Mediate Michigan

I need to give myself a divorce for a present this year. It was the voice of treason talking to me again as I approached my fortieth birthday, about 15 years into our marriage. I had heard it many times in my head. Unprompted, it would speak up, sometimes even with humour. It was truth insisting on itself, but even so, it can be hard to take seriously. It is asking you to drop a nuclear bomb on your life.

People often wonder when you know. They ask about the moment it was clear that the marriage wasn’t going to work. And for some, of course, it is very clear. “The day in 2004, June 14, I came home unexpectedly at lunch,” says a 50-year-old divorced mother of two. “I thought, ‘I should phone the house and let him know I am popping back so he can clear out the girlfriend,’ but then decided that I had to see for myself. It was the first time I ever even thought he had a mistress, and I don’t know why I thought of it. Something triggered my intuition, I guess. So a half-hour later, I walked in on him with his girlfriend–a married friend of mine with whom he’d been having an affair for about a year. In my home. I had a form of post-traumatic stress disorder after. For about a year, I’d feel like retching every time I pulled into the driveway.” There is a tipping point for many, that one final, even small, act that changes everything. “We were making love, and we were in the missionary position, and I looked up at him and I thought, ‘I can't grow old with this man doing this,’; ” recalls a woman, now in her seventies, who divorced in her forties. A divorced father of three told me he knew his marriage was over when he called down to his wife, on the dock at their cottage, to tell her that their house guest, a business colleague of his, had arrived for the weekend, and she refused to come up. He could suddenly see that she was not the partner he wanted.

For many, though, the denouement of a marriage is protracted, and to pinpoint when it all started to go wrong is like trying to determine when the aging process, which progresses with each new sag or impertinent wrinkle you hadn’t previously noticed, actually began. And, to make matters more confusing, there are many “postcard moments” at birthdays and holidays, which interrupt the regular flow of life and calm you down, make you think things will work out. Besides, marriage is comprised of many layers of compassion. Forbearance is part of its fabric. Forgiveness darns holes as they appear. New developments stretch it thin in places and leave it thick in others.

via To Divorce or Not to Divorce?.