a divorce thread

homo otm the idea of married people staying together for the kids makes my skin itch.

seriously, people, don't do that to your kids! i remember feeling like the whole world opened up when my parents got divorced, like the air had a different (better) quality. admittedly i am just generalizing from my experience, but everyone else itt is too as far as i can tell, so there.

I can only speak of what I know from my parents, but I guess the key part that I skipped over was that 'staying together for the kids' is a good cover story. As much as they loved us, I know with almost 100% certainty that we were not why they stayed together. I sat in the car with my mum when I was 15 trying to talk her into just leaving. She knew we knew how bad it was. Part of it was that we grew up in a small town, both my parents pretty much knew everyone in the town and a lot of the reason for not getting divorced/separating was they didn't want the shame of everyone in town knowing that that had happened. Well, my Mum. Pretty much everything we went through stemmed from Mum's fear of being publically humiliated over x y or z. And the other part was just she was a very competitive person and didn't want to lose. Divorce meant that she lost. And she didn't want to lose to my Dad. From what I know of Mum, my guess is that in her mind divorce would mean that she had been wrong about Dad, and god knows she didn't want to be wrong.

Sorry for livejournaling but I just want to make sure you guys get that it's not actually really a literal pact that they made or anything.

And to clarify again, she was pretty OTT during that period. Mum now and Mum then are almost two different people.

VG i wasn't responding to you fwiw, more nathalie and Hurting. every unhappy family is its own special snowflake; i'm not saying people aren't right to pick up on destructive dating patterns in their friends' lives or whatever, just that "it's a shame because he's a really good father" doesn't have much traction from my pov--he's still going to be in his kid's life. it's going to be better for his kid not to have miserable parents being miserable around him when he gets older.

Oh no I get that it wasn't aimed at me. Just weighing in longwindededly as per usual :)

Getting on the separation train

Sorry. It's not easy, even when it is. It's weird to me to see this thread, because a year after I started it I was getting divorced again. In retrospect I was probably channeling the anxiety of one relationship through the prism of the previous one.

So, having done it twice, all I can say is that it is a very hard thing to go through, regardless of circumstances. Some are worse than others, and there are things that can make it better -- helps a lot if no one is crazy or vindictive, and if there's still some level of empathy and not wanting to hurt each other. But for me, both times it took about a year to process and deal with. I learned a lot both times, fwiw. And ended up happier. So there's good things out there! But I know that's not much help when you're in the middle of it.

Best wishes with everything.

Thanks, tipsy. Honestly, I read this whole thread last night and that made me feel a lot better about things - especially your contributions.

Now I'm about a week into living alone. It's gotten easier but the first few days (even as I was telecommuting) were brutal - I was talking to myself a ton, couldn't sleep, etc.

Finally have pictures on the wall and most books up so it feels more like a home, more food in the cupboards.

Ray!! i didn't see your previous revive of this thread, feel kinda bad that we haven't talked on gchat or anything in a minute and i had no idea about all of this. hope you're doing alright with it, all things considered, i know it can't be easy when there's a child.

i grew up with me and my brother being part of a set of six cousins on my mother's side of the family (she and her two sisters had two kids each -- only one of those three marriages is still together today). this year, the 6th of the 6 cousins got married, and the first one to get married a decade ago began divorce proceedings. we visited her in her new house a while back -- she seemed happy, is definitely better off than she was in a marriage that didn't seem very ideal. but it's still a little depressing and scary to feel like we're exiting that 'everyone you know is getting married' phase of life and slowly entering that 'wait to see which of those people gets divorced' phase.

i found talking to myself to be pretty therapeutic, patience and indulging yourself in harmless stuff is the way to go i think

I feel bad for anyone going through divorce, because I know it's hard. But I don't find the existence or occurrence of divorce "depressing," exactly. To me, that buys too much into the idea that marriages or relationships either fail or succeed, when life is a lot more complicated than that. I mean, some marriages are objectively awful -- abuse, addiction, adultery, whatever. But a marriage that ends can still be a good and valuable part of your life. When you're going through a divorce, it's easy and maybe inevitable to feel like you just wasted years of your life. But that's not usually true. You were fortunate enough to find and spend time with another person, and you shared two or 12 or 20 years together, that's not in itself a bad thing. I'm not saying "just remember the good parts," but there's a tendency to talk about divorce as if it negates the entire experience of the relationship, which isn't true. At this point I think of my exes more as traveling companions than anything else -- people who shared x years of my life until we parted ways. And now I'm with the best companion I've ever had, but I don't think I would know and appreciate that as deeply as I do without the other experiences.

best post

Well, listen, I can totally see and understand that this thread is first and foremost for people who have been divorced or are getting divorced and may want to keep it free of the kind of social stigma and negativity that is often projected on the experience from the outside. So if using those words here was a violation of that spirit, I apologize.

Hell, no. I found the experience of divorce depressing and scary, also miserable, hideous, agonising and any other negative words you can throw at it, and I don't want to feel like I or anyone else can't explore those feelings itt. I agree with tipsy mothra about divorce not nec. being depressing in a general sense, however. Once you're out the other side, you can appreciate all sorts of positives in both the marriage (despite it's having ended), and the ending of the marriage.

