Let’s Get a Little Divorced - Modern Love
MY husband and I recently celebrated a milestone. It was the day we’d been married for 13 years, 2 months and about a week: the day our marriage outlasted my parents’ marriage.
The actual day isn’t so significant; after all, my parents were separated for more than a year before their divorce was final, and their marriage had been a mess for years before that. Still, staying married longer than my parents felt like a measure of success worthy of consideration. My husband and I had already passed the point where his parents had divorced, and our sons are older than my husband and his brother were when their father moved out.
When it comes to marital longevity, being the adult children of divorce actually has its advantages. Because of remarriage, our sons have seven grandparents, all of whom are motivated to help us because they have experienced how fragile marriage can be.
And my husband’s and my shared history of growing up in joint custody, dealing with step-parents and surviving the painful effects of divorce helped bring us together and is something we reference to keep our marriage strong. Almost every day of our honeymoon, and off and on throughout our newlywed year, one of us would say: “Hey, honey, let’s get divorced for five seconds, O.K.? Great, now that that’s out of the way ...”
People look askance when we joke like this and laugh uncomfortably when my husband (still) introduces me as his “first wife.” But the gallows humor is something positive, part of what made us seek out couples therapy instead of throwing in the towel when things got tough, part of what made my husband say, “No, I will not,” when I asked him to leave during a rough patch in our seventh year of marriage. The real possibility of divorce and the firsthand experience of how often marriages fail have made us fight for ours rather than take it for granted.
A good marriage, of course, isn’t just about how long you stay together, and ours is successful for more than its longevity. Although I often complain about being married (and have written a book of poems called “The Bad Wife Handbook,” about the difficulties and restlessness of monogamy), I love my husband, I love being married and I’m committed to staying married. So I’m surprised that, as I reach the end of my 30s and see many of my cohort splitting up, I feel, in addition to a good dose of schadenfreude, a fair amount of envy.
Sure, the divorced parents’ children seemed shellshocked, there are financial complications and post-marriage dating seems terrifying. But I’ve heard the phrase “He’s such a great dad ever since the divorce” so often and been told so many stories about post-marriage women following long-thwarted dreams and “finding themselves” in deeply satisfying ways that I’m starting to wonder if there isn’t something my husband and I (and even our children) are missing by staying married. I’ve begun to wonder if there isn’t something positive about divorce that we could incorporate into our marriage.
Which is why, on a recent date night, I said in all seriousness to my husband, “Honey, I think we need to act a little more divorced.”
Without missing a beat, he asked, “Does ‘acting divorced’ mean I get to sleep with other women?”
No, was my instant and adamant answer. I’m sure there are marriages that survive or are even strengthened by infidelity — certainly there is the European model of long marriages that include mistresses and kept men. But I know I’m not capable of that kind of arrangement.
“Sorry,” I told my husband, who admitted he wasn’t up for that kind of complexity, either. “I’m talking about you being a more in-charge dad and me being a more independent woman.”
When I told my friend Joan about my plan to act a little more divorced, she said, “Aren’t you just wanting him to man up?”
“Man up” is a funny phrase, given the context, because what she means in part is: Don’t I want him to be more like a wife and mother?
Maybe.
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Rachel Zucker lives in New York City. Her latest book of poems is “Museum of Accidents” (Wave Books).
Email: modernlove@nytimes.com
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