In my last column, I wrote about my bias towards staying married rather than giving up on a relationship. Ginger Emas left a comment saying she and her ex-husband John divorced after 14 years of couple’s therapy. She thanks her years of couple’s therapy for helping her and her ex have an “unbelievable divorce,” in which they are very close friends.
Not that she needs my blessing on her divorce, but I think we could all agree that working on a marriage for 14 years is a noble effort and if there is something primary that is still missing from the marriage after all of that effort, then divorce probably makes good sense.
In my last column, I talked about Bill. Bill left two marriages into which he put minuscule effort—or at least minimal effort compared to Ginger and her husband. In fact, Bill only came in to see me after he had made up his mind to leave his marriage. When it came down to it, Bill wanted my help justifying his reasons for leaving his marriage.
Each of Bill’s divorces ended up as contentious as his marriages.
Ginger’s comments started me thinking about my own divorce. The first time I married, I was 25. The woman I married was a woman I fell in love with about six or seven months before the wedding. We were both obviously impulsive (how else would we have married that quickly?) but also overwhelmed with passion and a shared desire to get our life started.
We married, I started graduate school and she soon became pregnant.
I won’t share the details of our failed marriage because it wouldn’t be fair to her (since she has not decided to share her side of the story). Suffice it to say, we were as immature at handling the give and take, compromise and conciliation required of successful spouses as we had been impulsive and passionate. Even though I was getting my PhD in Clinical Psychology, at 27 years old I only gave couple’s therapy a cursory try.
We separated and divorced before our son was three. I’m not proud of how easily I gave up and got a divorce given that I had a small child. My only apology is that it was almost 30 years ago and as the wise older woman in “Moonstruck” said, as she explained to the hapless professor why his young lover emptied a full martini in his face, “What I didn’t know about being a man was a lot.” (Forgive me for my shameless paraphrasing).
Let me tell you a few things about my divorce of which I am proud. My ex-wife and I shared equal custody of our son and argued on and off passionately throughout the time our son grew up. We both made huge sacrifices to make sure he got to important family functions of each parent’s family. I stayed in therapy to learn to better compromise and work with my ex-wife in ways I had not done when we were married.
The first time my current wife, Dina met my ex-wife was when my ex surprised us by coming into town unexpectedly and using her key to my apartment where our son was sleeping. Dina and I were asleep in my bed when my ex came into our bedroom to tell us that she was going to be sleeping in the spare bedroom. I introduced Dina to her that night and they had breakfast together the next day. There wasn’t anything weird about my ex-wife “crashing” in my spare bedroom so she could wake up with our son and help with the morning routine getting him off to school. That was 20 years ago.
One of my proudest “divorce accomplishments” was renting a house with my ex-wife for the weekend of our son’s graduation from college. My wife and I, along with my ex, her husband and all of our children, spent 48 very good hours together in the same house. The whole situation was completely…comfortable. While in the past we were not always the model of the perfect divorce, that weekend we were.
A few years ago, my ex-wife called and said, “I couldn’t imagine a better ex-husband than you.” She thanked me for being so wonderful and apologized for the role she played in our arguments over the years. Her words left me speechless because, trust me, I had behaved badly many times. The truth is we are better together after the divorce than we were as a married couple.
My ex-wife is a good person and I learned a lot from her about being a better man. I was fortunate in my second marriage to marry a woman who helped temper my response to my ex, and enthusiastically took on the step-parenting role. I think my ex-wife would say the same thing about her current husband.
Hindsight is 20-20. If I had it to do over again, I would not have walked away from my first marriage so easily. At the same time, I am grateful for the marriage that Dina and I have built, and for our two beautiful boys. Whenever a young couple with a child comes to see me and tells me they married too quickly because they were passionately in love, I have to be careful that my desire for their marriage to succeed isn’t stronger than theirs. Many young couples simply lack the maturity to make it work; commitment, empathy, assertiveness, perspective, tolerance, and self-soothing can take years to develop. If, after all the work of therapy, a couple decides to divorce, I will try to help them learn those same skills. That way they may not only experience a "good divorce," but they'll be much more prepared for a good marriage next time around.
Gerald Drose is an Atlanta-based couples’ sex therapist. Visit Dr. Drose at Powers Ferry Psychological Associates, LLC.
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