Lynn was facing her second divorce at the young age of thirty. Her marriage to Alex barely endured one season. They had been married on a late autumn afternoon when the air was still warm under a cloudless sky. By all accounts, the four guests that were invited to the ceremony witnessed an outwardly happy occasion. After all, Alex and Lynn were young and in love. And when two people are young and in love, the natural expectation was to profess the rest of their lives to each other.
Only, Alex was not completely honest with Lynn about his feelings. While he did indeed admire Lynn for her convictions and capacity for love, Alex had many doubts about. . . well, many things. One of which being that he and Lynn had only been together for just over a year. "What more do you need to know about each other?" Their therapist had said when the question of marriage came up nine months after they began dating. It was true that both Lynn and Alex wanted the same things: children, family, a life to share with another. But neither realized or could forsee that their individual pasts would haunt their relationship.
And so Alex never revealed to Lynn, nor to their therapist for that matter, his real feelings about getting married. Alex conveniently convinced himself that marriage was just the natural chain of events and that he should just settle down. He was five years older than Lynn and had never been in any relationship, either long or short-term. It's now or never, he had thought at the time. Alex and Lynn had reached a point in their relationship that either moved forward or ended. Alex wanted desperately to be in a relationship and therefore convince himself to be the grown-up he was not ready to be.
Lynn and Alex were married on a beautiful late autumn afternoon and they would separate four months later on a cold and cloudy December evening.
