Getting Divorced

A story about parting ways

A month before the wedding, I went into the mountains behind our house to gather aspen trees for which I’d use to build a chuppah for our ceremony. As tradition goes, the chuppah is a symbol of the home my wife and I would build together as a married couple—seeing as this is such a beautiful notion, and that I had built the thing to last, after the ceremony we brought it to our house, sticking it in the corner of the yard.

We placed a little table underneath the chuppah where we intended to spend mornings sipping coffee, drinking wine in the evenings, and taking time to appreciate the life we’d built together, though it never really happened. Mostly, the little table got in the way when I cut the grass.

A couple years passed before the wind knocked the chuppah over, splitting one of the upper boughs in two. I didn’t think much of it, propping the whole thing back up without making repairs. Still standing, I figured. Eventually, of course, that attitude would split a lot more than a piece of wood.

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Four months ago my wife and I decided to separate. She came into the room after putting the kids to bed. “We need to be honest with each other,” she began. Something had brought it all to a head that evening. Earlier in the day, I had been looking up how to know if you should get divorced. We’d both reached the same decision, separately, together.

It was one of the calmest conversations we’d ever had, perhaps the best in years: for once we weren’t hiding from each other, ignoring the dissatisfaction swelling beneath our marriage. And the odd part in making the call was that it wasn’t hard at all. Thirty minutes in we poured some whiskey, moved to the couch, and even laughed once as we reviewed how we’d ended up here.

For all the ease of honesty that night before, though, we hadn’t deluded ourselves into thinking it would be easy. In a way this wasn’t new to us at all—we’d called off our original wedding three weeks out, broke up, then got back together, seeing it through six months later. We knew something about how hard parting ways could be—but seeing our two young boys in the morning qualified that in the heaviest way and I couldn’t keep it together when they gave me a hug as I left for work. I shuffled around that day like I was in a dream, lost somewhere in the surrealism of a world still sleeping on this new reality I had to face. Yet it was as real as could be.

While we used the word separate, there wasn’t much question of us working it out—I guess divorce still sounded a little too harsh—because it had been years since either of us could honestly say we were happy. On paper, it looked pretty good, sure, but once you start going through the motions in life it’s easy to gloss over the deficiencies, the discomforts, the disillusions, until soon enough your “must haves” turn into “nice to haves” and you realize you’ve both willingly compromised yourselves to the lowest common denominator.

It should be obvious where a reductive trajectory eventually leads, even while certain visions of the future are achieved. We had a house, a small piece of land, and more important than anything, our kids. Beyond that, we still like each other. There was no abuse, addiction, or infidelity, but along with the absence of these came the absence of love, at least anything resembling romance. Simply put: we’d always been better friends than lovers. Nothing had changed.

We started telling people, slowly widening the circle, but notably saving the news from our parents. Maybe it was guilt that held us back, maybe shame, or maybe that telling them had a certain finality to which we hadn’t yet worked up. When we finally did I was met with the kind of unconditional love and support that makes me lucky to have the family I do, along with the opportunity to take another look at what I’d seen of divorce growing up.

Though I knew a lot of kids whose parents were divorced, only one of them had parents who were still friends. That seemed awfully strange; bitterness seemed the norm. Remembering this has helped us understand how exactly we want to shape ours.

The best thing that anyone has said throughout this whole ordeal is that we can make it look however we want it to look. One prescient vision stands out from last year, long before this decision was made, when our seven-year-old son told me his friend had parents who don’t like each other anymore. That was the language he had to describe divorce. So when we told the boys, we made a point to provide new words: that we love each other as friends, we just don’t want to be married anymore.

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A week after our first conversation about splitting up, a full windstorm came through and blew the chuppah over, cracking the whole thing in half. Poetic, right? The next day I dismantled it altogether, backing out screws I remembered driving in years before, and stacked the pieces against the fence, not sure what to do with the wood but not interested in looking at this broken idea of our marriage any longer.

Over the last few years I’ve come to think most decisions in life are made around comfort. And it’s more motivating to move away from discomfort rather than towards greater comfort, assuming you’re already pretty comfortable. Things were plenty comfortable for us, whereby some have wondered aloud: isn’t that enough? But no, it’s not.

