Leaving a marriage is hard enough. Leaving a marriage that took years to be legally allowed to have complicates the grief in ways straight friends don't always understand.
I got married in 2015, four months after it became legal in every state. I got divorced this spring, and for a while I couldn't figure out why it felt so much heavier than it should have — heavier, even, than the actual reasons my marriage ended, which were ordinary and unglamorous: we grew into different people, we wanted different lives, and by the end we were more like roommates who split the Trader Joe's run than partners. That kind of ending happens to straight couples every day and nobody calls it a tragedy. So why did mine feel like one?
Eventually I understood it wasn't really about the marriage itself. It was about what the marriage had represented to everyone around us, including me. My parents had come around slowly and painfully to the wedding — my mother cried at the courthouse, and not, at first, for the reasons she later claimed. Friends who'd spent years going to rallies and knocking on doors and arguing with relatives at Thanksgiving treated our ceremony like a small personal victory, a proof of concept for everything they'd fought for. My wife and I stood up in front of a hundred and forty people who had, in one way or another, earned the right to watch us do it. Ending the marriage felt, unfairly, like letting all of them down — like undoing something that hadn't just been mine to build in the first place.
I remember sitting in my lawyer's office, filling out paperwork that was functionally identical to what any divorcing couple fills out — same forms, same boxes, same flat bureaucratic language — and feeling a specific, irrational shame that had nothing to do with the forms. It was the shame of thinking I was supposed to be grateful enough to make it work. People who'd waited decades for the right to marry the person they loved didn't get to have a wedding at all, some of them, because they died first. I kept thinking about a friend of my mother's, a lesbian in her seventies who finally married her partner of thirty-one years in 2016 and who told me once, almost offhandedly, that she cried every single anniversary because she couldn't believe it had really happened. How was I supposed to tell people like her that I was giving mine back?
A friend who went through her own divorce two years before mine put it to me plainly over wine one night: "You're not just leaving a marriage, you're leaving a symbol, and everybody thinks they own a piece of the symbol." She was right, and it didn't make the leaving any easier. Straight friends were kind about it, but I could tell some of them didn't fully register the second layer — the sense that I wasn't just failing at a relationship, I was somehow failing the whole project of gay marriage, one data point in a column somebody at a family dinner might someday use as evidence that it "doesn't really work" for people like us. That pressure is not evenly distributed. Straight couples get to have their divorces be private. Ours, even the quiet, undramatic ones, can feel like they're on trial in front of a jury that includes your grandmother, your college roommate's homophobic uncle, and the entire concept of progress.
There's also a stranger, quieter grief underneath all of it: some of us built our whole adult identities around the fight to have this option, and then the option turned out to be exactly what everyone always said it was — a legal container that two ordinary, flawed people either grow together in or don't. Marriage equality didn't promise us happy marriages. It promised us the same unremarkable chance at a messy, human, sometimes-failing one that straight people have always had, and I think some part of me expected mine to be exempt from the ordinary math of relationships because of how hard-won it was.
Somewhere in the middle of the process, I called an old friend from college — one of the first people I ever came out to, back when that felt like the biggest risk I'd ever take — and told her I was scared of what people would think. She laughed, not unkindly, and said, "Nobody thinks Ellen and Portia broke the whole institution of marriage when their relationships didn't work out. You're allowed to just be a person who got divorced." I've turned that over a hundred times since. She's right, logically. Emotionally, it took me months to believe it, because so much of my adult life had been shaped by the idea that anything I did as a queer person was, whether I liked it or not, a small public referendum on whether people like me deserved the things straight people take for granted.
I don't have a tidy conclusion here. I still love my ex-wife, in the complicated way you love someone you built a life with and then dismantled it alongside. I still believe in the marriage we had, even in its ending. What I know now is that nobody prepares you for grieving a marriage while also feeling like you owe an explanation to a movement, and that the second kind of grief is real, it's specific to people like us, and it deserves its own name — even if all I can offer, for now, is the shape of it.
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