Divorce, according to the dictionary, is the act of legally ending a marriage. It’s also defined as disunion – a lack of unity.

I don’t personally know anyone who ever went into a marriage with the intention of not staying married. Instead, we get married because we feel we have found someone we’d rather not live without, someone we want to spend our lives with.

Some of us, however, have not made wise choices with those we’ve selected. Our hearts run away on the wings of romance, and we want to believe that our new budding relationship is the fairytale we grew up reading about. It’s only much, much later that we wake up to realize it was never a fairytale.

It took four decades of my life and two failed marriages to learn some hard lessons. And I had to be honest with myself and humble enough to learn those lessons.

Life is like that. It presents us with lessons, and what we do with those can make our lives easier or harder. Sometimes we have to learn things multiple times before they stick.

My book, Gray Divorce: My Life Rewritten, traces the journey I took as I tried to understand why my second marriage failed. We were together for thirty years – no short stint, by any means. And the decision to divorce was certainly not made on a whim. It was an agonizing process that took months.

I discovered many life lessons through that process. One of the most pivotal ones was that I had to be whole as a person before I could be in a healthy relationship. I had to be OK with myself and love myself first.

By extension, I had to live my life in harmony with who I was, and I needed to find someone who was in unity with that identity, rather than trying to morph my identity to fit what someone else needed.