There are things about divorce that make it possibly the worst experience of a person’s life. Among my friends who have gone or are going through this and in my own experience it does feel like the hardest thing they or I have ever gone through. Two of those people lost their fathers young. But they insist this is the hardest thing they’ve ever had to do.
It’s difficult on two levels. First there’s all the interpersonal stuff: feeling like a failure, letting yourself down, letting down your partner, letting down your family and friends. Then pile on top of that the feeling that you’ve been let down by your partner, by your friends, and by your family. No matter how supportive your friends and family are they cannot possibly help you. You need more help than you’ve ever needed before. You need so many things. And the things you need don’t have a name. If you could put a name to just one thing, you wouldn’t know how to ask for it. And if you did, and if a friend reached out, it would be like scooping a single drop of water out of the ocean—a remarkable feat, and futile.
The healthy, logical, self-protective thing to do is to not examine all the things you did wrong. It’s overwhelming, painful, and depressing. That leaves you with the notion that everyone else around you is screwing up. Your partner was a bitch or a bastard. Your friends are neglecting you, and your family is failing you. This is not a good place to be when you need the support of nearly everyone else around you. The people who do spend time with you rarely know what to say or how to respond. You’re a broken record, having the same one-sided conversation over and over, venting, rambling, complaining. When they try to talk, you stare blankly, distractedly pondering your situation. As soon as they take a breath, you steer the conversation back to you without observing normal conversation etiquette. You are all about you. You alienate the people around you and then wonder why no one is helping.
All this will be exacerbated in some way or another by friends and family who remember the good times. They recall your failed marriage from a point of view that is inaccessible to you. Looking back, there was nothing good about it. Everything about your relationship sucked. It was doomed to fail. This is normal, and it’s necessary. Because if it didn’t suck completely, then you could have saved it, you could have avoided all this, you could have fixed it. You and you alone see it from this point of view.
You feel isolated and on your own for the first time in a long time. It’s desperately lonely, and there’s no way around that because you are, in fact, on your own. For the first three months you can barely get out of bed. Eat, sleep, take care of the dog. That’s all I could do. Some days all I managed was to take care of the dog. Feeding and walking her provided me with a routine. Without that routine, I had little reason to get out of bed. If you’ve got kids to take care of, then you’re really screwed. They are dependent on you, need you to “be normal.” And you can’t escape your ex. You have to talk to him or her nearly every day about the kids’ homework, play dates, fevers, all those mundane details around which your life together revolved. I can’t speak for myself, but that must be a crushing daily reminder of your failure.
And then it gets worse. Because that was just the separation. Now you have to tackle the divorce part of the divorce. You have to fight through all the anger, hurt, and sadness and find a way to converse civilly with your now former partner. If the split was decided mutually, this can be a relatively smooth process. That will not make it easier. That will make you question why you stayed together for so long. Because if you can’t find something to fight over, then you can’t find something to fight for, and you wonder what your relationship was all about. It was safe and comfortable and not what either of you needed, and why, why couldn’t you figure that out sooner? If you fight about the kids, the money, the stuff, then it’s likely your divorce is going the same way your marriage went. You fight—about everything. Why couldn’t one or both of you see that fighting about everything is bad for you, bad for her, bad for the kids? Why didn’t you see it sooner?
Because that’s not how the world works. That’s not how people work. We are culturally programmed to believe in the sanctity of marriage. This is the second difficulty, and it is a crock of shit. Marriage is not sacred. I don’t mean this philosophically or emotionally. I believe we should take all of our relationships and commitments to the people we love seriously. But the idea that marriage is something above and beyond any other committed relationship in a religious or cultural sense is bullshit. The institution of marriage is a legal construct that predates whatever church or religion any of us chooses to believe in today. Marriage turns your long-term relationship, your promise to each other into a legally binding contract. The difference between a divorce and a break up? The piece of paper. That piece of paper comes with cultural, societal, and, depending on your beliefs, religious judgment.
When you sign that marriage certificate you are promising that this won’t happen. Ever. You promise that you will work out your differences no matter how your lives change. You promise that you won’t change too much and she won’t change too much, the world won’t change too much, and you’ll always want the same things. That’s crazy. That is not how the world works. You’re promising the improbable, the unlikely, the longshot. And you and everyone around you are crushed when you can’t deliver.
On a good day, before you get closure or distance from your marriage, you feel like The Coyote, Wile E Coyote of cartoon fame. This makes sense when you think about it. The Coyote and The Roadrunner have a relationship that feels kind of like a marriage. They are committed to a daily ritual of mutual destruction. (Okay, if this analogy works then I grant you it’s a dysfunctional relationship at best. But it is a relationship.) They battle each other like it’s their job. They show up for each other, and the outcome is predictable. If you’ve seen enough of these you know what I mean. The Coyote always loses. But that’s not what I mean by predictable. The Coyote is constant. The Coyote is relentless. He tries again every day. He picks himself up again every morning and gets back to it. And The Roadrunner gives him another go.
Because that’s how life works. You are The Coyote. Against all evidence to the contrary, you have to get out of bed every morning and expect today to be better than yesterday. Yesterday may have been the worst day ever. Today might be the worst day ever. But tomorrow…tomorrow you’ll get another go, and it will be better.
(For a clearer and more philosophical expression of this sentiment, I highly recommend the episode of Radiolab called The Universe Knows My Name. The best bit starts at 5:47ish.)
Visualizing Shakespeare 