An Unessay on the Fourth Anniversary of My Divorce. And New Life for an Old List.
From the Archives
Back in May, my basement flooded with eight inches of water, thanks to a broken water main. It took several weeks to get the water drained, the mud cleaned out, the boxes of ruined things taken out to the trash. This summer, over a month after the flood, while I was reorganizing the basement and prepping for a crew to come in and lay new flooring, I found several large Rubbermaid containers—which I thought had been cleared—were filled with dark water, the inside of the lids covered with the slow creep of mold.
I took the containers out to the yard and dumped them. Two of the bins had nothing of value—old papers and notebooks, some clothes with no sentimental value that I’d kept for reasons unknown—and then, a collection of wedding memorabilia: RSVP cards, my old wedding planner, and a box of napkins from the reception.
I was surprised to find them. For over two years, for a number of reasons, I’ve become something of a minimalist, only holding onto things that have usefulness or a deep sentimental value. I thought I’d gotten rid of any wedding memorabilia long ago, except for an album of wedding photos that I’d kept for my children. But I was even more surprised to find the damage that a little over a month had wrought: when I attempted to pull the cards apart, the pages of the planner, it was impossible. They were glued together in a soggy mass. When I touched the napkins inside their box, they disintegrated into small clumps of tissue, delicate as the seeds of a dandelion.
I deposited the whole mess in the trash and then hosed down the bins, left them to dry in the sun. When I got inside, I couldn’t shake a feeling of disgust, disquiet. I tried to sit with my feelings for a while, but it took several days for me to understand them. Looking at the mess of the wedding memorabilia reminded me of what a mess my marriage had turned into. I hated that reminder, and I hated the cheap little comparison my mind had made. Step by step, I’d been putting my divorce behind me, but the ruined wedding memorabilia brought it all back: a clichéd, far too on-the-nose metaphor, but in its own wretched way, still accurate.
If you’ve read other divorce essays and books, you can easily see the trajectory here. It would be so simple at this point for me to spin this essay like a wheel along the genre’s established tracks, to talk about the breakdown of my marriage, to tease this metaphor out and carry it through the muck and into my clean new life.
But this is not that kind of essay.
When I sat with that metaphor a while, I realized it disgusted and disquieted me partly because of its lack of subtlety and partly because it reminded me of an essay I wrote about my divorce a couple of years back that I never published. I originally wrote the essay, what I began to call the “Bad Wife” essay, for an essay collection I was planning to write about my divorce, post-divorce life, and the lessons I’ve learned.
The “Bad Wife” essay, which I hadn’t read in well over a year, uses a reformatted, redacted version of my divorce decree as the framework, and the essay itself is in footnotes, something of a sequel to an essay that I wrote for Aaron Burch back in 2019, just days before I asked for a divorce. The “Bad Wife” essay is good, I think, not because the framework of the divorce decree is particularly original but because I’m honest with myself in a way that I hadn’t been before.
In an early draft, the essay began by chronicling my experiences but quickly became a litany of the ways in which my ex-husband did me wrong. At some point, however, after my divorce was finalized, I began to understand that my memories and experiences, cemented while I was still in pain, told a particular kind of story.
But pain does not tell us everything. Sometimes, in fact, it obscures.
Up to that point, my writing about my marriage had painted me in a much rosier light than it did my ex-husband, even though we were each culpable in different ways for the disintegration of our marriage. While my writing told a truth about my marriage and my divorce, it did not tell the whole truth.
After I sat with my feelings and my disquiet, I dug the essay out, and I reread it. I was right. It is a good essay, not perfect or done yet but good, and it does attempt an honesty and accuracy that I hadn’t been willing to face until long after my divorce was over. Looking at it again after all that time made me proud of the realizations I made so far on the page and proud of how far I’ve come from the pained, miserable, shadow of a person who left her marriage. It also reminded me that our work can sometimes surprise us and always teach us things.
There I was, here I am, humbled by my own damn self.
For a while, I considered publishing the “Bad Wife” essay here in this newsletter. I thought about publishing it today in fact, on the fourth anniversary of my divorce. I know, in a way, that by writing this piece that I’m still writing a shadow of the thing. But this is ultimately not that. This is more of an unessay, a wandering rumination on mindset and process rather than the kind of sharply-focused divorced-woman-makes-good pieces I am used to writing and used to reading.
