(First published several years ago on this blog)
Nine years ago, on February 7, 2014 I answered a few questions before a judge and a few minutes later, a guy named Bob and I were no longer married. As I mourned the marriage and talked with friends and family about it, this is what I heard from other women who’d been divorced: divorce feels like failure. I told them my divorce didn’t feel like failure to me. The end of our marriage felt sad the way the end of a vacation feels sad or graduating from high school feels sad: it’s a shame that it’s over, but good things end and you go on.
One divorced friend insisted I was wrong about this. I often tussled with this woman as if we were bickering cousins, but we liked each other a lot. She wrote that if my marriage were ending, it meant my then-husband and I had failed to keep our marriage going. I replied that keeping our marriage going for the rest of our lives hadn’t been my intention.
She wrote, “So did you want to get a divorce?”
I wrote, “I married Bob with the intention of being 100% committed to the relationship until it didn’t feel right anymore. Divorce was an option from the beginning, so it doesn’t feel like I failed. It just feels like the adventure is over.”
She wrote, “You failed.”
I wrote, “To do what?”
She wrote, “You failed in being a married woman, whatever that means!”
(At this point I think she realized her argument wasn’t airtight.)
I wrote, “I also failed to stay 10 years old. You pass out of things as you grow up.”
She wrote, “Yes, but marriage is something that you work on.”
I wrote, “I did work on it. I gave that marriage 100% until Bob said it was over.”
She wrote, “You and Bob [like other divorced couples] didn’t do such a good job.”
I wrote, “My purpose wasn’t the same as that of other couples. I never believed in til death do us part. Not for a second.
She wrote, “Yo tampoco. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a failure.”
I believe the basic difference in how I look at marriage is that I see it as a rite of passage in the truest sense: it’s a state that you pass into and then pass out of. I see marriage as just one experience in a lifetime. The length of time it lasts doesn’t matter. What matters is learning from it and leaving it behind maturely, without anger or pettiness. Bob and I were only married for five years, but I benefitted greatly from that time and so did he. Then we ended our marriage peacefully. That feels like success to me, not failure.
It makes sense that divorce feels like failure to women who see marriage as a state that should last a lifetime, validated by double-digit anniversaries. They’re measuring the value of a marriage by whether or not it lasts until someone drops dead. This reduces marriage to a relationship with only one metric: length of time the union lasts.
But if a requirement of marriage is “til death do us part no matter what, dammit,” then we’re setting it up to be either a good/tolerable experience that doesn’t end or a miserable one that doesn’t end. My ex-husband and I had no interest in a marriage of attrition, which lasts purely because the partners believe marriage should last forever no matter how empty or painful the relationship.
I used to look at couples celebrating 25 or 50 or 75 years of marriage and think that to be together that long, they must really love and enjoy each other. Since then I’ve learned that some very long marriages are quite miserable. Length of time is no indicator of happiness. Would I want to hit those anniversary marks with a lifeless or painful marriage or would I rather sacrifice those accomplishments of attrition for a happier life as a divorcee?
To all women disappointed by how long your marriages didn’t last: don’t look at long-lasting marriages and assume those marriages are better than ours were. Length of marriage indicates nothing about the quality of a marriage or the people in it. All it shows is that they still agree to be married.
I believe marriage has become a rite of passage in American society, but we haven’t admitted it yet. At least half the time, marriages only last a limited time. I believe it’s similar to when we outgrow a job or house or lifestyle: when that happens, it’s time to move on.
And yes, marriage is a timeless universal institution that anchors communities and nations, organizes property and inheritances, and harbors child-raising. For those purposes it was, in the past, important that marriage last until death. But we now have other ways to organize societies and more creative ways to form families and raise children. If lifelong marriage were still the bedrock of society, the U.S. would have fallen apart decades ago.
Let’s ease up on the stigma of divorce. Pressuring everyone who marries to stay in that marriage no matter what is cruel. Why can’t we accept that when a relationship — even a marriage — has served its purpose, it’s all right to let it go? That’s not failure; that’s just life.
7 Feb 2023
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