Alone Again, Naturally

Written by: Jorinde Berben
Image credit: Jorinde Berben

I’m turning 40 this year. I’ve said this out loud to people at least 40 times already (just a random guess, probably lots more.) The reason I’ve said it so often is because I seem to use it as an explanation for why I ended my relationship of 4.5 years a month ago.
“Midlife… you know how it goes.”

The thing is, there’s probably a grain of truth to it, but not in the way it sounds. Not in the way I make it sound. Not in the casual: I’ve got an itch that I want to make some drastic changes in my life to spice things up a bit.

Midlife seems to be a time where we sort of take stock of our life: Figure out what’s working and what isn’t. In January, I entered a crisis of sorts which suddenly made it very clear that I hadn’t really felt fully alive in my relationship for a while. For years, really, with the obvious ups and downs. I hadn’t been able to fully be myself, and it was draining my energy and making me fold into myself more and more.

In September of 2024, I decided to return to teaching contractually, and was able to reconnect to the joy I felt in connecting with young people and watching them grow. I found my independence again, and it tuned out a lot of the fear that had been colouring my vision both professionally and personally.

I’ve talked on this blog quite a bit about being part of an anxious-avoidant attachment dynamic. Naturally, the question arose for myself, as well as my now former partner: “How much of my choice to end things was just a matter of running away?” In as much as I could, I reflected on this (alone, and with two therapists), but the decision seemed so clear that it supercedes the dynamic. It was a clarity I’ve only felt a few times in my life, and the images that it conjured up were so powerful they left little room for doubt.

Initially it came as quite a shock to myself as well. If you’d asked me a year ago, I was still convinced I just had to work on myself to make the relationship work.
‘Ay, there’s the rub’ as Shakespeare wrote, and as my therapist pointed out: perhaps a relationship you have to change so much for to make possible just isn’t the right relationship.
Staying wouldn’t have been the loving thing to do, to myself or to him, for that matter.

I look back with great gratitude for the beautiful moments we shared, some of which are in between the pages of this blog, and for the ways in which the relationship helped me grow. There was so much growth.

The story of that relationship has been shifting, becoming more nuanced, over the past month, and that process will take time. It took years before the dust of my divorce settled. It will take a few months at least before this new reality feels normal again, too.

I have time, though. And no urge to rush into anything serious again anytime soon. I want to choose what I want. Now more than ever before. There is not a single part of who I am that I’m willing to leave out in the cold to make a relationship work.
Maybe that’s what that famed midlife crisis is really all about: learning to follow your own instincts and building the life you want, finally, because you can and because, for the remaining decades, you can’t really afford not to.

Who knows if I’ll write here again.
I guess we’ll see but thanks for reading so far!