The stinger in divorce
“If you want to know what a person is really like, don’t marry them—divorce them.”
I’ve heard this more than a few times in my tenure as a couples’ therapist. Is there any truth to it? Why is there something of a consensus around it?
Certainly, as Walt Whitman concludes we contain multitudes. Meaning that we are complex humans with a paradoxical nature. We can be kind and cruel, thoughtful and careless—we have many parts that make up the Self. These parts become active under certain circumstances.
Divorce is one of those circumstances that can activate parts that lie dormant until there is some kind of duress. It doesn’t have to be divorce, but any occasion of not getting what you want. How does a person reconcile what they want but cannot have?
This is the fundamental challenge of life—and your relationship to loss is one that requires constant observation. Loss is an integral building block of life, without it there can be no growth, change or renewal!
If it is so natural then why is it so difficult to accept? Because we make it personal. If something goes against what we think it should be, there must be something wrong. Are you the person assigning fault? To whom? Is there a sense of being wronged or doing wrong? When we make it personal, we attach the loss to other experiences that carry an emotional charge. The loss says something about you that is unacceptable. Connected to other losses, you become one who can’t win, or one who is a victim, or one who is somehow not enough or loved enough. That’s the stinger in divorce.
But let’s step back into a wider perspective. None of your experiences are actually connected to each other except through this personal narrative. They are singular events in time that offer details about the world in which we live. All that happens is not a statement about you but a chance to experience the reality that is uniquely before you.
Granted, divorce does feel personal and it does feel like a loss but that’s one narrative and it’s a short story. You might even call it a tragedy. But keep writing because that’s not the end, it is a way through and beyond.
And it is so with all things. You have personal preferences, likes and dislikes, as Michael Singer explains, and it is not the mission of reality to cater to those preferences. A life spent avoiding discomfort or attaching to pleasures leaves too much life behind.
Divorce is a point in time, an event on a continuum. Like all things before you, it is a chance to expand your awareness beyond your personal circumstance. And paradoxically, there you will find your best self.
