Marriage is a hell of a thing to have to experience by trial and error. I don’t want to ever have to learn from it in this way again. That’s why it is so important that I extract every possible lesson from this, allow it to blow open all of my illusions, and let it cause me to face reality and all the ways I need to change. There’s what’s been done to you, but there’s also who you’ve allowed yourself to be and what you’ve allowed yourself to do. What you’ve been given is not your fault, but what you do with it is your charge. You want to know how to learn from mistakes? Allow yourself to feel all that you ought to through the consequences. That is lesson enough to not want to be there again. I am not talking about going to a morbid place, or taking it to an unhealthy extent, but escape, numbness, band-aids, and cutting corners is like pursuing leprosy of the soul. It was when you felt the burn that you learned touching fire will hurt. The draw to want to rush through the lessons is incredibly strong, but when I let myself feel through this time, I know that no shortcut is worth being here again. I only hope that my transparency will be used to help someone else not go through the same.