I worried that failure was my lasting lot, and when I started dating Paul, my happiness felt barbed and undeserved. Long-term married couples seem like society’s victors, and terms like “failed marriage” intimate that choosing divorce means acquiescing to defeat and personal weakness. While my rational self was well aware that divorce didn’t mean shame, my emotional self was resolutely masochistic. I have always been especially predisposed to feelings of shame, but when I ended my first fledgling marriage, I felt something more acute: a sense of true ruin. Two and a half years after that, I married Paul. Our divorce was finalized fifteen months later. The wedding was gorgeous and the union brief and sad. When I was twenty-five, I married my college boyfriend. I’m newly, and ecstatically, wed to Paul, but I’m not new to being wed. We nestled ourselves on the bank of Boulder Creek, intoxicated with the charged intimacy of being newlyweds on a mountainside soaked with sun, and I simultaneously tried to luxuriate in this awareness of love and also shake off my awareness of the history that preceded it. Our shared future rolled out before us, as epic and seismic as the landscape. Three weeks ago, two days after our wedding, my new husband Paul and I borrowed a car and drove into the Colorado Rocky Mountains.
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