My wife and I have since talked about the complacency and resignation in our marriage as limiting. And when you limit yourself in one area of life, especially in a partnership, you limit your life wholesale. For us, in many ways, this decision is about removing these self-imposed limitations. In our case, that means divorce—though I don’t necessarily think it has to come to that.

I’m amazed by the kinds of honest conversations I’ve had with my friends since sharing this news. The other day one of them said: you sharing all of this makes me want to tell you about the insecurities I have about my marriage. And so he did, and I’ve never felt closer to him for it. It seems like it often takes tragedy—miscarriage, cancer, infidelity, divorce—for people to open up. Why don’t we just talk about this shit instead of hiding behind a veneer of perfection? I’m guilty as anyone, to be sure, but there’s no question it’d do us all a lot of good.

The poet Charles Bukowski once wrote: pain arrives, BANG, and there it is. It sits on you. It’s real. And to anybody watching, you look foolish. Like you’ve suddenly become an idiot. There’s no cure for it unless you know somebody who understands how you feel, and knows how to help.

Interestingly, my wife and I have been that for each other. It's odd to find both cause for and comfort from suffering in the same person, but sometimes nobody else can understand what it feels like to be in a certain moment, so you lean in all the same. Both our therapist and mediator have said we’re good at divorce. That’s not the accolade we were going for at the outset, but I think it speaks to the mutual respect we’re trying to hold onto. Mainly, that we understand we’re forever connected by our children, and beyond this, we have a longstanding friendship currently being exhumed from beneath the ashes of this marriage, so for the sake of not only the present but the future, that mutual respect feels like everything.

Nevertheless, we’re also on our own.

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About six weeks ago I moved out of the house and into a condo, which I’ve slowly been making a place both settled and exciting for myself and the boys when they’re with me.

When you have kids, sometimes you yearn for the unencumbered nature of life before children, sometimes you simply dream of quiet. Then you get it and it’s almost unbearable. The silence is deafening. I haven’t been drinking very much lately, but the first night in the condo I needed something to take the edge off so I grabbed the tequila and poured it in the only vessel I had, my grandmother’s teacup. I sat on my bare mattress, my back against the wall, not sure if I should laugh or cry, so I did a bit of both.

The quiet hits me in the weirdest of ways. Drips of syrup still on the table from breakfast while I’m eating dinner by myself. A loose sock on the floorboard of my truck. Messes I’d prefer to leave as proof of life as a father.

And, then again, it’s also nice to get a reprieve from the relentlessness of modern parenthood. I actually have time for myself in way that I can enjoy, without feeling guilty for not being present with my kids when I’ve got other things to do. A friend of mine who’s also divorced said maybe this is how raising kids is supposed to look—not the divorce, but the regular breaks that let you renew yourself so you can truly show up for those who need you.

I won’t deny this has been hard on us as a family. Hard on the kids who show it in their behavior, and all my wife and I can do is hold the space for them to feel it. But I remind myself of two things:

1. When I told my best friend that we’re going to be okay, he said, “No, you need to adjust your language. You’re going to be better.” And that’s the honest truth.

2. I’ve talked to too many people who have said, “Yeah, my parents are still together, but they should have gotten divorced a long time ago.”

I’d never want our kids saying that about us. Bitterness hadn’t yet crept into our marriage, but if we had stayed together I’m sure it would have. So even though the marriage itself didn’t last, I don’t see this as a failed relationship. Rather I see it as one that’s been fulfilled. My wife used a beautiful phrase to describe what we had: soul contract. And our soul contract was to bring our two boys into this world. For any uncertainties I might’ve held about our relationship, I never had any doubts about that. And now, with that purpose fulfilled, it’s time for both of us to find out what’s next—as we continue to raise our children as coparents, while freeing each other to find other purposes that could not be supported in this relationship.

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Obviously, I can’t distill eight years of marriage into two-thousand words. But I’ll sum it up like this: the other day I was back at the old house, grabbing a few things, taking my time, hanging out. At one point, looking for the kids, I went outside and found them by the fence, building a fort with the wood from the broken chuppah. I don’t want to put too neat of a bow on this, but there’s something to be said for our children still finding shelter in the dismantled pieces of our marriage.

As much as I want to say everything happens for a reason, maybe it’s just that time marches on—and if you’re still around, still living, what else is there to do but look back on all of it and say, we’re still here—and that might be reason enough.

-Martin