by Don Hall

DIVORCE: A Survivor's Guide: Part One

After several years of growing apart, her detesting Chicago, me embracing the city like a Martian on Mars, I pulled the trigger. In a weekly newsletter to the theater company I'd founded I typed "And, in sad news, Don and Deanna will be getting a divorce."

I hit save and went into the room where she was sitting. "I think we're done here. I think we should divorce."

We talked for hours. Her discomfort with sex with me but not with the few men she'd slept with since we married, her hatred for the big city and desire to go back to Texas, the toll bringing her schizophrenic mother to live with us had taken. We had been to couples therapy (twice) and had employed a sex therapist to no effect. We had simply grown so far from each other there was no coming back.

Some twelve years later, I figured out at a friend's wedding during a tornado that my second wife was involved with the groom. It was obvious so I confronted her. We agreed she'd let it go and work with me to reignite the marriage. We tried couples therapy but she lied about her infidelity which made me seem a jealous psycho. She could not, would not, quit him despite him recently marrying someone else.

A trip with the in-laws that I chose to reject. She had two weeks to decide. She spent the time on the phone with him. She came home and I sat her down. "What's it gonna be?"

"I want a divorce."

Vegas. Over a decade later. The third wife walks in. "Are you fucking this guy?"

She sits. "Yes."

"For how long?"

"What does it matter? I want an open relationship."

"You know that's not how open relationships work, right? You don't fuck around, get caught, and then decide on open status. I'm not down for that. At all."

"I'm going to keep seeing him."

"Then we're getting divorced I guess."

Mutual tears. An agreement to keep the affair private and simply tell people that she wanted an open relationship, I didn't. Irreconcilable differences.

The next day, as we're talking through her moving out and the specifics of a quickie no-fault divorce in Vegas, I tell her how surprised I am with her choice to shatter our marriage over this guy.

"You don't want to know all of it."

"Of course I do. I mean, what could you tell me that's worse than you'd rather divorce me than give up your side piece?"

"If you really want to know…"

"Give it your best shot."

"Okay. In February 2020, I was out riding my bike. A guy offered me $100 to have sex with him in his van. I did. I liked it. I've been working as a sex worker ever since."

˙˙˙˙

The question in your mind is how to avoid this state of things. What can you do to stay in the union? What compromises must be made, what personal changes are required, to rebuild the trust and commitment to the lifelong promise?

When it comes to infidelity, the line is clear. The offending party has to give up the sidepiece and agree to work on the reasons he or she looked for love outside of the marriage. Anything less than that is a demand for acceptance of the behavior. Make no mistake, if the cheater wants to continue cheating but out in the open and with permission, this is a beginning of a slow decay for the other side—self esteem, self value, personal dignity. It only works if both spouses are bumping uglies simultaneously.

If the decision to divorce comes from what are called irreconcilable differences, the umbrella term that covers boredom, mid-life crisis, boiling disdain, and outright disgust, it gets more complex. How do you turn someone's slow-rolled discovery that you are not who they want to be hitched to around? Do you try to recapture the magic once all the flash and dazzle has lost its mystery?

The simple answer is that unless both sides of the marriage see their part in it and are willing to meet halfway in changes in personal behavior, it's pointless.

In 1998, I fell into bottles and bottles of booze. I cried to my friends in bars, stumbling home like a modern day Otis from Mayberry. I was borderline suicidal.

In 2009, I holed up in my apartment and played video games for a couple of months. No booze. Too much food. Threw myself into work.

In 2022, after taking the trash out one morning and passing the ex-wife's apartment and being serenaded by the sounds of her having sex with someone, I burrowed deep into my apartment, terrified of leaving for fear of a repetition of the song, wrote about it, drank, and ate too much.

NEWSFLASH: Booze is a depressant. Adding a substance that depresses you to an already morbid outlook on life is a recipe for disaster. It isn't sexy or artistic to feed your personal tragedy with a Hunter S. Thompson swim to a shotgun in your mouth. It's self indulgent, adolescent, and melodramatic.

