Time to Get Divorced
It’s divorce book day! Two different books about divorce come out today. The first is This American Ex-Wife by
, which I have read and was so enraging and wonderful and enragingly wonderful that I couldn’t stop reading bits and pieces out loud to my partner. The second is Leslie Jamison’s Splinters, which I am probably reading at this very moment as you read this newsletter. Last week The Cut also published a much-discussed essay by Emily Gould on her almost-divorce that includes a great divorce literature review.Divorce is having a moment, it seems. And it should! Hot take: divorce is great. You should get divorced.
Ok, fine, not really. I mean, maybe? I don’t actually know your life. Obviously my real take is much closer to this Emily Nussbaum tweet. But this is my pitch for taking a moment to really, seriously imagine yourself divorced. To build up in your mind a picture of what a divorced life would look like for you and how you would be different if you weren’t married. You might just find that there are parts of those visions that sound pretty fucking good and worth trying to effect, either through divorce or through hard, honest, vulnerable communication and work with your partner. (Honestly, of those two, divorce may well be the easier option.)
I got divorced in 2019, and it changed me in profound ways I never could have expected. I’m partnered now, but the way I show up in that partnership is fundamentally different from how I showed up in my marriage. I don’t know if I’ll ever look at my partner and really believe, with a deep-down certainty, that I’m going to spend the rest of my life with him. I did believe that about my ex. The realization that I wanted a divorce was completely sudden and unexpected, like walking smack into a glass door and breaking your nose, because up until that moment I knew we were going to work things out and be together forever.
Sometimes it makes me deeply sad to think that I’ll never be that sure about someone else again. The fact that I was wrong doesn’t make it less worth grieving that lost innocence and faith. But it’s also a gift. Now I know the only person I can be sure I’m going to spend the rest of my life with is me. That was always true, but when you’re married it’s easy to lose sight of it.
There’s an incredible moment in Detransition, Baby when Reese, a trans woman, is first meeting Katrina, the pregnant partner of Reese’s ex Ames. Reese tells Katrina that “The only people who have anything worthwhile to say about gender are divorced cis women who have given up on heterosexuality but are still attracted to men” (167). She continues:
“I mean, they go through everything I go through as a trans woman. Divorce is a transition story. Of course, not all divorced women go through it. I’m talking about the ones who felt their divorce as a fall, or as a total reframing of their lives. The ones who have seen how the narratives given to them since girlhood have failed them, and who know there is nothing to replace it all. But who still have to move forward without investing in new illusions or turning bitter—all with no plan to guide them. That’s as close to a trans woman as you can get. Divorced women are the only people who know anything like what I know. And, since I don’t really have trans elders, divorced women are the only ones I think have anything to teach me, or who I care to teach in return.”
For obvious reasons, my ex and I have talked about this passage quite a bit. There’s so much I could say about it and how deeply it resonates with my experience. (My joking-but-not working title for my memoir at one point was Baby, Transition.) But for the purposes of this particular pitch, I just want to point out that you don’t actually need to get divorced to realize the narratives given to you since girlhood have failed you and that it might be a good idea to move forward without investing in new illusions. It can be beautiful, even.
It’s a bit of a cliche that when you tell people you’re getting divorced, people who have never been divorced respond like you told them you have terminal cancer. Like divorce is the worst thing that could happen to someone. But divorced people will often congratulate you. They expect, usually correctly, that the divorce is coming as a huge relief. The cost of divorce is so high that for you to take that leap, you must have been absolutely certain that what you were leaving behind wasn’t worth saving. Most people will try to stick out a miserable marriage for years before seriously considering whether they and the rest of their families might be happier imagining a different way of living.
I remember at first how unthinkable it was. Because if I got divorced, who would kill the spider on the ceiling? Who would figure out what to do about the smoke alarm going off for no fucking reason in the middle of the night? Who would make me ginger tea when I got sick? I could barely even bring myself to think about the idea of joint custody, which sounded like the most painful thing imaginable. Like surgery without anesthesia, maybe. My youngest child wasn’t even a year old, and the thought of not seeing him every single day hurt so badly that my mind simply… slid off it.
Some of those problems I learned how to solve myself, and others I learned to live with. I’ve made peace with the spiders that share my home with me. And joint custody is the worst thing that can happen to you, but also? It fucking slaps.1
It didn’t at first. For the first few months, I felt overwhelmed as a single mom when I had my kids and missed them constantly when I didn’t. My primary emotion was “crying”. But as time passed, I got used to that rhythm, and I started to experience it as a tremendous gift.
There are so many things that are great about joint custody, not least of which is how much time and brain space it frees up for you if, in your marriage, you ended up resentfully occupying the role of primary parent, begging your spouse to “help” more. Hint: if you’re asking for “help”, the situation is probably not salvageable, because your partner has already deeply internalized the idea that the labor is your job and not theirs. Real partners don’t help, they… partner. I remember when I read this excerpt of Mom Rage by Minna Dubin how much I wanted to tell her that, actually, divorce really does solve all of those problems. Again, Lyz has written brilliantly about this.
