August 2026

‘We grew apart’ is not a lazy reason

Say it out loud and watch what happens. We just grew apart. Someone will decide, quietly, that you didn’t try hard enough. That grown-ups stay. That a reason you can fit in four words can’t be a serious one.

I want to take that off you, because it has been sitting on a great many people for a long time and it has no right to.

A thing that took fifteen years to arrive was never going to come out fast. The affairs and the shouting make good stories precisely because they have a shape — a day, an act, a before and an after. “We grew apart” has no day in it. It happened in a thousand ordinary evenings, not one of which you’d have thought to mark, and that is not a sign that it’s small. It’s a sign that it’s the real kind. The large losses in a life mostly arrive like that: without a date.

The trouble is that a loss with no date and no villain doesn’t feel like it qualifies. You watch friends go through the loud kind, the kind with a clear wrong in it, and you keep your mouth shut, because what would you even say. We get along fine and something is dying. It sounds like ingratitude. It isn’t. It’s grief for something that was genuinely alive once, and grief has never needed a crime to be real.

Here is the part the shame hides from you. “We grew apart” is not really a description of two people. It’s a description of two people who each, slowly and without meaning to, stopped bringing themselves fully into the room. Apart is what’s left when both of you have quietly gone missing from your own lives. It isn’t an accusation. It’s a location. And a location is a thing you can do something about — which a verdict is not.

I’m not telling you the distance can be crossed back. I don’t know that, and neither does anyone who hasn’t met you. I’m telling you the reason is not lazy, and you are allowed to take it seriously — which, strangely, is the first thing almost nobody lets you do.

Start there. Not with the marriage. With the fact that the thing you couldn’t say quickly was true all along.