Why we should stop using the term “failed marriage.” Or Why the song “Hey Ya” made me cry this morning.
I want to say that my sister’s wedding was one of the happiest days of my life. But I’m trying to get back to that day and remember who I was ten years ago. My sister was marrying a man with whom she was deeply in love; a good man who I already considered my brother. A man who loved her back every bit. At that time, my ex-partner and I were 10 years into our relationship. We were beginning the process of trying to have a baby.
Looking back from here, I think we were in a sweet spot in our relationship. We had had some ups and downs in those first 10 years. No doubt we were struggling in many ways, certainly with our own demons and our own individual life choices, but also with things that neither of us could even see then about ourselves, about each other, or our dynamic. And yet, we were happy. We were committed to each other and wanting to expand our family and bring more love into the world. Gay marriage was not yet legal in the U.S. and although we had considered having a wedding ourselves, we opted to spend our savings on trying to have a baby instead of a ceremony. In truth, there is some hurt for me even still around that fact — that getting married the way my sister was getting married was not an option for us, and that certainly some family members who were present at my sister’s wedding would not have shown up to support my partner and me if we had.
But there we were on that beautiful day in May all those years ago, our family all around us, celebrating another couple who was also coming together and bringing more love into the world. It was inspiring, the number of friends and family who not only showed up for my sister’s wedding but busted their asses to help pull it off. It was clear that she and her husband already had love all around them. That itself was something to celebrate.
One of my clearest memories of that day is dancing with my sister to Outkast’s “Hey Ya.” It was well into the reception and several celebratory glasses of champagne and if I close my eyes now I can still see the look on her face as she met me on the dance floor and we kicked off our shoes and started to move. It’s such a happy sounding song, and had been a favorite of mine since its release. Every time I have heard the song since that day, it brings me right back to that moment. But today, as I was walking to the train and it came on, I heard it differently. Or maybe it was that I am different and so I could finally hear what was there all along:
Last year my sister and her husband divorced. It’s been brutally soul-crushing at moments, for her of course, but also for our family, to lose her husband, my brother-in law, the father of my nephew. My sister has been blogging about her journey and I am so proud of her for the hard work of self-reflection she has done during this whole process. You can read her thoughts on starting over, parenting, and learning to love herself as she has been eloquently and humorously putting them here.
Although we never officially married, my ex-partner and I considered ourselves married for a long time during our 17 year relationship, which ended when our son was 5. Now at 8.5, I think he is still coming to terms with what it means to have parents who are divorced. I don’t pretend for one minute that it has been easy. It has been a hardship financially and a challenge to balance custody schedules with work and travel schedules. And it has been a process for all of us — learning how to exist in a new type of relationship with one another, choosing to co-parent as best we can and even still see each other as family in some way and maybe even sometimes as friends. It has been damn hard work. I understand that this is not a path many people take when they divorce. For so many reasons it just doesn’t always unfold that way and I don’t think it has to. Many times the hurt left among the ruins of divorce simply makes it too painful to continue existing in each other’s presence beyond the bare minimum needed to co-parent. And some people have ex-husbands or ex-wives who are impossible, narcissistic assholes. Or abusive. Or just not nice people. I’m lucky that my ex is none of those things.
Regardless of how well you get along post break-up, divorcing or ending a long-term partnership is usually excruciating and when children are involved, even more so. It’s not a decision I think most people take lightly. Yet many people I know have easily dismissed the idea of divorce as “the easy way out.” They say that staying in a marriage is doing the hard work whereas divorce is a cop out.
Working on a marriage, really working on it, is incredibly difficult. And it takes two people to do that hard work. Many people stay in bad marriages and choose not to work on them, which I believe is also it’s own kind of hard. Every couple, every person, must have their own reasons for why they stay or go, why they try or don’t try. I am working on being less judgmental of people’s choices — trying to be more understanding of where a person or a couple is coming from, knowing we all have a different path and that not everyone’s marriage, or divorce, needs to look the same.
But why do so many of us have a tough time wrapping our heads around the ways that love can change, fade, or end over time? Why do so many of us have trouble accepting that it does?
This idea for so many of us who felt the need or the pressure from family and religious communities to “find the one” and settle down when we were in our 20s, perhaps feel this more acutely than others. When you choose your life partner at a young age and then grow up together, you don’t necessarily always grow in ways that are compatible. Not that it all comes down to a matter of compatibility; my own relationship dissolving was certainly more complicated than that, but I do think time and life and the way it changes people is so important to consider.
And by compatibility I don’t mean “she likes action films and I like art films.” It is much more complex than that. How we handle conflict, our dreams and desires, our understanding of ourselves, what’s at the core of our being, if such a thing exists… all of these things can shift over time, which is why most of us don’t marry the first person we fall in love with, right? Some relationships can withstand such evolutions — can tolerate the ways that two people change over time — but many cannot. Why should we have to? Why should we twist ourselves into knots trying?
I get why this idea is threatening to many people. It calls into question the very meaning of what love and marriage are. The idea that marriage is forever is so ingrained in us — even in many LGBTQ people — that it’s easy to feel like a failure when it ends. In fact, as a lesbian, particularly one with a child, when my partner and I were breaking up, I felt like I was letting people down. All my liberal friends from our Christian college, my family members who stood up to the conservatives in our lives and defended us as a solid couple, a couple who were committed to staying together and had the right to raise a family just as much as anyone…what were we now? The failed poster children for gay-marriage and lesbians raising kids.