Yeah exactly, and I didn't mean to say people shouldn't find it depressing and scary. It is! But it is only one part of a relationship, is I guess what I mean. And I do think that even decades after the normalization of divorce via no fault laws, there's a lot of lingering social baggage, which can be sort of summed up in the phrase "failed marriage." The idea that it's either til death or it's a "failure" is at odds with reality, which is that different relationships work for different people for different lengths of time. I still like the ideal of partners-for-life, and it's what I hope and intend for my current relationship. But from my previous relationships I have years of good and important experiences, not to mention two great kids, so I don't think of them as having failed. They were good when they were good, and they ended when they weren't anymore. I know lots and lots of divorced people, and in general I think they're as happy and fulfilled in their lives as people who have never been divorced. It is hard to go through and hard to get to the other side, but there is a lot of life both before and after. I think it's most helpful to think of it as a traumatic event, rather than any kind of verdict.

Yeah, I just didn't want to sound judgy as an un-divorced person or part of an overall atmosphere of unfair received wisdom about divorce that you guys may have to deal with IRL.

Al, it's cool. I haven't really said much about it to too many of my friends or on FB. Quiet like. It's been several weeks, and I've been living on my own for two weeks or so.

It's for the best, really, but the transition has its swings emotionally. Some hours are better than others.

And yeah, you have no idea how many "can you believe how many ppl our age are splitting" discussions I've had lately.

Tipsy: I'll think on what you said up thread, seems v wise.

And now I'm with the best companion I've ever had, but I don't think I would know and appreciate that as deeply as I do without the other experiences.

Never been married, so never been divorced. But a year ago is when I had to start a breakup with the only person I'd lived with romantically all this time, and that was a wrench. But it had to happen, otherwise we would have been even more miserable the further we went. We've each found someone new since, and just speaking for myself, this sentence here rings very, very true to me. Sending best, Ray.

Echoing Ned about that sentence ringing true. It may sound dumb, but for me it was absolutely the case that learning how to be a good partner involved just that: *learning*.

My dearest friend has had a yellowing index card on her fridge for as long as I've known her (circa 1995). On it is scribbled:

Good judgement comes from experience
Experience comes from bad judgement

One thing that amazes me, and strikes me as a complete failure of art, is the way no movie/book/song has ever adequately captured the agony, misery and horror of divorce.

The only two pieces of art that ever came close for me were season 11 of Cheers and Usher's "Papers." No other work has ever really resonated with me. It's like the great artists of our time have collectively said "even we don't want to touch this."

Liz Phair's - Divorce Song?

It has a bad rap and has crappy reviews but the story of us with bruce willis and michelle pfeiffer is weirdly accurate

Though I’d imagine it’s only watchable for people who went through something similar

One thing making this a difficult task is that people divorce for reasons unique to each relationship — the devil is in the details as they say

Accurate should be “realistic,” sorry

Take a peek at Zulawski's Possession and let me know what you think.

Toni Braxton and Babyface's "Love, Marriage & Divorce" was really good I thought.

It might be that it's just something that nobody wants to think about or re-live. But still, art has gone to uglier place (grief, etc.) pretty unflinchingly.

Season 11 of Cheers is the one that cut way too close to home for me. The way Frasier desperately cycles through all these different stances (anger, sympathy, bargaining, being the bigger man, completely breaking down) to stop the inevitable from happening was brutal to watch. But obviously that's just the sanitized, sitcom version of things. Dunno anybody wants to watch more than that.

xxpost I've never been divorced (or married) but I first saw it in the wake of a hasty breakup and thought, yup, this resonates. And it was apparently pretty directly informed by Zulawski's own divorce. It's, um, brutal.

Gonna cue up those Phair and Braxton songs. Tammy Wynette's "D-I-V-O-R-C-E" absolutely nails the tragedy, but wraps it up a little too neatly. I also give Here, My Dear a spin every now and then, but that record is so petty it's hard to listen to. It captures the anger but not the trauma.

excited/terrified to check out Possession

What about War of the Roses?

That Toni Braxton/Babyface album is exquisite.

Blood on the Tracks

^ was waiting for that

bad example but a great album nontheless

Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage is good, but agree on above that the details will matter for this subject. Also, divorce probably doesn't make the best story arc for a movie...

Shoot out the Lights

I have to say that just for the joy vs. anguish aspect, Blue Valentine cut pretty close to the bone for me.

Kramer vs Kramer?
As a child of divorce, the subject holds no entertainment value to me. I suppose there’s a measure of catharsis in there somewhere but I’d rather just go for a walk

Also, divorce probably doesn't make the best story arc for a movie...

The subject definitely doesn't sell itself, but I think there's an interesting tension in just trying to survive divorce. The daily struggles and hurdles. It's not just this passive experience, it's a ton of work and obstacles to navigate. It's an enormous trial; great movies have been written about less

i think there are several cursive albums about it, but they're not really my thing

https://media.pitchfork.com/photos/5929c138c0084474cd0c32d6/1:1/w_600/07bf23e1.jpg

xp oh yeah I totally forgot about Domestica. That album does nail it, at least those specific circumstances. Not sure everybody relates to the "marriage is a battle" angle of it all but "The Night I Lost the Will to Fight" is brutal

i've been listening to turn around a lot but not because it reminds me of my divorce

it's a great track about a crappy relationship for sure though

kind of one sided though

Domestica is a good one if you experienced a prolonged bout of combative cohabitation

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/13/The_Meadowlands_%28Front_Cover%29.png

Wrens' Meadowlands is a brilliant divorce/break-up album. It's got all the messiness, ugliness, elation and disillusionment of divorce/break-up, wrapped raw and unrelentingly in blinding curveballs of songs. It's killer.

yeah it's a perfect album. Never really registered the divorce angle before somehow (maybe be I used to listen to it so long ago) but every time I revisit it I'm amazed how well it's held up

Got sad to see this thread bumped, glad it was just about art.

Not having experienced it, my guess is the reason that there are so few good films about divorce is similar to the reason that there are so few good films about lung cancer.