After some consideration, though, I decided not to publish that essay here. I realized that the essay is not yet done and that it no longer carries the same urgency for me it once did.
I’ve been thinking about urgency a lot lately, about what calls me to write about something, thanks to the Melissa Febos essay I shared earlier this week. As more time goes by and my marriage and divorce recede further into the past, the more I understand that I don’t want or need to write a divorce book anymore.
Except for very rare days like this one, in fact, I don’t want to write about my divorce at all. The urgency to write about it has passed.
I’m not the same woman I was when I got divorced. I feel like every cell of my body has turned itself over to something new since 2019. My life since then has been a revelation, a second chance that I never dreamed possible, something that gives me hope in the midst of the horror and brutality of a pandemic and daily life in America. I’ve learned more about myself in these past four years—about marriage and love, about my own flaws and fuck-ups, about my writing and what I’m capable of, about my values and my purpose—than I did in the full four decades that came before. I am amazed at the caring, thoughtful friends I’ve found, amazed at the brilliant, supportive, beautiful person I’ve fallen in love with. This life and these experiences are changing me, I hope for the better. I am humbled, grateful. The hurt of my past is not gone from my memory, but my body no longer feels those prickles of pain. And while there are some experiences from my past I want to continue to explore in my writing, my divorce, for the most part, is not one of them.
What I know about myself as a writer now is that is inevitably when I write something, I inhabit it for a while. I simply don’t want to live inside my own divorce anymore. I don’t want to write a whole book about it. I don’t want to have to give interviews about it, to be asked questions, to have to read sections of it aloud at readings. And most of all, I’ve decided I don’t want my children to someday read a book-length dissection of their parents’ marriage and divorce. I know from experience and from the stories I’ve heard that the decision to write that kind of book is necessary and right for other women—many of those books are powerful and insightful—but it does not feel right anymore for me.
But I don’t regret my past published writing about divorce. That writing was necessary to get to where I am now, and it was as accurate as it could be at the time. I’m proud of that work. When they’re old enough, I’ll talk to my children openly about it and accept however it is they feel about it being in the world. I hope once they read it they will be proud of me too, but I cannot control their response. I imagine I’ll still talk about my experiences occasionally, still share stories with the people who need to hear them, and divorce as a topic will still make the occasional appearance in my work.
But from now on, on those rare occasions when I do write about divorce, I will keep in mind this lesson: one of the hardest and best things you can do as a nonfiction writer is to reckon not just with the wrongs that have been done to you but with the wrongs you have done. Even more difficult is learning to identify the defense mechanisms you’ve developed and deployed to protect yourself from taking accountability for your mistakes.
The most difficult part of this writerly accounting is in allowing the work to highlight the gulf between the person you actually are and the person you believe yourself to be.
When we’re reflecting on painful or shameful memories, we tend to want to protect ourselves and blame others. It’s human nature. But as writers, we have an opportunity to turn the same critical lens that we deploy in our examinations of others back on ourselves. We also have an opportunity to offer others the same compassion we all so desperately want. And that’s the place where we often find not necessarily a singular narrative truth, which can shift depending on perspective, but at least a modicum of accuracy.
I’m not suggesting anyone overlook or excuse abuse or neglect. Not ever. But we can learn to better acknowledge the humanity of other people at the same time that we’re asking people to recognize our own. We can acknowledge the nuances of our lived experiences, both the successes and the mistakes, rather than forcing all of our assessments into a binary.
Binaries make for an awfully good underdog story, but we more often find accuracy in the nuance.
Today, on the fourth anniversary of my divorce and my new life, I’m thinking especially about a handful of sentences I wrote in that unpublished essay:
I’ve tried to write it straight. I’ve tried to write it slant and as fiction. I’ve tried to chart the chronology of my marriage, to understand where the wrongness began. I tried to tell the truth as best I could. But the truth is slippery, subjective. Too often, my truth boiled down to a bad husband.
And what I know now is writing about your bad husband is easy.
What’s harder is writing about being the bad wife. So I have to do it piecemeal.
It’s strange to write an essay about divorce that’s not about the animus or even really the reinvention, strange to write about the fact that you don’t really want to write about something once so formative at all anymore. It’s a manifestation of my overthinking, perhaps, and maybe an uncomfortable reminder of the way the anniversaries of things continue to fuck with me a little. It’s also an acknowledgement of how damn hard it is to try to be honest with yourself on the page. I’m still struggling with the discomforts and the delicate intricacies. I’m also still struggling with the gulf between who I am and who I believe myself to be and the ways in which I’ve done wrong. I haven’t mastered any of it yet. I still have a lot to learn.
