Ariranha has a blog post up that, very kindly, quotes at length from my old essay on being the King of Starting Over. Ariranha is going through a painful divorce herself (the subject of my original post), and mapping out her own short and long-term responses to the end of a fifteen-year marriage. It’s difficult and painful work, and she makes this excellent point:
And while in one sense I want to “keep looking forward and not look back,” as my mother says, I cannot escape the conclusion that I absolutely must spend a great deal of time “looking back.” I must do the autopsy, conduct the postmortem of this marriage. How else will I know what in me must be improved? How else will I get a handle on the dynamic and challenges I bring to a relationship? How else will I avoid dooming myself to the exact same situation, years down the road? There is a difference between honest reflection on your past, and becoming mired in the bitterness and pain of it. There is more ambiguity than the false dichotomy of looking forward or looking back. I think you have to look back. And even once you have spent enough time surveying the past, I think you still have to check it from time to time. I think it boils down to this: Attend to the road ahead, but don’t forget to check your rearview mirror.
Bold emphasis mine. She’s absolutely right. To one degree or another, we chose the partners we married, and we chose to stay with them up until whatever point one or the other of us (or both) decided to leave. Marriage, I’ve often felt, is like a movie with two directors, two screenwriters, two lead actors, and no editors. In the end, there’s a reason why you chose to write this other person into the movie of your life, and a reason why he or she did the same. Put another way, while we can be momentary victims of abuse or infidelity in a marriage, those of us who enjoy a reasonable degree of prosperity are more often volunteers for the suffering we both endure and inflict in the course of what will be an unhappy marriage. Learning how to break that cycle for ourselves, and how to make better romantic and sexual decisions, is a vital part of any post-mortem.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. I’ve been divorced three times. That doesn’t mean I’ve had three failed marriages. Marriage is, in the modern world, a particularly effective vehicle for personal growth. (That doesn’t mean that there aren’t other excellent vehicles.) A marriage is a failure if it inhibits the growth of either party; it is a success if it becomes the catalyst for individual and mutual transformation. Though all three of my divorces were painful, all three of my former marriages were, to my mind, ultimately successful in accomplishing the goal of facilitating the personal growth of the two parties involved. None were failures. I was not and am not a failure, and neither were my ex-wives. As loth as I am to buy into the logical fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc, in the case of my fourth, final, and happiest marriage I can say that my happiness and my maturity are in no small way directly due to the lessons I learned as a consequence of the first three.
Three divorces, four successful marriages. That’s how I see my past.
A marriage is a failure if it inhibits the growth of either party; it is a success if it becomes the catalyst for individual and mutual transformation.
I had not thought of it precisely this way until I read this, Hugo. Thank you for this new perspective. These are words to ponder.
It is easy to see growth when you are not left in desperate poverty, when you are still young enough to date, and when you don’t spend every minute working at a dead end commission job with no benefits for low pay because you gave up your career 20 years ago to focus on your family. Girls and boys, never give up your own career for your heartless spouse who will dump you the minute you get old and/or fat. — I am Sitting here in the office again, not getting paid for a 14 hour day. I had a operation and had to take time off, all at no pay. Most of the time I work, I don’t get paid. I am just one more illness away from bankruptcy and welfare. That is growth divorce provides for older women.
Hugo-
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.”
Dave, I disagree. Vows are broken, indeed — but a broken vow is evidence only of a failure to keep a promise. That’s worlds away from saying the marriage itself failed. Vows do not a marriage make. My marriages succeeded in changing me for the better and changing my exes for the better even as we failed to keep our vows. That’s not sophistry, that’s the redemptive reality of the good divorce.
Hugo: I’m a worried that too much emphasis on growth by divorce doesn’t account for the lost opportunity for growth when partners might have agreed to work on the relationship.
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.
Frank, the availability of divorce allows people an exit from abusive and wretched situations. The implication of your middle paragraph is that poverty makes for better marriages, or that dependence is somehow a catalyst for intimacy. That’s at odds with the research, to say the least — and utterly at odds with the experience I’ve lived and that of my friends.
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.
Hugo, this is just the same old narcissistic bullshit you’ve been spouting here for years. That was a pretty lame attempt at a straw man when you started talking about “abusive and wretched situations” in reply to Frank.
“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.
Warren,
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 owned a business six years ago. After three years, it was not making any money. I had to shut the doors and liquidate inventory, assets, etc. I had to fire my staff and plead with the landlord to let me out of the remainder of the lease.
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.
Hugo: If there’s physical abuse or serious and consistent emotional abuse going on, I agree that immediate separation is imperative. Marriage doesn’t need to be a contract of victimhood for anyone. However, among people I know well enough to know, abuse is the exception rather than the rule.
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.
“There is a difference between honest reflection on your past, and becoming mired in the bitterness and pain of it.”
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.
Sometimes we fail when our intentions are good. Sometimes failing puts us on a path that is better than we ever dreamed we deserved.
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.