A few months ago I was reading essays about divorce on The Cut. Every once in a while I start reading everything I can about divorce, but just as quickly I stop. So many of the articles are about marriages that end due to cheating or abuse. So many of the articles are about partners who are terrible people. I often feel like I am a thoroughly inadequate person because I could not make it work with a partner who did not cheat on me, did not abuse me, and was (and is) a good person.
I decided to write an article about it, and I pitched it to The Cut back in April. I didn’t hear back from them. Then I sent it to The Sun. It seemed like it got close there. And now, I don’t feel like sending it out again. I think it’s okay to not fight to publish everything I’ve written. To not keep finding venues, to not be brave, to not craft pitches, to not persevere, to not weather the rejections. At any one time, I’m already doing this for a handful of pieces.
So below is my article. I hope my paid subscribers will forgive me for offering this post entirely for free. It was how I intended it. And please, please share this piece if you know anyone who might need to read it, someone else who wasn’t able to save a marriage that wasn’t a bad one. Thank you.
Happy, and then Not
Sometimes you have a really good marriage that ends. For about 13 years, you both felt good about it. Of course things had changed as the years went on, but it would be weird if they hadn’t. Life changed, and it kept changing. You were still each other’s best friend. You had life goals that aligned. Ideas about your future that aligned. Where to live. What was important. You’d even found a local place that held a pizza dinner followed by a gymnastics class for kids so parents could have date nights. More importantly they could have date night at home. And you still enjoyed date nights. Dinners across from each other. Long talks. You fought sometimes, but so rarely. You can’t remember those fights now.
But then my mother was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and my marriage changed. I hardly even saw it changing, like the sleight of hand of a magician, I was looking at the other hand. How could I possibly watch both hands? The marriage hand was one I’d never watched before. What did it look like when it was in trouble? Did it have a before-it’s-too-late phase? What did that look like? How does one pull it back from the ledge? By the time I spotted that the hand held the coin, which felt like it should be ripped from his hand and put into my dead mouth, the hand was so far over the ledge, that I often look back, years later, and wonder if there was even a point of hesitation.
Right now, at this very moment, I hate how the previous paragraph draws attention away from my mother’s death. Implies that my marriage was more important than my mother. Though it maybe should have been, with how our lives keep moving forward and never back. There’s still so much I don’t know from my ex. Was it that he was grieving my mother too? Or was it too much, how distraught I was over my mother’s death? And I don’t say that to be cruel or to accuse him of coldness. I think it’s a valid thing to consider—that it’s difficult to feel as if you are a lesser priority, especially when marriage seems to be a declaration of mutual top priority status. And it’s valid because it certainly left him with a larger share of taking care of our house and son, and while I thought he ought to have been capable of that, I also knew, as they had been my tasks, how very tiresome they could be, and draining.
The strangest though—beyond my utter confusion as to what had occurred and so quickly, from being best friends to dreading sharing a room—was that as I relayed my story to others, I found women shocked at what they were hearing because the same thing had happened to them. They had lost someone and their marriages had changed, down to its core, to the point that it was unsalvageable, and all those women were now divorced. Like me. On all the paperwork now. Divorced. But they were all strangers, and I couldn’t ask them more.
I wanted to know every detail. I still do. Is my ex unique, and this was avoidable, if only I’d known how to tend to the rift as it formed? Or is this a function of people, some subset of people, and I didn’t stand a chance?
God, I want it to be the latter.
It’s horrible to watch someone die from pancreatic cancer, but the helplessness is something, something that helps me. I couldn’t have saved my mom. I couldn’t have saved my mom. Hallelujah, how small I am. Hallelujah, how human. I know it’s weak to want to have been helpless at the dissolution of my marriage. I know helpless means blameless. And you bet I don’t want to be blamed for it. I did the best I could do. I always wonder if I’m lying to my son, telling him I did the best I could. Telling him I tried. Did I? I know I found the couples’ counselor and signed us up and scheduled it and got friends of mine to babysit and went week after week. But mostly I remember watching the other hand. Even after my mother had died, I was watching that other hand, grabbing my attention, snapping in the air, at nothing.
Now I’m about to get married again. They don’t tell you much about that part. That you might set yourself up for divorce all over. That you didn’t really learn much from the first go ’round, yet here you are. I still can recognize a failed relationship, but I don’t have a clue what a failing one looks like. I’ve panicked about that more than enough times, pushed my fiancé away and said, Aren’t you worried this isn’t working? After I calm down, he says he loves me and asks if I love him. I do. And then he says that’s enough. That if we have that, we have a reason to stay together and fix anything else. Is that true? Is that how this works? I honestly don’t understand how this works.
I know my divorce taught me more about what I want from a partner. It’s not just a best friend and a good father and a responsible housemate and a person who respects me, and, and, and, all those other things I looked for when I was younger. What moved right up to the top of the list was someone with a high tolerance for stress. Someone who handles death well, and illness. (Because there’s still that forward rule.) And the stress threshold is a difficult one to measure if no one dies. If you’re not racked my grief that makes you capable of sleeping 18 hours a day like a fucking cat. But you can talk about it, and measure it against other stressors, a pandemic say. Enough to trust that you’ve found someone who can hold you up when you need it, and who can handle it when you fall apart despite any and all support.
I’ve been thinking about all the jokes they make about people who get divorced a bunch of times over their lives. Old men comparing their numbers, men who can make sweeping statements about each. Was she the one who hated parties? No, that was my third wife! Har har har. I don’t want to get divorced again. I’m happy. I like being this happy. I hate to think how it could happen again, how I’ve been happy before. How shifts happen so suddenly beneath us, within us. How it’s not as predictable as I was taught. How one cannot just promise, and then it’s so. How it doesn’t take cheating, or falling in love with someone else, or abuse. Things can be happy. You don’t have to look back and change that to make better sense of what happened. It can be happy, and then not.