On Divorce

I was raised to believe divorce was a natural part of the lifecycle. Sure, I promise I'll be with someone forever. They promise too. I even love them and they love me. We may plan on getting married, but both of us, somewhere deep down, are thinking: well, we can always get divorced.

But look at our parents. How could anyone take marriage seriously anymore? Even worse: look at our grandparents. Staying together can be a doozey. Alcoholism, child molestation, verbal and physical abuse. These are the results of monogamy. The results of divorce are more manageable: thousands of dollars in therapy, spiritual immaturity, complicated finances. As a child, the choice was very clear.

As far as I ever understood it, the process worked like this:

The first time you marry, it's just a bad idea. If either of you had thought very deeply about it, you would have laughed, looked at each other and parted as friends. But you didn't: you got married. Either you had children or you didn't. Then you got divorced.

This leads to the second marriage: the most important one. The second marriage is designed to provide a safe and stable environment for child rearing. You raise the children from the first marriage and then any new ones that may have arisen. This marriage typically lasts ten to fifteen years. It is usually broken up by the man's infidelity as he heads into his midlife crisis. Something essential is broken in the woman's nature during this time and she typically becomes rather brittle and turns to plastic surgery or long-distance power walking.

The third marriage is only for the man: he marries the young thing he cheated on his second wife with. This marriage can last anywhere from five years to twenty, depending on the assets and emotions involved. Usually no matter how awful this third wife is the man will tolerate it because by this point he is acclimated to having a wife and could not survive without one. The first and second wives look at the third wife with dismay: how did she manage to weasel a BMW out of him? How did she convince him to take a vacation in Greece?

 

The woman doesn't get a third marriage. Anyone decent her age is dating a woman in her twenties. It won't matter how much plastic surgery she's had or how beautiful she once was. She's like a retired greyhound. She'll get adopted by a loserish man her age whom she will have to support, he will have some interesting but low-paying job at which he is only mildly succesful. No matter how out of his league she is, no matter how vibrant or powerful or gorgeous, he will still never, ever marry her. If she is lucky he will be into tantric sex, though more often it is amateur porn. Their love will be tender, a kind of balm on her wounds. The secret to their relationship will be low expectations.

 

Such is California. I am sure it isn't this way everywhere. But it is this way for me, here, right now.

 

As a rule, I don't see families like this depicted in books. I see them more in movies and on TV, but not in books. Everyone I know has at least two step mothers, but I hardly ever see such things depicted in the latest literary magazines. Where are the seething step children? Where the complicated closeness between eldest daughter and third wife? Even more troubling, in romance plots, where is the girl's concern over being a first wife, with all it entails? Where is her knowledge that he will love her most, but ultimately leave her for a woman who is better at keeping house? Where is her fear?

 

I just spent a week in the desert. There is nothing as frightening as the California desert. Cotton mouth, amnesia, the feeling you've stumbled into a Joan Didion novel. Even if you haven't had an abortion, you suddenly feel that you just have. Some vital part of you has been removed and at your core is a torn, homely void. I was with my friend who had just been left by her husband. It was a second marriage. She had raised his children. Now he is going to Cabo with the younger woman. It was all so trite, so normal, so real, that it was difficult for us to even speak. Yes, the snooping through the text messages. The damning posts on MySpace. Yes, how homely, how trite, how terribly painful. But a pain that we expected. A pain we always knew would come.

 

But how do you write a book so jaded and so raw? How do you match the California desert, the bright screens of iPhones, the toad that crawls up on your balcony with his jet black eyes? How do you encompass the sudden sound of sprinklers in the night? How do you leave behind every ideal: goodness, honesty, truth, beauty, love? How do you do it with an amnesiac's grace, still playful and lithe?

 

How do you make the reader feel that mysteriously a soft hand has reached for his shoulder in the dark, and is pressing it, communicating through the dry, tender fingers: I know. It's okay.

 

I can't even do this for my friend as we sit together facing the dirt hills. How can I do it for you?

 

Comments

[Rufi Cole]

Coach coin purses, you have left this comment on two of my posts. What an odd spammer you are! What does a hyper-partisan atmosphere have to do with Coach bags? You are strange, spambot. You are very strange.

[las vegas divorce lawyers]

While it is important to practice human rights, divorce is not the answer to every single fight. There are some couples who are too lazy to fix their relationship. They are so hard headed and stubborn; none of them gives way, which is not the essence of marriage. Divorce seriously changes the life of the children and their future. It changes their values and perception. So before filing that document, make sure you have done everything to save it first.