I am a child of unhappily divorced people. Apparently, there are happily divorced people, but I have always thought they were a myth; an invention of advertisers, who need people to always be happy, even in extremis. Your heart can be in pieces, but how well you wear a cashmere shrug and gambol with a puppy!
For me, it was like growing up filled with emotional shrapnel. I didn’t think I would get married, although I always wanted to. I felt incapable of trust. I was love-shy. I am married now, although I do not know if I will stay married. Does anyone really know if they will survive? The fractures between us are large and growing. Sometimes we fill them in, and sometimes not. Perhaps one day we will no longer want to.
I always had a ghoulish interest in marriage though – and in divorce. It was a secret and unacknowledged obsession, which I tried to pretend I was above. Before I was married I would haunt wedding shows deliberately – and insultingly. (I was born to a woman who would shout at random brides, helpfully: "Don’t do it!") I was jealous, and contemptuous. But I wanted to get married, and for bad reasons. I wanted to get married to show I was not broken. I wanted to get married to prove I was wanted.
For that is what marriage is: the universal sign of being wanted, and settled, and loved. Nothing exposes your needs – and defects – like relationships. When I became engaged at 39 I expected congratulations, for, as my husband said, quoting Louis CK, he was the last branch I clung to as I fell out of the tree, and I married him, at least partially, because he said things like that. He knew things about me that I didn’t. My friends treated me like a bad investment that had, suddenly and miraculously, produced a dividend.
Too often, you come to the most important relationship of your adult life like a child, with all a child’s needs, hopes and fears. So, I have been asking people why they got divorced. It’s a curiously intimate question if you really dig in, and ask how they felt, rather than what happened. What were you seeking and how did you feel when it didn’t show up?
