This post is for people who are either in relationships that no longer serve them and feel they can’t leave for material and/or emotional reasons or people who are waiting for someone to leave such a relationship so they can embark on a new relationship with their love interest. I’m going to be talking about this from a spiritual perspective but the wisdom should be applicable to those who are more interested in a materialist perspective.
To the left, you can see a tarot spread I did for this topic. I did not select any of the cards deliberately. I shuffled the cards and these are the cards that were dealt. The only card that was not part of the spread was the bottom card and the reason I pulled it is because it shows the traditional tarot image for the card above it. I did this because the deck I used makes the middle card look generally positive with nothing to do with the topic at hand and it’s the traditional meaning of this card that is more applicable to the situation of ending relationships that no longer serve us. I will discuss the meaning of each card below but first, I will tell you the story of how I left my marriage and how difficult a decision it was for me to make.
My Story
Most people at some point in their lives find themselves in relationships that need to end but that they find difficult to leave. Eventually, we leave them but we usually stay in them longer than we should because we have hope and we invested time and energy into them. We don’t want to lose our investment and most people just don’t want to be single again. They don’t know what the future holds. No matter how many relationships someone might have had, it seems most of us are simply afraid we’ll never find someone else let alone someone better suited to us.
When a relationship is coming to the end of its useful life, we may find it difficult to admit to ourselves that it’s time to move on. Most of our relationships can end relatively easily if we just acknowledge that it’s time to leave and have the courage to do so. But there are some relationships that are incredibly difficult to leave because we are tied to them in a variety of ways and we are blind to how we might end them without causing great harm to ourselves, people who may be bound up in the relationship with us, and the social influence of people outside the relationship who we fear may judge us harshly should we end it. The higher the stakes, the greater our fears over the repercussions of leaving such a relationship behind.
Well, I’m here to tell you that no matter how high the stakes may seem, if you know in your heart of hearts that the relationship you’re in is not serving you and cannot be repaired, you need to leave anyway. It might not be something you can just snap your fingers and do right this minute but you need to move in the direction of leaving.
My Marriage
I got married for all the wrong reasons in 2007. I was in my early 30s which I thought was really old at the time and I am also permanently disabled. I believed at the time my prospects for being in a lifelong relationship were going to dwindle over time as I aged and my health became more unstable. In late 2006, my boyfriend at the time proposed to me and even though I had this nagging feeling that he wasn’t the right person for me, I accepted his offer out of fear that I would never find anyone willing to marry me. He was also financially well off and accepted that I was sick and he wanted to support me and take care of me. I was in denial as so many of us often are in relationships that aren’t a good fit for us. I told myself I loved him and I figured if he could just work on a couple of things, he could make me happy so why not give it a shot?
If you’re waiting on someone to magically become someone they’re not, you’ll be waiting until hell freezes over. It’s not that people don’t grow and change but you can’t control the ways in which they change so trying to push anyone in a direction you want them to change is only going to make them feel like you don’t love them for who they are and the truth is, you don’t. You should not stay in a relationship with someone you don’t love no matter how difficult it may seem to get out of it. It’s not fair to them and it’s not fair to you.
I prolonged the engagement at first because I was really hesitant to marry my now ex-husband. And this may seem really crappy but he kept wanting to buy me a new car and I wanted him to because I was terrified my old car was a deathtrap. It made a horrible banging sound when it went over bumps and no mechanic could tell me what was wrong with it. I was scared it was just going to fall apart while I was on the road and I’d die in a horrible wreck.
My parents knew of my hesitation to marry my ex and so they warned me not to let him buy me a car. They both believed that a car is the kind of gift you only buy a spouse. But my ex was persistent and I was afraid of dying in a fiery car accident so I finally gave in about 7 months after we got engaged. My mother was horrified when we went by the house and showed off my new car. She pulled me aside and told me I shouldn’t have done that if I wasn’t going to marry him.
I felt awful. I felt trapped. I let my ex buy me a car and now I felt duty-bound to marry him because my parents’ voices are strong in my mind. I’m sure to many people reading this, it will seem absurd that I should feel obligated to marry someone because they bought me a car but we all create our own mental prisons and what you might feel is something that binds you is something I might say is absurd and could easily see a way out of for you.
To make things that much worse, when I sold my old car to some kids in their 20s, they checked the whole thing from top-to-bottom and discovered that the spare tire in the trunk had come lose under the floorboards and it was the spare tire banging around in the trunk that was causing the loud banging sound when I went over bumps. My car wasn’t a deathtrap at all. But I was deep in denial at this point so I didn’t visit any feelings that I had just made the biggest mistake of my life.
