Loving Them Didn’t Make It Work: Divorcing Someone You Still Care About

They tell you love is the glue that holds a marriage together. That if you love someone enough, everything else will fall into place.

But what happens when the love is still there, and the marriage still ends?

It’s one of the most emotionally complicated experiences anyone can go through: divorcing someone you still love. Not someone you hate. Not someone who betrayed you or broke your spirit. But someone you still care for. Someone you still laugh with. Someone whose presence still feels familiar and warm, yet whose life no longer fits alongside yours.

When Love Is Real, But So Is Reality

There’s a quiet grief that comes with leaving a marriage like this. It’s not loud and rage-filled. It doesn’t come with broken dishes or shouting matches. It comes with silence. With soul-searching. With those long, tired looks across the dinner table, where both of you know... this isn’t sustainable.

You love each other, but you’ve stopped growing together. Or you want different things. Or you’ve lost the ability to communicate without hurting each other.

You may still reach for their hand during a movie or know how they take their coffee. You may still remember their childhood stories or admire their sense of humor. But love, on its own, can’t solve misalignment. It can’t fix years of unmet emotional needs, mismatched values, or repeated wounds that never quite healed.

You Start to Wonder: Am I a Terrible Person?

When there’s no dramatic betrayal or abuse to point to, the guilt is immense. Society teaches us that divorce is the last resort, reserved only for truly broken relationships. So when you leave someone who’s “not that bad”—or even someone good—it feels selfish.

You wrestle with thoughts like:- “Why am I doing this if I still love them?”- “What will people think of me?”- “What if I regret this?”

The truth is, you can love someone and still choose yourself. That’s not selfish. That’s self-respect.

Loving someone does not obligate you to remain in a marriage that depletes your joy, stifles your growth, or quietly breaks your spirit.

The Slow Burn of Letting Go

This kind of divorce isn’t explosive. It’s slow. It’s painful in its subtlety. You may grieve more deeply because it wasn’t a clean break. You still get a pang in your chest when their name pops up on your phone. You still feel the familiar warmth when you laugh at an inside joke, even months after the separation.

You may even miss the comfort of the routine: shared meals, lazy Sunday mornings, planning for the future. The hardest part? Realizing that loving someone doesn’t mean you're meant to build forever with them.

And maybe that’s the heartbreak we don’t talk about enough—the one where there was no dramatic ending, just a quiet decision to let go of a relationship that no longer served either of you, even if the love still lingered.

Loving Them… From a Distance

Some people imagine divorce as the end of love, but that’s not always true.

You can still love them in a different way. You can still respect their journey, wish them happiness, and root for their healing, even as you focus on your own. That doesn’t make you weak. It makes you human.

And if you have children? That love from a distance becomes even more important. Co-parenting with compassion, setting healthy boundaries, and modeling emotional maturity are among the hardest—but most powerful—things you can do for your kids.

Give Yourself Permission

So here’s what I want you to know if you’re going through this: You're not broken for leaving someone you still love.- You are not cruel for wanting more for yourself.- You are not a failure for choosing peace over partnership.

It takes enormous courage to walk away from “almost enough.” To say, “This love matters, but I still need something different.”

Love isn’t always about holding on. Sometimes it’s about letting go—gently, respectfully, and with all the grace you can muster.

And if you’re in the midst of that letting go, I see you. I’ve been you. It’s hard. It isn’t very clear. It’s lonely. But it’s also an opening. An opening for the kind of life and love that doesn’t just survive—but aligns, supports, and uplifts.

Keep following @DivorceeDish for more unfiltered truth, honest stories, and encouragement for those navigating life and love after marriage. Because we don’t just survive divorce—we rise from it.

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xoxo

Erin