Honest, short, and deeply moving. Thanks Michelle!

I love the mental image I got of a cross-over episode between Netflix's two series The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up (with Marie Kondo) and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. In it, someone's ex-husband is a teddy bear that they say "Thank you for your service to" and move on.

The phrase "loved you like a teddy bear" gives me a fantastic idea of codependency -- and it sounds like your ex-husband struggled with that as well.

I think the undercurrent here is contempt, which is the #1 predictor of divorce: https://www.gottman.com/blog/the-four-horsemen-contempt/ The statistic is something like marriages that have <3:1 positive to negative interactions fail 100% of the time, though I couldn't find the source.

While I would have loved to read this during my marriage, I don't think I would have connected the dots in this or the many similar articles I read. The sentence that is missing for me is, "I felt contempt toward him, and he felt contempt toward me." That was the reality at times during my marriage, at least, but I rarely see it used explicitly. I don't use that sentence when I describe my divorce, for example.

That said, I think a really important thing I've come to understand is that "communication" comes down to "I'm starting to dislike this thing about you. Can you change or do I need to completely let it go before it grows into contempt?" As you said, it's not a two-way street, and you can't just "ignore them" (the things you don't like) forever.

Thanks for the moving piece.