Marriage & Divorce

The speaker reflects on their marriage and upcoming divorce, realizing that the experience has been both a gift and a learning opportunity. They appreciate the unconditional love and authentic relationships they had during their marriage, as well as the suffering and emotional turmoil that followed their separation. This difficult period forced them to confront their own identity and purpose in life, leading to personal growth and understanding. The speaker acknowledges that despite their young age, others have recognized their wisdom and growth from this experience. They believe that life is meant for learning, growing, and finding one's authentic self, and they feel grateful for the journey they have been on for the past three and a half years. I wanted to talk about where I've come to in terms of my understanding of my marriage and my upcoming divorce. When you kind of step out of the immediate here and now and the immediate emotions and thoughts and sort of I take it to another level, the whole thing in a lot of ways has just been an enormous gift. On the one hand, I had the opportunity to fully experience in all its power and beauty a love, an unconditional love and to love another person and to commit to them in marriage. I got married, had an enormous wedding, absolutely loved my wife and her family and developed so many beautiful, authentic relationships and experiences. I really got to experience all of those things with my heart and have that kind of glory and that happiness and nothing can take that away. That was a wonderful experience and a learning experience. Then I was blessed to experience suffering. Whilst bad things had happened to me in my life and I've had failures, things like that, I hadn't probably ever experienced prolonged suffering and the sort of pain and emotional turmoil that was involved in those first few months after separation. What that actually was in a lot of ways was just a catalytic event. It actually forced me to confront things about myself and about life and to actually get a much better understanding for where it is I'm here and why it is I'm here and what I want to do. It's taken a while, but if you look at this period, so if we include the whole year leading up to when I'll be legally divorced, it'll be three and a half years from when I met Lorne until when we're legally divorced. I include that year after our separation because that's been an enormous period of learning and it's all part of the same sort of chapter of life. What a blessing. On the one hand, I got to experience life at its best with complete love and authenticity and beauty and relationships and security. I also got to experience suffering and that provided a catalyst for a lot of learning and growth which just simply would not and could not have happened otherwise. I'm a much better person for it and it's helped me to become who I am. When I sort of talk about these things to people, it's so funny because people actually say to me, you're so young to be where you're at in this. These are people who are in their 40s, 50s, 60s and they're kind of getting to the same place and it just flips everything on my head. I kind of thought, oh yeah, I'm 35 and things have failed and they look at me and just go, wow, you've worked it out early and I'm not saying in any way that I've worked it out. I've got a hell of a lot of long way to go and many battles and challenges but it was just an interesting insight that they looked at me and saw it from a different angle and thought, wow, you've really learned from this and you're in a really good place. So ultimately, at the highest level, the spiritual level, where we're here to experience things, to learn and grow and come into our authentic self, what a blessing, I mean, to experience kind of the best and worst there is, true love and then suffering and come out having learned all the lessons. What a chapter, what a pretty amazing three and a half year journey.