At a certain point maybe every marriage seems broken, beyond all hope of repair. For me it was about eight years in. It wasn’t the money problems or the arguments about who did more household chores. It wasn’t the still-unresolved disagreements about child-rearing or the accumulated history of unsettled, unforgiven arguments. It was all of those things, of course, but it was deeper than that. It was fundamental, unresolvable, and essential. We had grown apart. We were different people. It was not fixable.
I remember confiding in my sister as we walked on the beach during some family picnic: “I don’t think I can stay married.” She seemed shocked. In the early years of our relationship, before the house and kids, my then-boyfriend and I were so compatible that more than one friend had ruefully remarked that it seemed like we never fought. “But we do!” I would cheerfully assert, like a novice soldier who’s seen a couple skirmishes and can’t even imagine the brutal warfare waiting around the corner. Becoming parents—and, perhaps even more so, buying a house that needed fixing with no money to do so—had changed everything. From those charmed first years together, in which we had so easily built our shared world, agreeing on everything from what wine we liked to how we evaluated the world, the boot had come down. Real adult life had descended upon us, and it was hard. We weren’t equipped for it.
But neither, it seems, is anyone. Divorce is the big thing right now. In memoirs and novels and a seemingly endless stream of long-form essays in New York magazine, women have briefly explained why they had to end their marriages and, in much greater detail, how they then embarked upon, essentially, a second freshman year in college. No longer a tragedy, or a shameful admission of defeat, divorce is now the emancipation of a tired soul after a long winter of dreary monogamy, who will finally get to party again. It’s something vaguely exotic and fun to do, like a quinceañera or a retirement cruise. Why not, girl? You only live once!
