Drafted on March 18 and 19, 2026.

Revised March 20, 2026.  

Note: I’ll be taking next week off to refill the writing pipeline. If you’re a newer reader, you can always go back through the archives here. As always, I truly appreciate your support, whether that’s sending me thoughtful notes, sharing the newsletter with friends, or making a supporting donation. The current upgraded subscription rate is $25 annually, a bargain compared to most newsletters out there! Think of it as either paying my cat’s portion of the rent (my landlord charges a cat fee), or the price of a nice cocktail over which I’d trauma dump with you in-person anyway. You can upgrade below, or at the end of this full-access edition.

Next month will be both the one year anniversary of my husband telling me he wanted a divorce, but it will also be what would have been my ten year anniversary had we remained married. My crappy divorce apartment is next to Eden Park, and most days of the week when the weather cooperates, I go for a walk through the park, including the area where we had some of our first look wedding photos taken before the ceremony (held at another location). 

Every time I go past this overlook where we had our wedding photo taken, I take a picture of the Ohio River facing east, in the direction of its headwaters of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers upstream in Pittsburgh and in the opposite direction from where we posed on the overlook. I post each new Ohio River photo on my Instagram account as a quasi proof of life, but it is also a deliberate attempt to rewrite the memories of a place I previously associated with my wedding.  

Eden Park, as the name suggests, is a beautiful park and therefore quite the destination for all manner of photos, from professional (my former wedding photographer also took some headshots of me in Eden Park) to prom to family to engagement and wedding photographs. Because I like to go walking in Eden Park several times a week, I now have the frequent experience of witnessing brides posing in the same places where I posed for my wedding photos. 

And every time I see them, I have this quiet urge to scream “DON’T DO IT!!!!” to these beautiful women. Of course I don’t because a) I am actually not that insane, it’s none of my business, and I know someone’s wedding has nothing to do with my own personal history and heteropessimism but also b) I am a polite Midwesterner who would never dare to do something so transgressive to a random stranger (I have, however, confronted elected officials in public and would absolutely do so again!).

When you get married, you get to experience one of the greatest narcotics ever invented, which is the feeling of being chosen, and if you have a wedding to accompany your marriage, you get to be celebrated for being chosen. I know this sense of being chosen exists for people across the spectrum of sexualities, but the feeling of being chosen is one of the primary ways in which women are socialized to want and desire marriage as a major life goal. Being chosen is the beating heart of all mainstream romantic propaganda, from Disney movies to the Bachelor. A wedding is a fairy tale ending to all the drudgery of dating and the indignities of being single in a world designed for couples, and so naturally after a lifetime of romantic propaganda, women unironically pine for the entire fairy tale experience.

But fairy tales are just that: tales that we tell ourselves, because patriarchal culture has been telling the same story for generations. Fairy tales have no basis in reality, and the reality is that just as many marriages fail as they succeed (and personally, I believe that the divorce rate would be even higher if the economy were kinder to single people, and if getting divorced wasn’t such a legal shitshow). But women are raised on fairy tales, not on reality.

Women who marry men are socialized to believe that if we are beautiful enough, kind enough, cooperative enough, deferential enough, that we, and by extension, our marriages, are untouchable. This is exactly the story I told myself for years, and this is exactly what a fairy tale is: wishful, magical thinking that has no basis in reality. My particular version of this fairy tale was after feeling like no man would ever want to be with my cranky feminist self, I really believed that my ex-husband was my own fairy tale come true, a man who spent months phone banking for reproductive rights and who always washed the dishes? Surely I had won the heteroexceptionalist lottery of being chosen by a good man. By extension, any time I felt like I was falling short of being a good wife, like when I got angry and yelled or got upset because he was dismissive of my requests for emotional closeness, I felt significant shame for not feeling worthy of someone I unironically believed was my “better half” and who “put up with me.” 

I did not foresee a divorce in my future until it very suddenly happened, and so there is a part of me that internally grimaces whenever I see a bride posing with so much hope and trust on her face, because I was also that person once, basking in the relief of feeling chosen and celebrated. I actually don’t regret being married, and I’m glad I had the experience of being married. It taught me a lot of important lessons that I personally don’t think I would have learned without being married. But the cost of those lessons came at a steep price as I untangle the ways in which I abandoned and suppressed many aspects of myself during my marriage. 

Being divorced is like walking around with a different set of glasses on the world. You don’t want to come across as a big old bummer bitch, and you quickly learn that showing any side of your cynicism about marriage makes many other women feel extremely threatened by the divorce contagion of your mere existence as the dumpee in a blindsiding divorce, or feeling like you talking about your skepticism and mistrust of men is an indictment of their own personal choices. So instead I’ve learned to use this newsletter as a containment zone for my feelings and limit sharing my cynicism in person with other people who have been in my shoes, like when I asked another divorced friend recently if they ever internally wondered or placed hypothetical betting odds on “who’s next?” in their circle of friends to get divorced. That’s a conversation I would never dare to have with my married friends. 

Ultimately the urge to yell DON’T DO IT to others isn’t about misery loves company, it’s a chaotic wish to prevent other people from experiencing the kind of trauma and heartbreak you did. But women in fairy tales who cast a skeptical eye on princes and knights in shining armor are not historically treated well. And so in the meantime, I shift my gaze away from the brides in Eden Park, keep my feelings to myself about the relationships I observe around me, and tend my corner of the internet, knowing I will always be there for any woman whose fairy tale crashes into a reality they didn’t see coming.