In the study that I conducted before writing Runaway Husbands, I asked women whose husbands left out-of-the-blue what the moment felt like when he told her it was over and here are their actual words:

It was like someone had stuck a knife in my stomach and turned it
I felt like someone had stepped on my chest and emptied my lungs of air
I felt like someone punched me in the gut
I felt crushed, steamrollered, and then I felt as if I was falling off a cliff
If he had ripped my arm out, it wouldn’t have hurt as much
I felt like I had stepped on a landmine
I felt like I was hit by a ton of bricks
I had a strange physical sensation - like my brain had been shot with a stun gun

If we pay close attention to the words describing what it felt like, we understand why it hurts so much - being left in a cold, uncaring way when you had no idea that it was even remotely possible, feels like a physical assault.

In the weeks and months after the husband leaves, the wife obsesses, replaying that moment over and over in an effort to understand how someone who had loved her so much could so casually, but callously hurt her. The fact that she experienced the rupture of the marriage as a physical assault leaves her with pain in her body that she can’t think away because it’s not rational. It touches her on a gut level at some primal place inside.

What factors go into the depth of the pain?

Rejection - her husband has decided that she is not what he wants and he’s discarding her, often for someone else. He’s made an assessment of her, the wife he knows so well, and he doesn’t want her anymore.
Betrayal - he didn’t let her in on his growing discontent about the marriage. He deprived her of any sense of agency in her own life, making a unilateral decision and then springing it on her when there was nothing she could do about it. He broke the bone deep trust she had built with him.
Destruction of her vision of her future - her plans for her future, which she may have been carefully constructing her whole life, are destroyed like a house that’s been hit with a wrecking ball and she’s left unable to envision what her life is going to be like.

Attachment Injury

However, the animal cry we heard in the women’s statements above come from a deeper place, the place of attachment injury. The bond that is built within a long term marriage is more complex than just love - it’s attachment. Imperceptibly, day after day within a marriage, we are melding our identity with our partner, who we turn to in a fundamental way for support and safety like we may have done with our parents in childhood.

If we were lucky enough to have had dedicated, caring parents, we replicate in our intimate relationship the seamless sense of protection we experienced growing up. For many people, there was zero possibility that one day their mother would turn her back and walk away saying, “I don’t care about you anymore.” So when the husband does just that, it’s equally unthinkable.

For those women who grew up in an unstable or unsafe childhood home and then with great courage and hope, allowed themselves to open up and trust their husband and then he leaves, it’s even more damaging. It confirms the fear that people are not safe and not to be trusted, which is a hard way to maneuver through life.

While you’re recovering from the sudden loss of a spouse, you need to recognize that it’s not just a process of thinking and thinking and then eventually figuring out how someone who once loved you could hurt you, so that you can heal and move on. There is a concurrent process going on of soothing the emotional wound of the loss of attachment. That requires that you work towards accepting the fact that your suffering is normal and that having been attached is a good thing. It means you had the courage to let someone into your heart.

As the pain starts to diminish, and it will, you’ll find that you can feel safe and protected even without that other person because you can learn to love and protect yourself. Once you know you can protect yourself, it will be safer for you to attach to someone else because if that person leaves, you now know you will never lose the one you need the most - yourself.