But what if a couple changes, not just in spite of each other, but because of each other? Sometimes it’s not just life that changes you — it’s the way you grow in response to who the other person is too. And sometimes the people you are when you’re together are not the people you both want to be. I think that was very much the case for me and my ex. I think we both failed each other in deeply sad ways. I think most people in relationships do. But I refuse to call our entire relationship a failure because it didn’t last forever.
My last therapist made a distinction between happiness and fulfillment and I think it’s a good distinction. No marriage, like no person, is happy all of the time. But when you look at the big picture is there fulfillment? If there isn’t, then fight like hell to find some.
There’s a tension between the idea that life is short and life is long. Here is where I side with the idea that life is long: If you get to the point where you realize that fulfillment or happiness are not possible in your marriage, why not fight like hell to get out? Isn’t life too long to spend another night laying next to someone if you both make each other miserable? There is nothing wrong with trying to save yourself. And for many, saving ourselves first is the only way to also save our kids.
Lately, I have been thinking a lot about what getting married means. Why people still do it today, whether I will ever do it again. I never got to have a wedding and that is something I always wanted. Of course, there’s a world of difference between having a wedding and being married. But what is the connection between the two?
I love the idea of celebrating love, especially a love that has overcome great obstacles to be together. Last fall my cousin married his long-term partner in a legal ceremony in Pennsylvania. There were nearly two hundred people there in that old rustic barn with the stunning floral chandeliers — even some of our family members who had previously been staunchly against gay marriage and struggling mightily to reconcile their church’s teachings with their love for their gay family members. I remember, years earlier, my cousin’s mother (my aunt) crying when I came out to her as she struggled to understand who I was now that she had this new knowledge. That was before her own son had come out, but I think that on some level she must have known even then that there was something different about him. She must have feared the worst already: that her child, like her sister’s, was “homosexual.” When he came out to her several years later, I don’t know how that conversation actually went down but I do know that he decided to seek help and that my grandparents helped find a rehabilitation program where he could work on becoming not gay. That “gay-hab,” we joked much later, is where my cousin finally met the man he would marry.
I have experienced what I consider “true bliss” just a small handful of times in my life and one of those times was at my cousin’s wedding, as I joined him and his mother on the dance floor and we all danced together celebrating his marriage. That night, I danced with tears of joy in my eyes, full of gratitude for how very far my family had come.
I hope my cousin and his husband last forever. I know that they went into marriage after being partners for a long time and after already doing a lot of work on their relationship. I believe their union was truly, on many levels, something to celebrate. I hope that they can be present and self-aware and work on their own individual selves and continue to support each other as they do. I hope that when they struggle in their relationship, they fight like hell to make it work, and I hope they have all the resources they need around them to help them get through any struggles they may encounter. No one should enter into a marriage thinking, “I’ll do this until it gets too difficult or doesn’t work for me anymore.”
I think intending on forever is a beautiful thing. But I think as a culture we also need some understanding about what it means when you’ve fought a good fight and forever isn’t possible. When forever means staying stuck in old notions of who you are, when it means staying locked in constant struggle, when it means going round and round on all the ways we wish the other person would be, all the things we wish they’d do differently, but never seeing real change that works for both people? That kind of embattlement wears on you and nobody wins.
I study and teach memoir and autobiography. Autobiography theorists are always trying to understand the nature of memory and where it intersects with art, how we capture the past in words and images, and turn fleeting moments, moments long gone, into something we can touch and share. Like memory, people are complex.
I always tell my students to write towards the complexities, not away from them. First year students often want their pieces to be easy, pleasant, linear and uncomplicated. But life is not like that. And neither is memory. People tend to think that the past is static and unchangeable, but it isn’t true. Because the only thing about our past that’s real is how we remember it — how we understand it. Memoir writers are constantly wrestling with this notion. How I understand the past today may look different from how I come to understand it tomorrow or in ten years.
For a long time after my ex and I broke up I went over and over our entire relationship, trying to figure out the precise moment when it all fell apart. Weren’t we happy at one point? That day — my sister’s wedding — weren’t we happy then? Didn’t we all absolutely believe in the promise of forever that day? How did we get here? While I think that reflecting on your past and taking responsibility for your part in any relationship is necessary for healing and for moving on I’m not sure it’s possible to pinpoint a specific moment when a relationship falls apart. Relationships… Hell, people — are messier and more complicated than that.
I’ll quote an old Indigo Girls song, because what would any piece written by a lesbian of my generation be without an IG reference. Amy and Emily ask: “if it was ever there and it left does it mean it was never true?” There’s an implicit answer already there in that question — the way it hangs out there in the song. Of course it was true. Just because it’s gone now does not mean it was all bad. It does not mean we have to look back with shame or an overarching sense that we failed. Is a marriage a “success” because it doesn’t end in divorce?
I think we need a dramatic reframing of what divorce can mean. It can mean to have tried your best and then deciding to try your best in a different way. I think that’s what my sister is doing. I think that’s what my ex and I are doing and what many of the people in my life who have opted for divorce are doing.
Life changes people.
People change.
Momastery blogger Glennon Doyle Melton recently posted an image on Instagram with the quote: “You don’t know this new me; I’ve put my pieces back differently.” Her caption read: “This is why fitting back into your life after great love or pain is so difficult.” This resonated with me deeply. Some day I would like to tell the whole story — the story of the love and the pain and all the difficult intricacies of why my marriage was not a failure even though it did not last forever. But this is not that day.