Congratulations on Your Divorce
Content warning: suicidal ideation
At a friend’s wedding years ago (yes, irony from the start), I answered a stranger’s question that must’ve pertained to my relationship status because my response was that I was going through divorce. My expression conveyed that I’d anticipated “oh, I’m so sorry” or a response of that ilk. Condolences are customary in response to such news. In contrast, she replied “I think divorce is always positive.”
Divorce is always positive. Divorce is always positive. The line reverberated in my ribs.
Just as you don’t really know how to be married when you get hitched at 21 years old, to the first person you ever kissed, I didn’t know how to be divorced. Media had scarcely offered any model to emulate. But my church-centered upbringing did prepare me for the emotion I assumed was required post-separation: shame. I am much accustomed to shame. To be greeted with compassion and even congratulations instead destabilized me.
o o o
My wife and I met when we were ten and eleven years old, respectively. I don’t remember meeting her for the first time, but we certainly never met beforehand because she’d been living in Kenya the first decade of her life before joining me at the church where all four of our parents had met in the 70s. Our friend groups related but barely overlapped and our eyes only met with romantic curiosity my senior year of high school. It was her eyes, her gaze, that entranced me. I was a golden boy of the youth group who genuinely bought into the tenets of our fundamentalist theological environment. She was also the child of missionaries everyone admired with several international Christian-making excursions under her own belt. We flirted through the summer following my high school graduation and maintained our connection long-distance during my missionary training in Switzerland and Southeast Asia. I was unsure if we’d revive our teenage romance when I returned, but we did, and I followed her to university that fall, selecting the major she had. Jesus had written the script of our relationship, it seemed, and we enthusiastically memorized our lines.
Subtly and gradually, we grew apart. I felt unappreciated, but never expressed it. I am skilled at swallowing uncomfortable feelings for fear of hurting those to whom they pertain. But my behavior betrayed me and she was paying attention. Then, one night, she confronted me about it, and because I’d stored up too many uncommunicated misgivings, the dam burst, and I found myself breaking up with her. She gathered the pieces of her heart from the floor of my dorm and retreated to hers, her roommates good friends to console her. I summoned my brother for a similar salve and wept into the night.
Same major, she and I shared multiple classes the next day. It is a distinct pain to hold physical proximity juxtaposed against emotional distance. And I couldn’t bear it. I spiraled in my thoughts, and contemplated ending it all. I never attempted, but the thought of killing myself seemed a legitimate option. So, frightened by my own mind, I called her. She came over. We reconciled. And buoyed by the relief of avoiding the worst, I proposed the summer before my junior year and we married the following. I was a father at 25.
When we first separated in 2018, this memory of our first breakup flooded my mindspace. It is not as if I would undo the decision to get back together with access to a time machine, but when your marriage severs, your mind tends to punctuate the story of it with decisive moments. The forks in the road stand out. I cannot help but wonder what my life story might have entailed if I had honored my feelings and vocalized them.
I withhold a full account of our separation. I have a thousand times more to say about marriage, divorce, and co-parenting than I am willing to share on the internet because I am not the only character in my own story. Rather, I come with unsolicited advice and some words meant to comfort anyone contemplating, navigating, or striving to heal from divorce. Because whether or not it is always positive, it is nearly always painful.
o o o
A heavy and political point, but let us briefly acknowledge that for the majority of human history, marriage denotes preserving lineage, protecting or accumulating property, or otherwise promoting economic stability: the opposite of romance. It has mostly been reserved for gender-normative couples and almost always presumes and reinforces the lie of patriarchy. Marriage is dangerous for women. As such, increasing divorce rates signal greater economic security for women and non-men, which ought be celebrated. And that so many remain in awful marriages for fear of abuse or homelessness ought be lamented. Marriage can be so misogynist and so violent, so carceral and life-sucking, that I’d listen to an argument to abolish it altogether. Perhaps such a treatise was what my wedding-guest-conversation-partner bore in mind.
She more-probably meant that a divorce points to some kind of rupture in the relationship that was, even if reparable. Just because something can be salvaged doesn’t mean it should be. To have chosen against divorce might’ve meant to suppress someone’s needs and feelings. The “success” of a marriage is not its perpetuity but, rather, the extent to which the partnership facilitates the most authentic selves of those who comprise it. We should not aspire to ‘til death do us part if the marriage itself was emotionally fatal.
Marriage takes two to mend but only one to end, as I ended mine. Regardless of the circumstances, to make that choice or have it thrust upon you provides an opportunity. You are your first and only person, even as you inevitably belong to a community. Divorce is an invitation to remember that. To return to yourself. Indeed, to wed yourself instead.
It is embarrassing to admit that I first encountered the concept of being self-partnered through some tabloid pull-quote attributed to the actor Emma Watson. Still married, I didn’t even read the article, but I logged the concept and returned to it when I did find myself single for the first time in my life (I’d been in relationships since eighth grade). I afforded myself the possibility to pour into myself the same emotional energy, time, devotion, tenderness, respect, and affection that I once reserved for my spouse.
Indeed, I emerged a better parent after divorce not just because my children became my whole immediate family but because I had committed to my own personhood. I hope and believe it is the case that everyone whose lives intersect with mine benefit from me living into my most authentic and integrated self. I am not advocating for individualism - I'm a socialist, after all. I’m arguing that even if you find yourself partnered or married again some day - self-discovery is agnostic to nuptials - it would serve you well to answer the call to fall deeply in love with yourself.
Our separation included fits and starts interrupted by moving states and a global pandemic - it would be four years between our first conversation about divorce and standing before a judge to make it so. But when she moved out the first time, closing the door behind her, I turned around and took in the apartment that was ours and now, suddenly, just mine. For the first time in adulthood, I asked myself what I really want, independent of what others do. My eyes landed on the refrigerator, a mess with magnets affixing grocery lists, postcards, etc., and I said to myself “I like a clean fridge,” and removed it all. Nothing adorns my refrigerator to this day. Trivial and meaningful at once, it was the first choice I made for myself. And yes, my ex surely would have agreed to discard the magnets when we were together, but I’d never heard the invitation to prioritize my own needs and wants before. And I listened.
I do not mean to minimize the suffering characteristic of so many divorces, especially when children are involved. The early months of our separation were the darkest of my life, the lows including more intense suicidal ideation exacerbated by alcohol abuse. Always is too absolute, and positive too simplistic. But both here in the present and surely on the other side lies the thrill of possibility. The uncertainty can be terrifying, and fear of the unknown cages so many lifeless marriages, but whatever happens to you in the next chapter, there you will be. Your future is you, in all of your beauty and imperfection. You have yourself. Don’t pass up the chance to discover who that is and cozy up next to the person you find.
o o o
Today would have been my fifteenth wedding anniversary. Fifteen years. It seems an occasion to notice, but the calendar makes no recommendation of the accompanying sensation. It’s not one you’d find on a feelings wheel. It certainly isn’t sad: my ex-wife is happily remarried, we co-parent exceptionally, our kids live a privileged and peaceful childhood, and as it spilled out of my mouth at Thanksgiving to relatives, “I’m the me-est me I’ve ever me’d.” I am grateful to be divorced. But whatever the sensation is, it prompts me to honor that chapter of my story and the person with whom I shared it. I love her. I’m proud of the life we’ve built out of betrayal and hurt, separate but still connected. And I can’t wait to meet future versions of me in whatever chapters come next.
