The Friendship Their Spouse Ended

I knew this guy for over a decade. Tech field, same background, both of us used to being the only person in the room who looked like we did. We didn’t agree on everything, but it never mattered much. We talked almost every day, sometimes texting, sometimes calling when there was time, about world politics, starting a business, sports, and somehow, constantly, X-Men and every Disney movie either of us had seen. It was that kind of friendship.

The first crack showed up small. He mentioned something his partner had said about a movie. One minority group was finally getting their first movie built entirely around them, the first one ever, nothing like the tenth movie where the majority of the cast happened to be from a group that already gets plenty of screen time. She questioned why that got so much celebration when another group didn’t get the same treatment. My take was the opposite. Why compare at all. Celebrate it. A rising tide lifts all boats. It was just a movie, so I let it go.

Then the election happened. She felt the guy running for president had bad values, but that it didn’t touch her life enough to matter. I felt his policies went against everything I believed in, and if she was fine with them, I started wondering if that meant he was too. I stopped really talking after that. The texts went surface level. I didn’t have the energy to get into it, so I just didn’t.

I never brought it up with him directly. I still feel bad about that, if I’m honest, but I doubt it would have changed anything. That decision, who he builds a life with, belongs to him, not me. I wasn’t planning on spending my life around him in that way either. Still, I noticed I’d get irritated by the smallest things. Him asking how my family was doing felt like a slap, knowing his partner backed policies hurting families like mine across the country. Saying something ugly about her felt like the wrong move, and I figured he didn’t deserve that. Two years out now, with gas, food, rent, student loans, and health care all still climbing, that feeling is hard to keep steady. She became a stand-in for everything that went wrong.

The hardest part is he stayed exactly the same toward me the whole time. That’s what made it so disorienting. If you’re at peace with how she sees the world, even though it writes people like me off, what’s left for me to do but put some distance between us. Second hardest was the total lack of awareness. My kid has health issues. His partner never cheered for kids losing coverage, but she did believe some people getting help simply hadn’t earned it. So when he’d ask how my sick kid was doing, it felt like he missed the disconnect completely. I’m not white, and the guy running the country talked about deciding who counts as American based on the same racial lines this country has struggled with since it started. It felt strange to root for someone using that kind of power to go after people. Every topic started to feel like a test of what I valued. How do you love X-Men, a story built entirely around tolerating people who are different, while your partner is fine with people getting kicked out or blamed for the cost of living, when the real reasons are a lot more complicated than that.

Here’s why I don’t think this kind of loss gets taken seriously. People treat politics like a sport instead of a moral position. Their team won, end of story. Nobody sits there thinking about the trans person whose rights just got rolled back, or the single mom working three jobs about to lose part of her food assistance. It’s just my candidate won. And yeah, people’s values shift, especially once they’re married, and what mattered to you at twenty five isn’t always what matters at forty. I get that. I try to assume good faith, that someone with different values still wants good things for people. I don’t fully understand everyone’s choices, how someone eats, what they believe, and I think people should get to live differently without being forced into one mold. But there’s a line between having different values and backing policies that actively hurt people who aren’t doing anything wrong. I let the small stuff go early on because everybody’s different. It’s harder to let go now that so many people are struggling because of it.

What actually helped was deciding to hold onto my own values, even if it cost me something. I talked to friends who knew the whole situation, and they were honest, telling me where I was right and where I was off. Rushing past it didn’t work. I wanted to skip the bad feeling and land on the other side already fine, but grief doesn’t work that way. It makes you sit in it whether you want to or not.

I still go back and forth on the decision. I know eventually I would have said something about his partner that I would regret, and he doesn’t deserve that. I tried playing out the best case, some future where we’re on decent terms and she gets to explain herself, and even that version still stings, because I would assume someone who talks about faith the way she does would have voted differently. Then I played out the worst case, and that didn’t sit right either. Neither version ends with me feeling good about it. That tells me this was never really about finding the right ending. There isn’t one here.

I still think he’s a genuinely good person, and we had a lot in common. I just don’t want her in my life, and that leaves me a little regretful, because friends like that are hard to find. Maybe there’s more to him I don’t know. That’s just how it goes sometimes. Honestly, writing this makes me feel like a hypocrite, because I’ve wanted closure in situations exactly like this one before. Life doesn’t usually hand you a clean ending. Apparently that goes for the endings you cause yourself too.