Self destruction sounds great in the moment but, unless you actually do drown yourself in a bathtub or leap into traffic, you're going to live with affects of this teenage exercise.

There are a host of emotions swirling in your brain. Deep anger, sadness, a sense of immense failure, self pity, fear. All at the same time, one surfacing above the maelstrom after another. You're a fucking mess.

DO NOT GET BACK ON THE HORSE.

Would you want a friend to go out on a date with someone afflicted with a dire disease guaranteed to effectively infect your friend? Of course, not. Likewise, you're an emotional pit of quicksand, seeking out validation and sex with no regard for anything but your own personal need. You are a drowning victim willing to pull anyone near you under the water in order to save yourself. You are, in this moment, a selfish, greedy child willing to hurt anyone you meet in order to simply feel better or to pettily wound your recent ex by moving on before they do.

No one wants to be the rebound. Only a lunatic would want to be a rebound on what became broken over a series of years and still bleeding from the eyeballs and ears. Imagine you have accidentally been trapped in the room with that toxic gas in The Rock, your face bubbling and your lungs filling with pus and then convincing someone to go out for a drink with you. Pretty shitty. Don't be shitty.

This thing takes time so sit back, reflect, and be patient.

At first, your ex is entirely to blame for how you feel. If you remain stuck in that place, you'll destroy any possibility that you might find a stable and sustainable relationship ever again. No matter how horrible your ex was, you contributed to this circumstance and you absolutely have to see how you fomented to the demise. If you have kids, this step is possibly the single most important thing you can do to avoid traumatizing your kids for life because you have to continue some sort of co-parenting situation and full-on hatred of your child's other parent is a recipe for generations of anger and brokenness that soon won't be retractable.

Start with why you got married in the first place.

˙˙˙˙

Just out of college, my first marriage was with a college sweetheart. I graduated and landed in Chicago while she had another year to complete at the university. I asked her to marry me before I left out of fear. Fear of the unknown, fear of being alone in an uncertain future, needing something to ground myself with a guarantee of security on some level. She agreed for much the same reason but, if we were honest, her senior year was wasted by being the fiancé of someone 800 miles north. She cheated and told me so I slept around some myself. That year of separation built a foundation made of longing for something, someone else for us both but we were young and stupid so we got hitched anyway. Out of obligation.

The second marriage was based upon mutual interest in the theater I founded and which she was the artistic director. I produced the shows, she directed them. It was just easy to marry. Little sexual chemistry existed. We started dating soon after the first divorce (reminder: Don't Get Back on the Horse) and she was in a relationship with a married man. I exploded into angry, desperate need for her to choose me rather than him and, if I'm honest, I'm sure she regretted choosing me for years.

Of course, when I ceased producing the shows after being employed to produce events for NPR, she found someone else (also married).

Number three was a marriage of delusion and transaction.

I wanted to get it right. I fell in love in record time. More cynically, she saw an opportunity to remove herself from a poisonous relationship with a nearly homeless man and out of the back room in a hoarder's home. It was a dishonest beginning and then no surprise after five years, the falsity of the premise blossomed into a landscape of lies over the last years.

No delusion is more dangerous and debilitating than self delusion.

Once you've gone through the gauntlet of blame and recrimination, look in the mirror and own your contribution to the downfall. No, you aren't the piece of shit your ex-spouse says you are but you are a piece of shit nonetheless. You blew it just as they blew it and maybe no one blew it and the foundation for why you married was inevitably flawed from the get. Be honest. Be brutal.

More to the point, avoid microscoping individual moments (unless, of course, you boned someone else for a duration of time). Look at the overall picture of how you saw them, how you allowed yourself to be seen, and where those two views lost traction. Hindsight is 20/20 so lean into the perfect vision now. Knowing how things went foul is the cornerstone of avoiding a repetition.

...to be continued...