I was chatting with a friend of mine this morning (who's in Japan, I'll hasten to say, just in case anyone thought they were being alluded to), who was reeling from the fact that he had just advised one of his friends to divorce her husband. I don't really believe in divorce, he said, and I was the first to tell her she should get one. The punchline is that my friend, himself, is divorced. And now he and I have this weird thing in common, which is this creepy tendency toward divorce evangelization.
I remember when I first noticed that the words "ditch him and move on" had become one of the things that, if I were one of those novelty dolls with a string you pull, would be one of the half dozen phrases I would utter (go ahead and take a deep breath and read it back, it makes sense I swear). I was really shocked at myself. At first I thought I had become one of those self-righteous, man-hating bitter women and was trying to bring everyone around to my own jaded view, but I don't hate men and I don't feel bitter or jaded, so I realized it can't be that simple.
It also occurred to me that perhaps it's easier for other women to open up to me about their relationship problems when they know I'm divorced, because they expect I'll be able to relate better than someone who has one of these Donna Reed-type marriages. Maybe it makes me more approachable, maybe they think I'll be more receptive to the messages they've been sending themselves. And my answer has a tendency to be "ditch him and move on" because in reality that's precisely what they've decided in their hearts, it just took the right listener to unlatch and authorize that feeling. Gosh, I can certainly sleep better at night with that explanation.
I love it when people work it out, which certainly happens. I give infinite credit to those who share enough love and trust to make a go of it. I hate it, however, when people lament that couples today get married thinking that, if it doesn't work out, they'll just pop down to the corner store and get them a DEE-vorce. No one who has experienced the anguish, fear, abysmal loneliness, hurt and vertiginous self-confrontation of a divorce would ever think that it could be taken so lightly. In fact, I think divorce is something people often enter into with a considerably greater degree of deliberation than marriage or parenthood. Which is a shame, because if people thought harder about those other things before they did them (and I do not exclude myself from this), maybe there would be less divorce.
It would be the height of cynicism to marry someone for any reason other than wanting to spend the rest of your life with that person. But what if it turns out you were wrong about that? Do you then have to stick out eternity making each other miserable? Do you forever deprive yourself and your partner of a shot at real happiness because of a severe early miscalculation? It's not that I think we have any inherent right to happiness, but not to try for it is just so... chicken-shit, I guess. Make no mistake, divorce doesn't absolve you of your responsibility to better yourself and confront your demons. By itself, making that break doesn't solve anything... but then, neither does just staying together. And from that standpoint it's a lot harder to be self-congratulatory about divorcing than about "sticking it out for the sake of the kids, the dog, etc". If you're busy feeling Quite the Hero for deigning to stay in your relationship, forgive me for saying so but you're unlikely to turn it around.
It also occurs to me that my pat, "ditch-him-and-move-on" response comes from the fact that I, myself, gambled on happiness. It wasn't pretty. I hurt somebody I loved, big-time. I will never again be one of those people who can say they have no regrets. There's puh-lenty I'd take back if I could. But what it comes down to is that I'm a better person now, and that I'm happy. After all the pain and fear and ugliness I both perpetrated and felt, I'm happy, so when somebody comes to me and says, ohhhh, I'm sooooo unhappy, blah blah blah, I get impatient. Stop bitching and do something about it, I want to say. For me the outcome of having been through a divorce is that I'm much more tolerant of people's shortcomings in general, having bunked in with some of my own, but much less tolerant of people who wallow in their unhappiness.
Truth is, it's an easy enough thing to pledge 'til death do us part' when you've never experienced eternity in the day-to-day. Some people know themselves and their partner well enough to get that right the first time, or they stumble into a good thing out of sheer shiny-cheeked optimism or dumb luck. Others, like me, need first-hand experience of something like eternity to decide with whom we should spend it. So that, next time, hopefully I can say: even knowing what spending-the-rest-of-my-life-with-you feels like from moment to moment, I'm just crazy enough to want to give it a try.
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