By Joan Semanda.

“It’s The End.” Stella looked into Rob’s eyes as she told him, in not so many words, that their five year marriage had come to an end.

She still loved him. She still cared for him. She felt like her guts were being wrenched from her body, but she knew that there was nowhere to go from here.

Rob was on his way out to play golf with his friends. The same golf game he had gone to for the past four years. As he was running out the door he picked up his car keys and  saw an envelope with his name on it in Stella’s handwriting. “I wonder why she would write to me,” he irritably thought as he tore it open. “It’s The End.”

Those three words were all she could come up with. When Rob tipped the envelope over, a wad of papers titled “divorce” fell out with them. Confused, he picked the papers off the ground and, with envelope in hand, walked to the kitchen where Stella was putting together sandwiches for the kids. “What’s this about?”, he asked.

When Stella looked up he noticed how haggard she looked. It was only then that Rob took a moment to really look at her. It felt like she was with him but she wasn’t. Almost like the shell that kept her was there, but she wasn’t.

A while back, Rob thought when she came back from work and tried to tell him about her day she was going on about things that were nagging him. When she told him about a problem she had, he jumped to give her a solution – because he just wanted it to end so they could get back to watching the game. When they needed to get intimate, he was more interested in getting done with it and going to sleep.

They were like a well oiled machine he thought, but she had not felt him in a while. She knew he wasn’t there. He hadn’t given her his all in almost four years. He hadn’t taken a moment to appreciate her. He hadn’t told her he loved her – like he meant it. It was always an “I love you,” followed by him running out of the door, because earlier on in their relationship she had made it clear that she needed to hear those words. Maybe what she should have said was she needed to feel them.

Rob was a good man. He took care of his kids and went to work each morning. He came home at approximately the same time and followed his same routine. But he had forgotten to nurture their love and, along the way, Stella had given up on him.