My parents almost divorced 3 times.

I thought I knew their story. I’d lived inside it for twenty-eight years. The silences. The slammed doors. The year my mother slept in the guest room for three months and nobody explained why. I’d filed it all under “complicated” and assumed some people just endure. The night before my wedding, my father sat down with me and said he wanted to tell me something he’d never said out loud. “We almost left. Three times. Real almost lawyers once.” I didn’t say anything. “The first time, I was ready to go. I had a bag in my car for two weeks. Every morning I’d look at it and think: today. And every evening I’d come back and your mother would be at the kitchen table and something in me just... couldn’t.” He wasn’t romantic about it. No grand speech. “The second time was her. I didn’t know how close she was until years later. She told me she’d called her sister. Had a plan.” He paused. “What kept us wasn’t love. Not in those moments. It was stubbornness, partly. But mostly it was this: every time I imagined the life without her the actual daily life, not the relief, not the freedom it was smaller than what we had. Even broken, what we had was bigger than what I’d have alone.” He looked at me directly. “Nobody tells you that marriage isn’t a feeling you maintain. It’s a decision you remake. Sometimes daily. Sometimes at 3am with a bag in your car.” I’ve been married six years. We’ve had two moments that felt like edges. Both times, I heard my father’s voice before I heard my own. The bag stayed in the house. #share #knowledgesharing #fyp #phycologyfacts #deepthoughts