The end of what was once a happy marriage is an indisputable tragedy—or at least, I’ve always thought so. Hearing about a divorce, any divorce, has always made me feel profoundly sad, sometimes in ways that defy explanation. Why am I so devastated by Nicole Kidman’s split from a country singer whose name I could never remember and who I couldn’t have picked out of a lineup? I don’t know! And more importantly, why are you asking me this incredibly insensitive question when I am literally sobbing into a People magazine?!
But this week, a viral essay suggested that the end of a marriage is anything but a catastrophe. Written by Cathi Hanauer, a 63-year-old novelist, essayist, and mother of two adult children who recently separated from her husband of 30 years, it argued that what we think of as a failure is more like the final act of a perfectly great love story—just one in which the happily ever after is lived apart, instead of together.
“We could’ve tried to put Band-Aids on our issues until they healed, or didn’t-heal-but-whatever,” she wrote. “Instead, we made an increasingly common choice: We hugged, apologized for our shortcomings, and freed each other.”
It was a provocative idea, and people were indeed provoked. On social media, people lambasted the author for being “selfish,” “a homewrecker,” “a narcissist”; even on the usually-friendly New York Times comment section, the top reply announced that, “[reading] this essay, I am struck not by courage or insight but by sheer self-absorption.”