But I’ll keep trying. I want to see if I can do it better, write it better than I have in the past. And I’ll be writing more and more about people who have taught me, and about the life and the narrative worlds I’m building that are informed by my past but not overshadowed by it.
I may still publish my “Bad Wife” essay someday, if I can get it right. I will, at the very least, save it for my children. Published or not, I want them to have the chance read it, if they choose to. I want them to understand that a divorce is rarely a rupture and more often a slow unraveling, to understand how rare it is that a relationship ends because a single person is at fault.
But that will take more time. And more humility. Like I said, I have to do it piecemeal.
The one thing I won’t do is muck around anymore in all the memorabilia gone moldy in that Rubbermaid container and try to create something new from it. I’m done with the metaphors. The mess is gone. The good memories I have of my marriage are mercifully undamaged by its ending, same as the photographs in that wedding album that I tucked away for my children. Someday I’ll share both with them.
Besides, I don’t need to do or say or write anything more to redeem myself or to make something good from my marriage. My two beautiful children did that long ago. They do that every day.
So, for now, back to my writing, and back to this beautiful, unexpected, incomparable second life.
I hope I’ll meet you there sometime.
One small anniversary gift for you today, my readers —
I’ve pulled together and am republishing a thread of relationship advice that I wrote on Twitter beginning in 2019. These are not all my words; a lot of friends and family and Twitter followers contributed to this thread through 2022, so this is a collaborative, crowdsourced list, and I think it’s got a lot of valuable advice. I hope you enjoy if you haven’t read it before, or if you have, I hope you enjoy revisiting.
I’m using this list as the impetus to launch my “From the Archives” mini-series, which I’ll run here occasionally and where I’ll publish reflections on old work, pieces that got published on sites that have sadly gone defunct, or pieces that never got picked up in the first place.
Since Twitter isn’t long for this world (or, you might argue, is already dead and buried), and this thread was a source of comfort and hope for me during a very dark time, I felt like it deserved a home someplace other than that cesspool (albeit with a handful of 2023 updates).
Thank you for reading.
As always, I’m right here with you.
Never assume that your partner won’t leave. Always assume that they could find someone out there who could treat them better or appreciate them more. Never forget it.
Make your partner feel special every day. It doesn't have to be a grand gesture. Just something that says hey, I love you. I see you. I care.
No partner has a right to know everything about you. You are your own person. But if there’s something you aren’t telling your partner, you should carefully interrogate why you can’t trust them with that information.
You never know what’s happening in someone else’s marriage. And you never will, unless you’re in it too.
If one person is unhappy in the relationship, there’s something wrong. That doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with the people. Just that the relationship isn’t working somehow.
Kids are wonderful. They will also exponentially magnify any flaws or problems in a relationship. They will never, ever fix them.
Do. An. Equal. Share. Of. The. Housework. From the beginning. Forever. Always. Do not expect a medal for doing it. Do not expect a medal for finally catching up after years of neglecting your half.
There are lots and lots of women out there who feel absolutely exploited by pregnancy, breastfeeding, and childcare. There are lots and lots of women who justifiably feel like men do not do enough to offset this. This may be why your wife doesn’t want to have sex with you.
It should be just as hard to get married as it is to get divorced. Maybe harder.
Holding onto your resentments is poison.
If a “good” person does a “bad” thing, it doesn’t transform a person from good to bad. But there are still consequences. Sometimes the result of those consequences can’t be repaired. Sometimes a good person can do incalculable damage, even if that was never their intention.1
Just go to therapy, ffs.
Forgiveness is not something that anyone is entitled to.
It may not be true that your partner doesn’t like sex anymore. It may be that your partner just doesn’t like sex with you anymore. And that often has nothing to do with physical attraction and everything to do with the way you treat them and make them feel.
Just listen sometimes. That’s it. Don’t ask questions. Don’t try to solve the problem. Just listen. And then give your partner a hug. And maybe a drink or some ice cream.
Don’t pay attention to what other people are doing in their relationships. Think about what YOU want and what works for YOU.
You’re never going to be able to make someone fall in love with you. Or fall back in love with you.
