Disclaimer: In Real Life is a platform for everyday people to share their experiences and voices. All articles are personal stories and do not necessarily echo In Real Life’s sentiments.
Julia (not her real name) from PJ, Selangor, has always believed in marriage as a child, hoping her trip to the altar would be the start of her “happily ever after”. But after two tough divorces by the age of 35, she thinks kids are given unrealistic expectations about marriage and adult relationships.
Speaking to IRL, she says: “The ideal is you get married and you never get divorced. You’re told you go to school, get your degree and then get married and live happily ever after. That’s genuinely what I believed.”
She says she thinks the possibility of getting married is offered to little girls “as if it’s the only option.” She argues that: “Not everyone is meant to be married. No one ever showed me a true example of what marriage looks like or what intimacy is.”
Although Julia says she didn’t think much about when she would get married as a child, she admits she never thought she’d be twice-divorced by the age of 30.
“I met my first husband in school”
“I played volleyball and I was good at sports, so I thought I should get my degree in sports management. Then I got my masters in sports administration,” she explains.
While studying for her undergraduate degree, Julia met the man who would become her first husband.
“He played football and I played volleyball so we thought it was a good match. We ended up messaging on Facebook and then we started dating.”
When she was in her final year of university, Julia and her boyfriend got engaged and they married at 25-years-old – but looking back, she can see the “red flags” in the relationship that she had ignored.
“We were young and it was the kind of love where the highs were really high but the lows were so low. I don’t want to be on that rollercoaster ride – I want to be on an even path. He’s a really good man and the issues in the relationship were on both sides.”
During their five years together, Julia says the pair never had a “decent day.” She recalls: “I was either living my best life or I was curled up in the foetal position.”
“At the time I didn’t have as much awareness as I have now. I knew it was unhealthy but I never put it into those words,” she says.
The pair were married for just over a year before Julia realised she needed to leave
So on New Year’s Eve 2015 (which was also her birthday) she ended the marriage. But despite being the one who walked away, she was left broken by the breakup.
“I felt like a bad person for ending a marriage. I didn’t know who I was – I just thought I was a failure. I had this mean inner voice that was telling me I should have done more to try to save it. I remember sitting on my bed and asking one of my girl friends to come be with me. I couldn’t eat and I couldn’t sleep.”
For the next two months, Julia admits she struggled to get out of bed, but with the support of good friends and a loving family, she says the “sliding scale” of sadness began to shift.
By May of that year, Julia’s divorce was finalised – and she found love again soon afterwards.
“We already kind of knew each other from college and then we matched on Tinder. We rediscovered each other, I suppose. We’d actually both gone through divorces. It wasn’t the only thing we connected over but that was a big part of it. It was like, ‘Oh, you too’?”
Julia says there was “a lot of love in the relationship” as the pair proved to themselves they could fall in love again after suffering heartbreak.
And in 2019, after being together for three years, the pair got engaged
“There was a little bit of fear there. A part of me was scared I’d make the same mistakes again. But the majority of the time I was thinking, ‘This is great! I’ve found my person’. Overall I was excited. I remember showing my ring off to everyone and people were so happy for us.”
But while the pair didn’t have the same rollercoaster relationship Julia had experienced with her first husband, she admits there were other problems.
“There were underlying issues but I didn’t realise they were problems. We just didn’t really communicate about the hard things. I take full blame for that. I was the avoidant one. I’d avoid intimacy, not realising it felt uncomfortable to me.”
While Julia began to feel unhappy, she says she felt like she was wearing a mask
“I’d be like, ‘Everything’s great, look at me’ but I’d have this underlying anxiety about who I was. Those things really affected how I could be in a relationship.
“I’d do a lot of finger-pointing at my ex because it was easier to say ‘you’re the problem’. But now that I look back, I think ‘You, Julia, you’re the problem’.”
Eventually, Julia turned to emotional eating and binge drinking to cope with her unhappiness. At her lowest points, she even self-harmed.
“My ex just wanted a partner that would show up for him, take care of him, and do the little things everyone wants in a marriage. I told him, ‘I don’t even love myself, I don’t know how to love you’.”
After making the difficult decision to part ways with her second husband, Julia says she needed her supportive friends and family more than ever. “It’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do,” she says about ending the marriage.
But with the help of a counsellor, she eventually started to feel better again
She decided it was time to focus on herself. She moved in with a friend who was also recently divorced and the pair helped each other through their heartache.
“Having somebody else going through that too was so key because we bounce off each other and we’d lift each other up.”
While she recovered, Julia started to enjoy the little things in life: like sitting on the balcony with a cup of tea, watching the sunset and buying matching pyjamas with her housemate.
After spending the last year trying to find happiness in herself, Julia admits she’s doing much better – but also says she hasn’t “perfected the art of dealing with it.”
While in counselling, she discovered she sways towards having an avoidant attachment style in relationships – meaning she is more likely to struggle with intimacy and be emotionally distant with partners.
But while the process has been difficult, it’s helping her understand why her relationships haven’t worked out.
“For 29 years I thought I should be positive and happy all the time, but it’s not real.”
Now happily single, Julia is open to love again in the future – but she’s focused on “self-love” for the time being.
She says: “I know who I am and I get to choose how I think about myself. I think I’m a lovely person!”
For more stories like this, read: I’m A Malaysian Woman In My Mid-30s Who Does NOT Want To Get Married – Here’s Why and Why It’s Better to Get Married in Your 30s Despite What Your Malay Family Says
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