My last article was in November 2023. What happened?

Divorce. That’s what happened.

I hadn’t been happy for a long time—maybe not since… 2014. A marriage has phases:

First: butterflies, love, roses.
Then: kids, family, and a shared sense of being together. You help each other raise the kids. As they grow older, go to school, and start talking back, a feeling of camaraderie develops. Deep friendship.

Happy couples call this deep love. However, many couples never reach this stage. They’re too different. They grow apart—sometimes very fast, sometimes slowly—and the once-happy marriage turns into constant quarreling, neglect, or worse: adultery or fights. And the kids are the ones who suffer most.

Our marriage started growing colder in 2011. I once loved my wife because she was so different from me, and she felt the same. But in retrospect, we were too different. After 2011, she quarreled often, and I fled. I fled into my work, my business, my hobbies, and my wargame room. It felt like the only way to escape the frequent demands, orders, sour looks, sighs, and reproaches. I just hoped it would end someday.

Of course, that was a false dream. If you don’t solve a conflict, it never ends. She never stopped chasing, and I never stopped running. We had a Tom & Jerry relationship. Eventually, I built high walls around myself—an emotional bunker—to survive the pain. I focused on the enemies of Napoleon and Alexander, while the real conflict played out every day… and I denied it.

We visited several relationship therapists but never found peace, never reached that deep love I craved.

We stayed together because of the kids. Although we didn’t care for each other anymore, we faithfully cared for them—made their food, lived together, spent family holidays, and shared a house. After dinner, she glued herself to the television while I vanished upstairs to my study to paint, blog, or work.

In the last two years, the marriage grew freezing cold, and the kids began to notice. After a bitter family holiday, we decided to split. That was in October 2023.

I used to visit the Amsterdam wargame club weekly or biweekly – a club I founded it in 2014. But not anymore. But after the divorce process started, I stopped attending altogether. I stopped painting and blogging. I had to focus on organizing our divorce, practically and legally. Napoleon? Forget him. (He was also a divorcé, by the way. 😊)

The last 15 months were spent finalizing the divorce agreement, finding a new place, requesting a mortgage, buying a house, painting the walls, furnishing it, and trying to find a new balance.

I think I found it today.

The sun is shining, and I smiled at myself in the mirror. My Dutch Lancers are waiting in the storeroom. A good day to write my first letter from Saint Helena, I thought.

The communication with my ex-wife is civil, and my kids still love me.

I think I’m happy again.