Monogamy is not for everyone. For some people, it’s misery-inducing. There is absolutely nothing sinful or criminal or abnormal about alternatives to monogamy, as long as it’s consensual and age-appropriate.
Ending a marriage doesn’t have to be the end of the world. Sometimes, it can be the beginning of a healthier relationship.
Marriage is not for everyone. And that’s totally okay.
Don't worry about how others outside your relationship--mutual friends, family-- will react to the breakup. Focus on yourself and your own needs.
Unhappy people still fuck, y’all. As a very wise person told me, sometimes they sleep with their spouse to try to trick themselves into being happy. If you’re using your sex life or the sex life of other married people as a litmus for happiness, it could be a false barometer.
A very wise person suggested communication patterns between people could get stuck at the age at which you met or married a person. I got married at 23. This explains a lot.
A family member told me I’d have a hard time dating because my eldest son with Down syndrome would “be a dealbreaker.” If your child is a “dealbreaker” for someone, that person isn’t your person. And anyone who says that’s a reason to stay married can go fuck themselves.
Another family member said I shouldn’t date seriously for at least 1.5 years after my divorce. Who the FUCK are they? Have they been in my marriage? If you’ve been living in a marriage that’s been over for years, you’ve waited long enough. Go get yourself some happiness.2
Givers and taker rarely balance one another out. The giver usually ends up resentful and drained.3
Tangible joy is more important than a perception of safety.4
When you wake up, ask yourself: how can I make my partner happy today? It’s a hell of a lot more fun than asking yourself how they’re making you mad.
The only thing that matters is how you make the other person FEEL. Ask people what makes them feel loved and satisfied in a relationship. And then do it. Don’t assume. And don’t give yourself credit for trying when you didn’t listen and were doing the wrong shit.
If you can’t give someone what they want and need in a relationship? Let. Them. Go.
Sometimes we focus too much on tiny irritations. But what if those tiny irritations point to a larger pattern? Example: if your partner routinely drops a door on your face when you’re entering right behind them, it signals a lack of basic courtesy. They’re not your person.
Please don’t settle. Don’t ever settle. For crying out loud, for all that is holy: DO NOT SETTLE. Choose a partner who feels like they won the lottery when they’re with you and who makes you feel the same. Don’t waste your wondrousness. You only get one life.
Mental load and emotional labor are real things, and their impact is measurable. If you say they don’t exist or get defensive when your spouse brings them up, chances are good that you aren’t pulling your weight.
Anecdotal, but here it is: men* routinely say to me “I love being married.” Women say “I love/hate being married to (spouse).” Think: you like the perks or the person? Because there’s a real problem with this gendered disconnect. *No, not all men. I shouldn’t have to say it.
Every person who messages me about this is agonizing over their decision. It’s a rare person who takes divorce lightly. Please respect people’s decisions.
Many of the people who have messaged me this week have said they aren’t “brave” enough to file for or ask for divorce yet. Y’all, you’re coping daily with difficulty and misery. You’re ENDURING. And that is brave as fuck. Don’t ever doubt yourself.
Also: marriages don’t fail. They aren’t car engines or computers. They’re living things inhabited by living people. Sometimes they regress, grow apart. Sometimes the people do. It’s okay to admit that something can’t be salvaged. It’s healthy even. It’s a chance to grow anew.
If your partner doesn’t respect your personal boundaries, that’s a huge red flag. Get out. No one has a right to touch you without your permission or tell you how to feel. No one is entitled to your every thought. You are supposed to be an equal, not your partner’s property.
Whatever problems you had during your marriage, expect those to compound exponentially during the divorce. People who have been hurt or are hurting are often their worst selves during the process. Things will likely get better with distance and time.
If you are begging to be loved and your partner cannot or will not love you the way that you need them to, don’t keep begging. You deserve to be loved in the ways that make you feel fulfilled.
If you are friends with both people in a divorcing couple, do. Not. Choose. Sides. I don’t care what you think you know about someone’s marriage. You’ll never know the truth.
Don’t date your ex’s friends, y’all. At least not for a while after the breakup. I know some disagree with this, but seriously. There are tons of people in the world to choose from that aren’t connected to your former partner. Wouldn’t you rather choose one of them?
Don’t judge a partner’s contributions to a marriage based on their salary, especially if that person is a woman. People bring far more to a marriage than money. If you can’t see that, you need to re-evaluate your priorities.
