After 10 years together, my wife and I divorced because our relationship had simply wound down. It's sad, but I'm also relieved.

• I met my ex-wife in college, and it was a meet-cute we loved to tell everyone.
• Nothing was wrong with our marriage, so we stuck it out — but in the end, we were just roommates.

"What happened?" my dad asked.

It was a fair question, but I swallowed hard trying to think of a satisfying answer. I hadn't seen my dad since Christmas before the pandemic hit. Now here he was, 2 1/2 years later, legs crossed on my couch.

"I don't know," I told him, honestly. "We just sort of didn't work."

I'd told my dad I was getting divorced, and now he wanted answers I didn't really have. I was tempted to make something up just to end the conversation. I thought about creating some big, life-changing event — maybe an affair or a fight — that would make it all make sense.

But I didn't want to lie. "We just didn't work. We tried hard, and we failed," I said. It was the truth.

Dad leaned back into the couch and asked me how I was feeling. This time I didn't have to search for the answer.

"Relieved," I told him.

I met my ex-wife on our college campus

She was my campus tour guide, a rising junior. I was an older freshman starting school in the fall.

I'd put myself in her tour group thinking she looked cute, and I tried my best to flirt without being annoying or creepy while she walked backward around campus for almost 90 minutes.

At the end of the tour, my dad came over to me and loudly suggested I "ask that girl for a tour of her dorm room." I begged him to shut up, and, luckily, he did.

We met again in the campus cafeteria. Hurricane Irene had made all the students shelter in place and taken out half the power. We bumped into each other — literally — in the dark, and the rest is history. Or was history.

People loved it when we told that story. It's a real meet-cute, and we used to tell it well as a couple. She used to tell everyone she remembered me from the tour; I was the only one talking, asking questions, or being friendly. She missed the flirting but thought I was nice-looking and funny.

As we built our relationship, we enjoyed and celebrated our differences

She was my opposite: grounded, calm, practical. At first all our differences didn't matter. She was a vegetarian, and I love meat. I'm a night owl, and she loves an early-morning routine; I need noise, and she needs silence.

At the start, each of us was willing to reach, to be a little uncomfortable. It was new and fun.

I could tell people liked us together. They liked the story of us. We'd unwittingly created a kind of mythology of our relationship for their consumption: not exactly star-crossed lovers, but something just as sweet.

Opposites attract, but I don't think they stick all that often. Months turn into years, and what once were just cracks deepen and widen into chasms. All the little differences felt so much heavier than I remembered.

We moved into separate bedrooms and became more like roommates

Right before the pandemic we moved into a new apartment — and separate bedrooms. It was all practical. I needed to sleep in the cold, I liked sleep sounds, and I wanted a TV in my room. She needed the bedroom to be warm and quiet. She wanted rows and rows of shelves for her plants.

This was a sensible compromise. It made sense.

I convinced myself it was possible to conduct a healthy marriage from separate bedrooms. But I quickly learned that it didn't work for us.

As we waited out the pandemic together, baking sourdough and rewatching "Mad Men," things slowly unwound. We lead different lives — even locked up together, we were living on top of each other.

We were little more than roommates in the end.

I always thought the end would look or feel big

I'd imagined the end of our marriage would feel thunderous, pervasive. In reality, it was just me, sitting alone in my bedroom late at night, rationalizing why we should stay together, justifying my marriage until I couldn't anymore. It was a slow, quiet unraveling.

One night I finally asked her for a divorce, and she said yes. We didn't argue about it. I slept in her room that night — the last night of us. She asked me to, and I didn't want her to feel abandoned. I was sure I was doing the right thing. I think I grieved the end of my marriage long before I asked for a divorce, but it was still terrifying.

After 10 years together — from 21 to 32 — I wasn't sure who I was without her.

When I finally woke up that morning to greet my dad, alone in my own place for the first time, I looked around at all the space that had once been ours and was now mine. I made coffee for myself and let my dogs out. A wave of relief crashed through me as I felt my jaw relax. For the first time in a decade, I had only myself to consider.

That night I sat up alone in bed thinking about all the things I could do now — just me. Whatever had unraveled was recoiling into something different, something new.