I had dinner with Matthew and he had brought a friend. Recently separated and working on his divorce, I will call him Jeff.
I have learned from him that New York state laws require that a couple be separated for a year before they can legally file for divorce. I didn’t ask why but assumed that this was to ensure that the couple will not be acting on impulse. He is young, just 35 and was married to his high school sweetheart for 8 years after they have lived together for three years. They were both from Manhattan but after their wedding moved to Long Island in a three bedroom dream house with a porch that overlooked a manicured lawn.
Jeff is not a bitter man after the fact. He is, actually quite reconciliatory. He strikes me as one those who have removed themselves from their situation and have begun to look at their situation as an outsider looking in. He shrugs that he thought it was all simple when you marry someone you have literally grown up with and that things would work it out by itself, and expectations wouldn’t be so high. His ex-wife, who we will call Anne worked as a pre-school teacher and had a strictly 9 to 3 workday and she gave up her work at a school in the city for one that was a 5-minute drive from the house. Jeff worked in
Manhattan for a big-shot investment company and stayed there grooming for a vice-president post (which he got last year) and worked long hours. He admits it had been his fault in a way. He had thought that if he worked and made money to pay for the vacations, the parties, the bills and the other things that supposedly made for a lifestyle they both wanted, he was doing his part in the relationship. He was, like his father, fulfilling his role as the Provider.
It was obviously not enough for Anne who felt taken for granted and abandoned in favor of an ambitious drive for corporate success.
The next year and a half prior to D-day (when they move out of the dream house with the porch overlooking the manicured lawn) became a struggle to reviving a relationship that had flat-lined. He compared the hard work to feeling your way around a large dark room barefooted with broken glass on the floor seeking for a needle. It was as though no matter how much he had tried to reach out for her hand the further she drifted away from him until they were no longer in the same room. It was a time when every attempt for romance was a sorry act of desperation.
They both resolved to end it sans the drama. Anne moved her things out and returned to her parent's house. Jeff bought an apartment in the city and was spending the week on Matthew's couch while it was being redone.
Looking back, he said he would have done things differently, if he had the chance. He would never have let her slip away in the first place – to have listened more and kept the courtship going even after the wedding. These, in hindsight would have made a difference but in hindsight just the same. It was now over, the house is for sale and lawyers in discussion. When I asked him of the possibility that they could still miss each other and eventually reconsider, he told me real life wasn’t about how it was written in the romance books and Meg Ryan movies. Both of them have thrown the towel to the ring and have accepted that this marriage was over.
Then he said that the experience makes him feel like he’s ready for a relationship more than ever. Not for revenge because he still respected Anne and maybe even loved her, in a different level. Knowing what he knew now, he felt he was armed with the basics of what would make a relationship work and last. He has long accepted that there is no such thing as a perfect relationship – not with parents, siblings and more so with spouses. And yet that he enjoyed being in a relationship – the companionship, of dreaming big together, of creating a life for each other, of having someone to grow old with and of the comfort of monogamous sex. He was never a swinger so there was no wild bachelorhood to revert to.
Until tonight I have always thought of men who have gone through separation and divorce to be the troubled wounded ones. I was just telling Wally a few weeks ago that I stay away from the path of the emotionally wounded man because they carry the weight and burden of drama: exactly the reason why I only date single men. Jeff is wounded and troubled and perhaps masking the wrenching misery and feeling of loss he is trying his best to keep hidden from us. He, however does not make any effort to pretend that the loss of a marriage was one or the other’s fault. He acknowledges his shortcomings and does not uttered a single bad thing against Anne.
Jokingly, we mused that the failure of a marriage being directly proportional to the cost of the wedding. To me, if a couple puts up a big program as a prelude to a marriage you are setting yourself up for doom (and what an evil thought for a wedding planner, too!). People whom you have invited to watch you say your “I do’s” and make your first dance would the ones who would be jinxing your chances for that silver wedding anniversary. How many times have you secretly gone to a wedding and in your head placed a bet on how long the couple would last? Or have you observed the way a couple interacted with each other or their new in-laws to come to a conclusion that the union wouldn’t make it to silver anniversary?
Jeff brings to light a different kind of a man coming in from the storm. Hardened by the cold and having survived, he sees the world in a different light; having experienced the loss of love, now more willing to work harder to keep love. Or perhaps it is just Jeff, a rarity in the class of divorcees and separated men: that there is life after marriage, just with alimony… and maybe child support.