But even without the freedom that comes from doing all of the parenting 50% of the time instead of 80% of the parenting all the time, the cadence of custody disrupts the passage of time in a way that has made me so much more aware and intentional about who I am and who my kids are. When I’ve had my kids for longer stretches, I’ve noticed that the days kind of smear together. It’s hard to notice time passing. But when I get the kids back after a week without them, I really notice them. I see the minor shifts in their interests and behavior that you can miss when someone is on top of you or under your feet every single day. And because I know I only have a week with them at a time, I put much more thought into how I want that week to go.
It’s also easy to forget, when you’re in the parenting trenches every day, what you want for yourself in your life that’s separate from your kids. What kind of friendships you want, what hobbies and interests you want to spend non-parenting time on. Being forced to confront these questions every other week? Not the worst thing.
Joint custody also forces you to let go. You have no control over what’s happening at your ex’s house, and that’s just how it is. That letting go is also a gift, because truly, control is so often an illusion and a coping mechanism. And even if your ex is making parenting choices that you don’t like and struggle to live with, there’s a clarity in that and an opportunity to be mindful about the kind of parent you want to be on your time.
That doesn’t come up for me a lot, because my ex and I are actually very closely aligned on almost all parenting issues. So instead, my divorce has just brought me a bigger community of people who can put their heads together and brainstorm different approaches for how best to support our kids. I’m so grateful for that. I remember when it was just me and my ex parenting our oldest together, and how isolated and clueless I felt. Now I’m part of a bigger community parenting three kids, and it’s orders of magnitude more complex but I never feel isolated. Divorce gave me that. The late capitalist American nuclear family is a scam and a sham in so many ways. As Kylo Ren said, let it die. Kill it if you have to.
In Emily Gould’s essay, she mentions that her divorce mediator became her couples’ counselor, and I honestly think every married couple should see someone like that. Divorce forces you to clarify what you want in a way that even non-divorcing couples should think about more. Together with a custody mediator, my ex and I put together a parenting plan that forced us to come up with a contract that defined our shared parenting values and commitments to each other, from how we wanted to handle religious education to who had to do the extremely unenviable labor of throwing the kids’ birthday parties.
It’s now crazy to me that people only put in the work to explicitly lay out these agreements when they’re separating. I will die on this hill: people should have to write parenting plans before they have kids. At the very least, get yourself a Fair Play deck. Have these conversations and revisit them often.
After my ex moved out, I missed her a lot, but I also enjoyed being able to do things exactly the way I wanted. When you’re partnered, the overall health and happiness of the partnership become the goal. If you have a minor preference for something, but your partner has a strong preference for something else, the logical move is to cede the point. If you love lavender hand soap but your partner doesn’t, you find a scent that both of you can live with. When I got divorced, I got all my minor preferences back, and I loved it. So in my new partnership I don’t cede the point quite as quickly as I used to.
Women in hetero partnerships cede their wishes a little too easily, I think. Why not make our partners see if they can live with us exactly the way we are?
My current relationship started as a rebound fling. When I realized that, contrary to my expectations, it had actually gotten pretty serious, I was terrified. I confessed to my therapist that every so often I felt the urge to ghost him completely. She tried to get me to put my fears in perspective. “So you’ll fall in love,” she said. “Maybe it’ll all work out, and there will be another wedding. Or it won’t, and your heart will get broken. And either way, you’ll survive.”
Because I’m great at therapy, I immediately started nitpicking her framing of weddings as the ultimate goal of romance.2 I’m not much of a wedding person, and I honestly don’t believe that marriage will ever be right for me again. But her bigger point landed, and I’ve brought that mindset into how I approach the partnership. So I still compromise when I have to, but I’m a little less quick to assume that compromising is something I have to do.
What if I just ask for what I want? If it goes well, I’ll get it. And if it goes badly, the absolute worst that could happen is that I’ll be on my own, spending the rest of my life with the only person whose happiness I truly have any control over. In a way, that was the only happy ending that was ever possible: that I would learn to be happy with my life, on my terms, whether I had someone by my side or not. It’s not the “happily ever after” romantic stories aim for, but maybe the narratives we’ve been given since our childhood have failed us.
Give yourself the gift of imagining getting divorced. And if it happens, at the very least, it might give you something to write a book about.
I just want to note here that the first time I wrote this, I included about eight more mentions of how much I miss my kids when I don’t have them, and then I started to feel like it was absolute bullshit how much internalized pressure I felt to prove that I was a good enough mother who misses my children enough! But if me talking about how great joint custody is makes you feel uncomfortable, feel free to mentally add them back in, I guess.
Also, as I briefly mentioned in this newsletter and my therapist knew, my boyfriend was married at the time! Even more fodder for sarcastic deflection, my go-to coping mechanism.