If your kids are important to you, prioritize your partner. They will still be there once the kids are gone. Don’t think you can ride out those early childhood years. That’s the time when caregivers of young children need to be reminded that their value is more than as childcare.
If you treat your partner like the hired help, don’t be surprised if, at some point, they quit.
Do not judge someone’s grief over their divorce based on whether or not they’re crying. Sometimes a person has cried for years before they actually get to the point of leaving. Sometimes by the end, the time for tears is long past, and they are just ready to move on.
Everyone who ends a marriage occasionally has some lesss-than-flattering things to say about their ex behind closed doors. But if you date a divorced cishet man and you want to know what he really thinks about women, look at how he treats his ex-wife when he thinks no one else is looking.
In cishet relationships, divorced men who don't think of themselves as patriarchal often have a very hard time recognizing their patriarchal behaviors. Divorced women often have a hard time recognizing how much they gave in and subsumed themselves to that relational model.
It’s really, really important to identify your own patriarchal behaviors and responses so that you don’t replicate them again.
Similarly: if you don’t deal with your unresolved problematic relationship patterns and behaviors from your marriage, they are going to come back and bite you in the ass in a future relationship.
If you come out of your first post-divorce relationship a better person, someone who has learned to see themselves more objectively, you aren’t perfect, but you’re moving in the right direction.
Most of the time, the way people treat you is a reflection of them, not you. We are all struggling.
Please watch out for people who promise you the world. It's actually quite easy for someone to say "I'm going to spend the rest of my life with you." It's far harder for that person to deliver on that promise. Please be cautious about trusting the peope who issue those grandiose statements.
Similarly, pay attention to the people who demonstrate their care through action. Notice what people DO to support you and show up for you. The people who devote their time and energy to you are people you should keep close.
No matter the relationship, consistency is everything. It's everything.
I have two couples I know who have been together a long time and seem truly happy. Here are their secrets: 1) Every day, they try to do something to make their partner's life better or to show them they love them. Often, it's something small, and it costs them nothing.
And 2) Rather than arguing when a conflict comes up, they have scheduled weekly time for a relationship discussion. They come to that discussion calm. They remind each other in that meeting that it's them against the problem, not them against each other. They are a team. Always.
Finally 3) (and this is the one they said matters the most) they say kindness is the key to a happy relationship. No matter how angry or frustrated they are, they try their best not to take their feelings out on their partner. They try for kindness every single day.
Please notice who blossoms after a breakup and who follows essentially the same path or trajectory. It will help you understand people's capacities for reinvention, self-awareness, and change.
As a follow up, this does not mean you shouldn't want growth and change for yourself. But your partner's job is never, ever to tell you who to be or what to do. Their job is to support you as you figure out how to be a better you. Do not let anyone tell you how to live your life.
If anyone you're dating says they've never gone to therapy and suggests they don't need it and are absolutely fine as they are, please beware. Every single person in this country would benefit from objective help and greater self-awareness. Every single one.
And one final piece of advice, courtesy of my unpublished “Bad Wife” essay: if you get divorced, one of the biggest lessons is that yes, you made mistakes, and yes, you still have so many things to learn. Me too. Me too.
There aren’t actually any good or bad people. There are only our actions that make us, not our words. And we can always choose to do better. Hopefully, by the end of our lives, we will have done more good than bad.
I would caution, however, that getting into a serious relationship right after a separation or a divorce is a risky prospect. If you don’t heal and take time to get to know yourself, you risk making unhealthy partnership decisions and replicating every single pattern you fell into in your marriage. Trust me.
You should give with joy and not expectation - love is not transactional. But if someone never fills your cup in any way? That’s not healthy or sustainable.
But emotional safety? That means every damn thing.
Holy cow. The list at the end of this is so incredible. Every word of it.
i'm so happy for you that, four years on, you're in this place of gratitude and clarity at all your life has become. i'm about 2.5 years post-breakup and i can tell you, it's shocking the truths that keep revealing themselves. zero regrets about what my relationship gave and taught me—but also zero desire to ever be back there. my ex was and is a good, decent man. but omg, so unaware of his own deep-seated patriarchal habits. as i was unaware how i abetted them. i'd like to believe (and mostly i do) that there's a meaningful, more equal relationship in my future. but if there isn't, i still wouldn't trade who i am now and what i know to settle for something less than i deserve.