I compounded that mistake by agreeing to set a date to marry my ex. I told my mother we were getting married and she was thrilled. She wanted to plan the wedding and I was more than happy to let her. I’m not the kind of woman who had dreams of a perfect wedding from the time she was 5-years-old. I had dreams of love but not of a celebration to commemorate what is little more than a legal proceeding.
But my mom wanted to plan something beautiful and she wanted me to love it and she wanted her friends to love it too, all of whom she invited to the wedding. She sold properties she owned that were generating income in order to bring her vision of the perfect wedding to life which made me feel even more obligated to go through with the wedding and stay in the marriage forever. It was a beautiful wedding and if had been to the right person, I would have no regrets despite the fact that I loathed every minute of the wedding planning. I saw it as impractical and costly and just generally a pain in the ass.
The marriage was a nightmare from the beginning. My ex wasn’t in love with me either by the time we actually got married but he also felt the pressure of society to get married by a certain age and so he lived in as much denial about the situation as I did. We had a decent friendship but not much more than that and there were a lot of times when we just didn’t get along. The atmosphere between us quickly became hostile and so we were both stuck in a loveless, sexless marriage.
We next made the mistake of buying a condo together right before the market crashed in 2008. Well, he bought it. I am permanently disabled so I couldn’t work or generate income. And then my parents pitched in another twelve grand on top of the 30 they already spent on the wedding to help us renovate it. I was in so much denial that I really didn’t recognize just how deep of a hole I was digging for myself. It was easier to pretend everything was okay. I was surviving, I finally had a roof over my head that wasn’t my parents’, I had high-quality healthcare which I couldn’t have had without my ex. But I was also completely financially dependent on someone I was in no way, shape, or form in love with and deep down I knew that but just tried to distract myself from that reality with other things.
Things got worse when I started having fantasies about being with other people. There were two people in my life I had stronger connections with than my husband and I when things got really bad between us I let myself wonder what it would be like to be single again and be able to date them. I also started fantasizing about all the ways I could get out of this situation without having to take any responsibility for ending the marriage. All the things that could possibly happen that would save me from this situation that was allowing my body to survive but causing my heart to die.
I imagined writing a screenplay (I used to be a screenwriter) that I could sell to a studio for a lot of money which would allow me to become financially independent and pay back my parents for all the money they spent on my wedding and the condo. I imagined winning the lottery for the same reasons and since my ex was pretty obsessed with money, it might soften the blow of us parting if he could part a rich man and not be have to worry about being underwater on the mortgage. I even imagined him dying in a car accident. I’m not proud of it but I also was screaming on the inside to get out of this thing.
In early 2009, a year and a half after we got married, the dam that had been holding back my real feelings finally broke and I finally admitted to myself that I didn’t love my husband and I couldn’t go on like this. I didn’t know what I was going to do yet but I told him that night that I didn’t feel the way about him that I should feel about my husband. We didn’t fight about it. He just kind of ignored me and went to sleep in a huff. I always stayed up later than him so I told him I was going out for a drive. I went to call one of the men I had a crush on because my heart was finally free even though I hadn’t yet decided to get a divorce. I didn’t tell him how I felt about him but he was so easy to talk to and I told him everything that I’d been feeling about my marriage. We talked for 3 hours.
Well, my husband must have thought something was up because when I came downstairs after waking up the next morning he was livid. He wouldn’t tell me what was wrong. We had a couples’ therapy appointment that day (we had been in counseling almost since the beginning of our relationship – pro tip: if you’ve been dating for 3 months and you’re already in couples’ therapy, you might not be in the right relationship) and he just told me I would find out what was wrong later that day.
We got to therapy and the first thing he said was he had checked my phone, seen that I’d been on the phone with someone for 3 hours, and broke into my MySpace account and saw that I’d been talking to this guy since before we got married. Then he declared I was having an emotional affair and slapped a printed piece of paper on my lap with the definition of what an emotional affair was and told me he wanted a divorce. And I was in agreement.
But then I told my mom and she threatened me that I couldn’t come back home which was tantamount to a death sentence for me because of my ill health and then my husband was hemming and hawing once he realized I was serious about getting a divorce and things were up in the air. I told him I needed to be alone for a few days to think about it.
I didn’t need to think that hard about it but I really needed to mentally prepare myself for the sh*t storm that was headed my way if I went through with the divorce and I wanted to just be alone, something I hadn’t been in almost two years. My husband went up north to stay with family and I had the condo to myself.
The Divine Demands I Be My Authentic Self
On probably the third day, I was walking up the stairs and I felt this heaviness come over me and I felt like I couldn’t take one more step. I paused on the staircase and suddenly everything went gray. All of our possessions, the walls, the air itself lost all its color. This is not a metaphor. The entire inside of the condo was gray-scale. The only thing that was left in color was a painting I had made for my husband for Christmas one year. It isn’t a true self-portrait. It doesn’t look like me. But it was a portrait of my soul.
