What My Divorce Taught Me About Building for the Long Term

Sometimes the most important thing you can build is the wisdom to know what you should have built differently.

Before my current partnership, I was married for six years. The ending of that marriage taught me more about what relationships need than the beginning ever could. We were young, both of us, mid-twenties and full of certainty that we had found something permanent. We were convinced that the intensity of our early connection was proof against whatever came next.

We were wrong.

Her name was Sarah. We met in college, fell in love fast, and got married two years after graduation. The wedding was beautiful. Everyone said we were perfect for each other. And in some ways, we were. We made each other laugh. We shared values. We wanted the same things, or thought we did.

What we didn't know, what we couldn't have known, was that love is not a state you achieve. It is a practice you maintain. And we had no idea how to practice.

The first few years were good. Not effortless. We fought, we struggled, and we learned each other. But good. We were building a life together, navigating careers and family and the slow realization that adulthood was more complicated than we had been led to believe. We thought we were doing fine. We thought the hard parts were just phases, bumps in the road, things we would get past.

But slowly, imperceptibly at first, we started to drift. Not dramatically. Not obviously. Just gradually. Small disconnections that we did not address. Minor resentments that we did not name. Assumptions that calcified into patterns. We were still saying "I love you" at the end of every phone call, still sleeping in the same bed, still functioning as a married couple. But the connection we had in the beginning, the sense of being truly seen, truly known, and truly together, was fading.

I did not know how to talk about it. Every time I tried to bring up something that felt wrong, Sarah would get defensive. Or I would. We would end up arguing about something tangential, the dishes, the schedule, or some minor slight, without ever touching the underlying distance that was growing between us. We were fighting about symptoms while the disease went untreated.

Looking back, I can see the patterns so clearly. The way we stopped being curious about each other. The way we assumed we knew what the other was thinking instead of asking. The way we let small hurts accumulate because we did not have the tools to repair them. The way we performed intimacy, date nights, anniversary celebrations, and the rituals of couplehood, without actually cultivating closeness.

We had no tools for the hard parts. No infrastructure for repair. No shared memory of what worked. We were trying to build a life together with nothing but good intentions.

It wasn't enough.

The end came gradually, then suddenly. Gradually in the sense that the distance had been building for years. Suddenly in the sense that the actual decision to separate felt like it came out of nowhere. We were sitting on the couch one evening, watching something on Netflix, and Sarah turned to me and said: "I don't think I can do this anymore."

I knew exactly what she meant. I had been feeling it too, the sense that we were playing at being married, going through the motions, and waiting for something to change without doing the work to change it. But hearing her say it out loud was devastating. It made real something I had been trying not to acknowledge.

We tried couples therapy. We tried date nights. We tried having the hard conversations we had been avoiding. But by then, we had drifted too far apart. The trust was broken, not through any single betrayal, but through years of small abandonments. We did not believe anymore that the other person would show up for us. We had too much evidence to the contrary.

The divorce was amicable, as these things go. We didn't have kids, which made it simpler. We divided our possessions, sold the house, went our separate ways. I felt grief, but also relief. The end of something that wasn't working, even if I had wanted it to work. The release of the constant low-grade anxiety that came from trying to hold together something that was slowly coming apart.

But the real gift of that experience was what I learned. Not immediately. It took years of reflection, of processing, and of eventually building something new with my current partner. Eventually the lessons accumulated. The wisdom settled. I started to understand what had gone wrong, not only in that relationship, but in my approach to relationships generally.

I learned that love is necessary but not sufficient. You need more than feelings. You need skills. You need infrastructure. You need tools for the hard parts: the repairs, the difficult conversations, and the maintenance that keeps a relationship alive through seasons of stress and change.

I learned that drift is the default. Left unattended, relationships don't stay close. They slowly, quietly move apart. You have to actively work against this drift. You have to choose connection, again and again, even when it's hard, even when you're tired, even when you'd rather retreat than repair.

I learned that small neglects accumulate. The missed bid for connection. The forgotten preference. The assumption that they'll always be there, so you don't have to try as hard today. These things add up. They become a wall between you, brick by invisible brick, until one day you look up and can't see the person you married.

I learned that performance is not the same as practice. Date nights and anniversary celebrations are lovely, but they don't replace the daily work of staying connected. The check-ins. The repairs. The curiosity about who your partner is becoming. The willingness to be vulnerable about who you are becoming.

Most importantly, I learned that relationships need support. We try to do this impossibly hard thing, build a life with another autonomous human being, with nothing but cultural scripts and good intentions. We would not try to build a bridge without engineering knowledge. We would not try to heal an illness without medical training. But we expect ourselves to just know how to maintain intimacy across years, stress, and change.

It's insane, when you think about it. Of course we fail. We haven't been given the tools.

When I started building Interleave, these lessons were front of mind. I was in a new relationship by then, one that was going better because I was going better. I had learned some things, grown some skills, and become more conscious of the work partnership requires. But I still felt the gaps. The moments when we did not have the language for what was happening. The times when we fell into old patterns because we did not have new ones to replace them. The sense that we were improvising something that deserved infrastructure.

I built Interleave Romance for the people we had been in my first marriage: young, well-intentioned, and lacking the tools we needed. I built it for the people my ex-wife and I could have been if we had had support. I built it because I never want anyone to feel as helpless as I felt, standing in that house we had built together, realizing it was coming apart and not knowing how to save it.

The features we built all come from this place. The check-in prompts that help couples have conversations before they become crises. The shared memory that preserves context so you don't have to hold it all in your head. The pattern recognition that helps you see your cycles clearly instead of stumbling through them blind. The infrastructure for repair, for maintenance, for the long work of staying together.

I'm not claiming Interleave would have saved my first marriage. Some relationships end because they're supposed to end. Sarah and I grew in different directions. We wanted different things. Even with perfect tools, we might have arrived at the same destination. But we would have arrived there with more clarity, more intention, less of the slow suffering that comes from drifting apart without knowing why.

What I want for the people who use Interleave is what I didn't have: support for the work of partnership. Tools that match the seriousness of the undertaking. Infrastructure for the long horizon.

My divorce taught me that love is fragile. That good intentions are not enough. That the work of staying together deserves respect, attention, and support. It taught me that sometimes the most important thing you can build is the wisdom to know what you should have built differently.

I'm building differently now. For myself, for my current partner, for everyone who is trying to build something that lasts. The lessons were expensive. I'm trying to make them available for less.