Tonight I'm a little sad.

I had a friend, or rather friends, because at one time a couple we knew well took their family out to France, feeling they had been called there.

Cut a long story short, my friend met someone else on the internet while he was going through a difficult time with the church and in other ways, and decided that was the end of things. His stance became increasingly angry and bitter, taking a stronger and more offensive anti-Christian (and sometimes other faiths too) stance in his facebook posts. There was less and less good and more and more that was barbed and designed to wound.

Tonight, I expressed how I felt, how he'd become eaten up with hatred, how the friend I once ate with and made music with had gone.

At least being de-friended when the friend you once had no longer exists doesn't hurt.

I mourn the loss of the man I knew. Of the husband he once was, the father, the friend, the leader. Life can never be the same for him, never to know the purity of a first and only partner, of children growing in an unbroken family.

So he was all to blame then?

I don't know. Nothing is ever straightforward in marriage, but sometimes you can ride the feelings like surfing on the crest of a wave, while other times you just have to swim against the current of feelings to stay still. But in the end, a marriage will stay together as long as both parties choose it to, and will fall apart when that ceases. No marriage will ever fail without deliberate sin, and if one party has chosen that path, there's little one can do to stop them unless they want to be stopped.

I'll still miss him, but not as much as his family will miss the man he once was.