Sitting outside with my neighbor, watching my children play in the front yard with her niece’s children, we got on the topic of marriage. She, married 40 years with five adult children, stated simply: it’s a lot of ups and downs. A lot of waves coming at you in sets over the years, with periods of flat ocean stretching out as far as the horizon in between. It’s good for a while, and then it’s bad again: financial stress, drinking, separate vacations, bullheadedness, differences of opinion that become stand-offs. But, she said, you just gotta ride the waves. Then again, she’s 68, and as she says, “too old to do anything different.” I’m 40. I’ve got a lot more waves to ride, and I’m already tired of paddling back out. After almost 16 years of marriage, it feels like it might be a good time to get out of the water, maybe dry off for a while. Rest.
A few years ago, I started thinking maybe I’d like to call it before I got put through the wringer, hoping to end things feeling like I enjoyed the ride enough to make the hard work worth it. Other times, it felt like I’d been through the wringer a dozen too many times already, and I was waterlogged, dizzy, and sick. Those times, I just hoped to make it back to the shore in one piece. And yet, I’d see our kids–better kids than my sister has (her words, not mine), waving from that shore, and I’d find myself wanting, yearning, hoping, and wishing we could make our marriage work–not just for them, but because of them. Because I’d look at them, and see how good my husband and I could be, because nobody with as many problems as we seemed to have–or even without the problems we had–was raising kids like ours. Yet I knew we’d hit a wall in our relationship, and had been banging our heads against it for a long time–maybe for as long as we’d been married. Still, the issues seemed so stupid, so insignificant on paper. Nobody had cheated. Nobody had lied. Everybody was essentially as he or she had always presented himself or herself to be. It felt like someone should be able to do something to make this work. From the outside looking in, we looked like a model family–always on the go, always having fun, always making the most of things.
And yet. We were making the most out of nothing. Neither of us knew how to get past the resentment, the feelings of inadequacy, the anger. Both of us felt like we’d overcompromised in our relationship and had been undercompensated. Although we still angrily, vehemently, defensively told each other we loved each other, the only thing either of us felt was broken, empty. It’s a sad, hard thing to wonder if you’d be happier overhauling your marriage into a friendship and co-parenting partnership. To try to rationalize an emotion, to reshape romantic love into friendship or familial love, without the sex. In even the best divorces, splitting one household into two–especially when there are children involved–seems an insurmountable and polarizing task. How could we possibly let go of what was and look forward, positively, to what could be?
To consider whether living in your own house, by your own rules, and getting to spend time with your kids that wasn’t dictated by anyone other than them–with maybe a few suggestions here and there by you–would be more comfortable than tiptoeing around each other tensely, carefully, uncertainly. To ruminate on time you would have to yourself, without your kids, alone, to read, to write, to think, to just be. To question what it would be like to have sole control over how and when and on what your money was being spent instead of anxiety and frustration over bills that can’t be paid in full every month. To ponder pursuing your career, your hobbies, your friendships, your interests without passive aggressive commentary. This is what it feels like to contemplate divorce.
And yet, for some time, to believe you’d be happier divorced, and to still want to stay married–this is also what it feels like to contemplate divorce. But it’s soul-crushing to feel like a failure of a spouse, a partner, a friend. To feel like you’re breaking a promise you made, that divorce meant giving up on someone you love. To realize that a job you waited your whole life to accept has been misrepresented or changed beyond what you’re willing to give to it, and you’ve been replaced by someone younger, fresher, and more naive. It’s heartbreaking to feel like a failure of a parent, to feel that no matter what you do for the rest of their lives, this one huge thing will forever be the worst thing you could have ever done to your kids. It’s frustrating to know that the issues that have caused so much emotional pain, so many bad decisions and defensive actions, are the same issues you’ll still be arguing about, divorced. And it’s useless to wonder, if you could just find solutions to the issues, couldn’t you stay together? Because at some point, you get so injured by each other, that there is no more “together.” And accepting this is how you will, finally, accept divorce.
(mostly) full disclosure 