Someone recently suggested I write a list of the pros and cons of my marriage.

A healthy exercise, apparently.
Balanced. Reflective. Therapeutic.

So I sat down fully intending to be fair-minded and emotionally mature.

I thought:
“Come on, Linda. Thirty-two years. There must have been positives.”

I made a cup of tea.
Opened a notebook.
Prepared myself for deep introspection.

And then something awkward happened.

I genuinely couldn’t think of a single “pro.”

Not one.

Unless we are counting:

• the week-long fishing trips,
• the occasional silence,
• and the strange peace that descended on the house the second his car disappeared down the road.

Which probably tells you everything you need to know.

The truth is, when you’ve spent years living with criticism, tension, emotional manipulation, unpredictability, or outright abuse, your nervous system starts treating absence as safety.

That’s the part people don’t always understand.

You don’t suddenly realise how stressed you were because of one dramatic event.
You realise it because your body changes once they leave.

You sleep better.
You breathe differently.
You stop listening for footsteps, moods, doors, sighs, or the emotional temperature of the room.

Silence stops feeling lonely and starts feeling luxurious.

And that can be a deeply uncomfortable revelation after decades of marriage.

Because society teaches people that endurance equals success.

“Thirty-two years!” people say, as if length alone proves love.

But prisons also involve long sentences.

What nobody tells you is that surviving something and enjoying something are two completely different achievements.

So there I was, staring at my blank “Pros” column while the “Cons” section was beginning to look like a doctoral thesis.

In the end, the only honest thing I could write was this:

Pros:

• He went fishing sometimes.

Cons:

• He came back.

Dark humour? Maybe.

But humour is often what remains once the fog lifts.
It’s the brain’s way of finally telling the truth without collapsing under the weight of it.

And perhaps that’s the real recovery:
not rewriting history to make it prettier,
but finally being able to laugh at what you once had to survive.