartment together was. I never once doubted that I had made the right choice.
A few months before Sandi and I started falling apart, a new girl started work in the HR department at my company. Her name was Alison. She was a pale Midwesterner, very short, maybe 5' 2", quiet, plain, and somewhat overweight, but she had pretty eyes, a cute nose that was just a tiny bit crooked, and a dry, biting sense of humor (once you got to know her) that you almost never find in a woman.
I said hi to Alison in the cafeteria one day when we were both sitting alone reading, and we got to talking. She had just graduated from the University of Iowa and moved to Chicago because her older sister lived here. It turned out that she had an encyclopedic knowledge of The Simpsons, loved Monty Python, and could quote entire Thomas Hardy poems by heart. She was one of the coolest people I had met in a long time, and I found her very sexy in spite of her weight, though I had no plans to act on it. Things were bad enough with Sandi and I didn't want to further complicate them. I think I also had a feeling that the situation with my marriage was coming to a head, so I was content to let it unfold in its own time without doing the unconsciously self-destructive things people often do to provoke a crisis.
Once Ali and I started having lunch regularly and talking in the halls, some of the young male researchers and analysts—most of them douchebags just out of college who knew fuck-all about women—would ask me about her with shit-eating, mirthless grins. On one of the few nights when I joined them for drinks after work, one of them got pretty loaded and started making lewd remarks about Ali, asking if I was a chubby chaser, etc. I feigned laughter and leaned over so that no one else could hear what I whispered in his hear, which was that, whether or not he apologized, I was probably going to wait for him to leave the bar and then knock a few of his teeth down his throat. His face went gray, and he ended up sneaking away via the bathroom 15 minutes later, but my only half-serious threat did the trick; he obviously told all his friends about what had happened, and nobody ever said a word to me about Ali again.
When the divorce started going forward, things got pretty bad for me. Work suddenly got busy, I was still living in the house but sleeping in the guest room, and I was trying to find a condo at the same time because I didn't want to move twice. There were some bad scenes with Sandi, and I felt like a zombie at work most days. At the same time, Ali was doing some traveling to our other offices in California, Germany, and the UK, which was good and bad: bad because it would have been nice to be able to talk to her about what was going on, but good because, as I said, it wasn't the time for me to get distracted thinking about another relationship. We barely saw each other for about a month, though we talked via email and IM pretty regularly. She was having a good time and learning a lot, and her boss had told her that she was likely on track for an assistant directorship if she kept doing as well as she had been. I was very happy for her.
She got back around the same time I found my condo. We had made plans the week before, when she was in London, to have lunch the following Friday, since I was going to be out most of the week before that dealing with the inspectors, the title company, and the movers. I had already bought my lunch and sat down when I saw her come into the cafeteria. She had really transformed: she looked like she had lost about 15 pounds, and was made up and dressed much more sharply than usual.