As I looked into the eyes of the woman in the painting, I heard a booming voice clear as day ask me, “Are you willing to live in truth now? Do you swear to live in truth for the rest of your life?” I realized in that moment that the only thing I cared about was that painting and what it represented. It was the real me, my authentic self. And I replied to the voice, “Yes.” And it was a real oath. Not like the one I made when I got married.
I just didn’t care anymore about all of the things I was afraid would happen if I left my husband, I was done. I didn’t care if I died on the streets because my parents wouldn’t let me come back and live with them. It was over and come what may, I was free.
The Divorce
It was hell. I was pit between my mother’s threats to not let me come home and my husband’s threats to use up all of our money on lawyers if I tried to get alimony which I knew was not an idle threat. I didn’t know how I was going to live. My mother thought if she threatened me enough, I would just stay married. And it’s not because she thought being married was best for me. She didn’t want to have to tell her friends whom she’d invited to the wedding that I was divorced. She was embarrassed and for the next 3 years, she would end up refusing to let any of my future boyfriends come to family functions. She kept up the lie for all that time that I was just staying with them because I was too sick for my husband to take care of me.
But in the end, I was out. My parents let me come back home and I was able to move on to more fulfilling relationships. And for those of you who think your partner or spouse will end up devastated by your defection, after we divorced, my husband became a fairly rich man, married a career woman he’s compatible with, and has a child that he couldn’t have had with me because I was too sick to bear children.
All the fears I had about what would happen if I just decided to end the relationship never came to pass. I ended up getting Social Security and Medicare a few months after we split which gave me a small but steady income and free health insurance. And all the people I’ve loved since have been genuine soulmates most of whom are still good friends. Lasting forever is not what makes a relationship successful. All relationships end. If marriages don’t end in divorce, they end in death.
Life is not a Disney movie where people live happily ever after. What makes a relationship successful is that for a time, however long it may be, you have love in your life, a genuine connection that brings you joy and gives you the sense you aren’t alone in the world. A successful relationship helps you meet life’s challenges and helps heal the pain that is an inevitable part of life.
If you are reading this because you are in a relationship that no longer serves you and want to get out but don’t think you can, I know your situation is not the same as my marriage. But just know that everyone thinks THEIR situation is insurmountable. I’ve met people who got out of circumstances that most people would think were more challenging than mine simply because most people don’t know what it’s like to be chronically ill and unable to fend for yourself.
However, they HAVE gotten out of them and you can too. Not only are you capable of doing so but you should do so. It’s not right to stay in a relationship with someone you don’t love no matter your circumstances. Would you want someone you love staying with you out of a sense of obligation rather than genuine love? How would you feel if you loved someone who was only pretending to love you back even if that pretense stemmed from self-denial?
The Tarot Spread
When I was dealing cards to go along with this article, I asked the spirit realm for cards that would act as a theme for this topic and they certainly didn’t disappoint.
For those of you not familiar with the Tarot, the card on the bottom of the deck is the overall energy for the reading. In this spread, the bottom of the deck was the Three of Swords.
If it isn’t clear from the image, the Three of Swords represents heartbreak. But it also has other meanings. It can represent love triangles or painful situations where three parties are involved. It can represent crushing disappointment in any area of life but it usually has to do with matters of the heart.
The Three of Swords can mean a painful breakup that destroys in multiple facets of life. It means a split that can hurt not only emotionally but spiritually, physically, and financially as well. It is the card of ultimate heartache. The only card that represents more profound suffering is the Ten of Swords but at least a ten represents an end to suffering as well. The three means you’ve got to deal with this and it’s going to hurt for a while. That may be why the next card in the suit, the Four of Swords, is about rest and recovery. It takes time to get over this kind of pain.
The Five of Pentacles
The Five of Pentacles depicts a wounded man walking away from a woman, presumably his partner. They are destitute and have nothing left for themselves let alone anything left to offer each other. This card also could represent a breakup. The suit of pentacles is about money but it’s also more generally about resources and there is clearly a lack of resources here.
Neither of these people have the resources to continue on together and so the man, though clearly the less able-bodied of the two, has made the decision to walk away from a situation that is not serving him or his companion. Some readers interpret this as someone leaving someone else out in the cold but I don’t interpret it as being out of maliciousness. This situation has just become so dire that both people need to go their separate ways in order to find a means of survival and a new path forward in life.
If you’re reading this, you may be at the point where you need to take the courageous step to leave behind someone you don’t want to hurt because staying means you’ll only end up draining each other of what little you have left to give. This card represents leaving behind a situation that no longer serves you.
The Four of Pentacles 
