'The one thing that made me realise my marriage was over'

Milly and her husband, Hamish, have been separated for more than one year now and she's slowly getting her head around her new life and new situation.

She says what's made it easier at times – and, perhaps harder at other times – is there was no great catalyst for the end of their marriage.

No one cheated, no one lied, no one was cruel. It was just a slow unravelling, where over time their 12-year marriage no longer made sense.

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Her husband just came to the realisation that he no longer had the same love, optimism and hope for their relationship. And, if she was truly honest with herself, the marriage was no longer really serving her either.

How can it be, if someone is already finding themselves no longer fully wanting to be in that relationship?

Milly says the relationship was crawling along for some time before it came to a stop.

"Really, the last year of our marriage were not particularly happy," she says.

"It didn't feel quite the same and we tried to chase those old feelings and that old rhythm we were in, but we could never find it."

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In the end, Milly says there was one thing that she realised, that made her see that her marriage was coming to an end.

"This may sound trivial and silly, but it was one simple thing: emojis," she says.

A year or so earlier, Hamish had told Milly about a website and messaged her the link, and now she was trying to remember the name of it. She didn't want to bother him, because he was in a meeting, so she did a few searches back in their message history.

That's when it hit her.

"In every message he'd sent me, about eighteen months earlier, he always signed off his messages with emojis," she says.

"There was always a smiley face, the kissy face, the hug. And he'd put other emojis in – maybe the slap forehead one, telling me about something that happened at work."

Milly scrolled through months, and years of messages, and they all were filled with emojis – they felt fun, playful and light.

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"Those messages felt different," she says.

"I stopped scrolling back and looked forward, and slowly, the emojis got less and less until there were none. No lightness.

There was the occasional, 'love you' but never with a kissy face. It probably seems strange, but that was it. That's when I could see that the light had gone from our marriage. We'd been trying to claw it back, but it had gone."

Milly says they went into therapy after having a conversation about it, to see if they could save their marriage. In one of those sessions she mentioned about the emojis, and, her husband began using them again.

"But they didn't feel the same," says Milly. "They felt forced and performative."

After six months, they came to the heartbreaking decision that it was best for them – and their kids – that they go their separate ways.

"It has been the hardest few years of my life," says Milly. "I live in hope that one day I will find love again – and emojis again – but some days it's a lot harder to hold onto that hope.

I'm so glad, particularly for our kids' sake, that nothing horrendous happened between us, but sometimes that's also hard.

I still love him, he's a great guy – I know he still has a lot of love for me, but we couldn't make it work.

He didn't love me enough in the right way, and that's hard on my heart at times. It's very hard, but I know I'm not alone – I know there must be a lot of women like me out there. If you're one of them, I'm sending you my love."

This article was originally published on Capsule, and is republished here with permission.

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