27 People Who Got Divorced After 20+ Years Of Marriage Share Their Heartbreaking Stories

Not all marriages last forever. But some marriages look like they will...and do for a long time...until they surprise everyone by falling apart.

Recently, we asked members of the BuzzFeed Community who got divorced after 20+ years of marriage to tell us their story, and they held absolutely nothing back. Here’s what they had to say:

1. “My ex-husband, as I knew him, just…vanished. After 22 years of being a responsible, mature, and fun husband and father, it’s like a switch flipped. He started having affairs, racking up credit card debt, working out incessantly, disappearing for days at a time, and more. He filed for divorce while having an affair with a woman at work who was 25 years younger than we were. (She dumped him three weeks after the divorce was final.) Classic midlife crisis. He was in complete denial that he was hurting anyone. It was very sad and hard to watch.”

—anonymous

2. “Coming up on 20 years of marriage and we’re separating. There is no infidelity or big event that caused it. We just poisoned the relationship from the inside out slowly. We got married very young (19 almost 20) and had a crap ton of issues thrown our way throughout. Poor communication, not following through on promises, resentment, letting our physical selves go — all of it just added up and killed the love. It’s probably the most painful thing I’ve ever had to go through, and I question it every single day. Twenty years is a long time to just walk away from.”

—christy3761

3. “My parents got divorced after 23 years of marriage because my dad found an easy way to make money: trafficking drugs across state lines. Turns out, that’s a federal crime. We had no idea and thought he was just at work (he wasn’t at it long before the FBI shut