There’s a difference between “failing” and “being a failure,” after all. I have failed in my life. Repeatedly. I will fail again, in small and occasionally large ways, probably for the rest of my life. But I do not consider myself a failure.

A relationship can be said to fail when it ends, but it does not mean that the net worth of the whole experience is a failure. Without a few of my past relationships failing, I know that I wouldn’t be in the good one I am in today.

I’m working really hard to differentiate between the former and the latter. I won’t leave my past alone because I believe if I leave it unchecked it will sneak up and screw up my life. I have the attitude that only by watching it and trying to understand it better can I keep my past from creeping into my decisions and twisting my perception in ways that keep me from reality. However, at the same time, I worry that I’m letting myself be “mired in bitterness and pain” and that that in itself is altering my perceptions. Then again I’m only 20. Bother.

I strongly believe in the learning potential of bad decisions. However, I can see how one could not consider a marriage that ended in divorce a “bad decision” if you couldn’t have done it any other way at the time. Sometimes what turns out to be a bad choice later was the only choice you were capable of making at the time. I think that’s indicative of growth in itself. By the end you’ve grown enough where you can see that there was more to the pictures than you could see before. If one has really learned, they’ll have a broader perspective in the next situation.

In what I wrote, I didn’t intend any claim that poverty or dependence makes better marriages. Commitment makes better marriages, and an easy-divorce environment reduces the effort an individual will ultimately “invest” in the relationship both when entering it and when considering its dissolution. Call it freakonomics if you like.

None of the divorces I bemoan involved abuse beyond what what David Schnarch calls “normal marital sadism” (dismissive behavior, mean-spiritedness, refusal to engage, refusal to try counseling and the like). People just got tired of waiting for their partner to grow up the way they expected, and left for greener pastures.

For the sake of my own marriage, I’d like to have more married friends who struggled together toward maturity even though quitting seemed easier. I’d like to see more living examples of how that struggle transforms the individuals as well as the relationships.

This was certainly a learning experience. I grew tremendously through it, and made mistakes that I would certainly not make again were I to begin another venture.

However, I would not nor would anyone call that business a “success”. Just because I left the endeavor more enlightened does not mean that it was successful.

The point of a business is to make money. The point of a marriage is to fulfill a promise to your spouse to build a life together through thick and thin.

I learned a lot from my failed business. There was some collateral damage, I was paying off creditors for years and my credit took awhile to recover. Of course, this is considerably less traumatic than being relegated to visiting offspring once every other week and for a month in the summer and the other nasty consequences of divorce (in other circumstances, not your own evidently).

I take some pride in my failed venture–having taken the risk and learned first-hand what it was like. I certainly became wiser and learned life lessons from it. But under no circumstances could the business itself be called a success. One can and should learn from failure, but it is difficult to do so when one can not admit to failure in the first place.

Businesses come and go, in fact the odds of success are pretty low for new startups. It is a shame that this has become the case with marriage as well.

I’m not sure if you’re a troll or are serious.
Either way, one doesn’t lose their “feminist credentials” by getting divorced.

“I’m a much better husband to my fourth wife than I was to my previous wives, and divorce made that possible.

And you used three previous wives to get to that point. Some feminist! You’re nothing but a pathetic hypocrite.

It was through divorce and re-marriage — as well as grace and therapy — that I came to accept responsibility, as my post made clear. No one goes into marriage expecting divorce, but that doesn’t mean that divorce doesn’t have redemptive possibilities. I’m a much better husband to my fourth wife than I was to my previous wives, and divorce made that possible. That doesn’t mean that working on a marriage isn’t also a fine option for some folks as well.

I’ve seen friends divorce, only to have the same intra- and inter-personal issues emerge in the “replacement” relationship. Consistently partners with the means to survive economically on their own put much less than 100% effort into working on the relationship or refused to work on the relationship at all. If divorce were less available or the full emotional and economic costs were more obvious (and equitable, as Rainbow pointed out in her reply), the partners might put more effort into the work.

I think in more cases than not, divorce and remarriage just postpones the point of realizing that it isn’t my partner causing my problems, but me causing my problems.

I mean no disrespect, but the fact that you have learned and grown through your divorces does not change the fact that three of your marriages failed. In essence, a relationship dies and vows are broken when a divorce occurs. The fact that you have been able to take such failure and learn and grow from it speaks well of your character. Failure turned out to be an impetus of great importance in your development, but let’s not get confused and call what is actually failure a “success.”

Also, simply because a person has failed in the past does not make him/her a “failure.”