Five Easy Steps to the Perfect Messy Divorce
I don’t want to brag too much, but ever since the beginning stages of my divorce, I’ve had quite a number of people say to me, with a certain degree of admiration in their voice, “How on earth did you manage to get yourself into this mess?” And I know there’s stiff competition in this area, but to be honest, I don’t think I’m overselling it when I say my particular version of marital unraveling is QUITE impressive.
So what do you do when, like me, you’ve managed to reach the pinnacle of late-stage marriage dysfunction? Well, if you’re as magnanimous as I aspire to be, you find a way to share your achievements and your knowledge. You don’t just rest on your laurels; you use your successes to show others the way forward. So, with that in mind, as my special gift to anyone hoping to replicate the experience, I’ve put together the following no-fail guide to achieving that perfect, spectacular marriage implosion that will awe your friends, confuse your neighbors, and supply your frenemies with enough Schadenfreude to get them through until the next Jennifer Aniston failed romance debacle. Follow these five simple steps, and you too can be on your way to après-marriage unbliss.
Step 1: Get in the Right Frame of Mind
Messy divorces aren’t created overnight. If you truly want to reach the highest levels of achievement in this arena, you need to start laying the groundwork many, many years earlier. In fact, preparing for a major life event like this is a bit like training to be a professional athlete, in that you need to begin your training when you’re young. How young? Ideally around age 12 or 13. If you’ve already missed the boat on that, though, not to worry. You can start at any age, as long as you’re committed to the process.
Whenever you start, what you need to do is spend significant time studying conventional ideas of beauty and harshly comparing yourself to them. You must also internalize the view that girls can be smart or they can be popular with boys, but they can’t be both. You must practice this type of thinking until you believe, in your heart of hearts, that you’re destined to grow old with nothing for company except a cat that you’ve cleverly named Snowball’s Chance.
Why is this important? Because when the time comes and the right man comes along, it will help you overlook the Red Flags. If you’re not careful, and you haven’t properly laid the groundwork, those Red Flags can ruin everything. You’ll find yourself thinking dangerous thoughts like, “Maybe I should be concerned that he’s over 30, doesn’t seem to have what you would exactly call a job, spends 12 hours a day playing Super Mario Kombat Hedgehog, and keeps a pet skunk?” Obviously, if you’re going for the messiest divorce possible, thoughts like this are not going to be helpful.
Step 2: Go All In on “Opposites Attract”
The more opposite the better, here. If you like alternative pop, make sure he likes country. If you like five-star hotels, make sure he likes camping with no showers in a five-mile radius. If you like haute couture, make sure he wears the same three t-shirts and two pairs of jeans all the time. If you like doing crazy grown-up things like paying your bills and making sure there isn’t a negative sign in front of your bank balance, make sure his financial past is littered with credit mishaps and preferably a foreclosure or two.
But in addition to that, if you like playing it safe, make sure he has a sense of adventure that will take you to places in the world you wouldn’t have explored if left to your own devices. If you like Michelin-starred restaurants, make sure he can cook well enough over a camp fire that you actually crave his nineteen-egg casserole. If you like structure, make sure he challenges you to let everything go once in a while.
The true goal here is to find someone who is different from you in a way that makes your relationship interesting and exciting for a good amount of time — many years, even. During that period, you’ll find that both of you enjoy helping to expand each other’s respective horizons. And his bad-boy habits will make you feel edgy and free-spirited. You’ll congratulate yourself for not being as buttoned-up as you once thought you were, and you’ll even start to forget about Snowball’s Chance.
Ultimately, what you want is a set of qualities in your spouse that — while not things that you could ever tolerate for the rest of your life — will still keep the two of you together long enough so the marriage isn’t just a short-term blip. That way, by the time the whole thing disintegrates, your partnership will have been a significant and entrenched part of your adult life.
Step 3: Work Hard at Your Career
During your marriage, find a career that interests and stimulates you and that you will find fulfilling for the rest of your working life. This, of course, will be hugely important to you once the marriage implodes. (This is a guide to having a messy DIVORCE, after all, not a whole messy LIFE. I would never recommend that to anyone.)
But most important, make sure the career is highly lucrative. The amount you earn should increase drastically over the course of your marriage. At the same time, you must never suggest that your spouse get a job, even if you’re starting to suspect that the molecules of his back are beginning to fuse together with the molecules of the couch to form a completely novel and heretofore undiscovered compound of the man/couch hybrid variety. The goal is to achieve a point of maximum income disparity between you and your spouse.
Of course, it’s also very important to live in a jurisdiction that has lots of laws designed to protect the lower-earning spouse in the event of a divorce. Community property states are the best, but if you can’t manage that, at least make sure that your state divides all property equally between ex-spouses and also awards oodles of lifetime spousal support, whether or not the lower-earning spouse ever decides that now might be a reasonable time to get one of those crazy job things.
And whatever you do — and this is key — DO NOT get a prenup.
Step 4: Effect Change
Remember those free-spirited, bad-boy tendencies of your spouse that you found exciting and refreshing at the beginning of your relationship? Well, very gradually, over the course of your marriage, you need to change those. This one is tricky because you need to do it so slowly and with so much finesse that neither he nor you ever fully realize that it’s happening. You might, for example, point out to him that paying parking tickets instead of using them to collect chewed-up gum is an option. And he’ll not only see the wisdom in that, but he’ll maybe even double down and start putting money into parking meters. Sometimes.
By the time you’re finished with step four, the goal is to have turned your spouse into someone who — while still managing to fail to meet almost every single one of your expectations for a life partner — has successfully shed the most charming of his rule-breaking ways, keeping only the truly annoying ones.
Step 5: The Finale
If you’ve faithfully followed steps one through four, step five isn’t actually going to require a lot of effort on your part. All you have to do now is sit back and experience the culmination of all your hard work. And if you’re lucky enough, the ending will come in the form of a Jerry-Springer-style dénouement in which your spouse gets into a public physical altercation with the other boyfriend of the woman he’s been seeing behind your back for months. (She’s clearly trying to out-do you in the Most-Messed-Up-Personal-Life department, so you’ll need to stay alert if you don’t want to lose the title to her.)
That will be followed closely by a breathtakingly exciting period during which your soon-to-be-ex and his lawyer comb through all the details of, not just your joint finances, but also your professional life and future career prospects, to make sure that your ex gets his hands on every possible penny of your future earnings — from now until a very, very long time from now — so you can support his holding-down-the-couch habit, as well as provide amply for the girlfriend with the super-great taste in men.
And now finally, you can relax and enjoy the awe and amazement of everyone you know, secure in the knowledge that very few people are going to be able to top this one. It’s been a long road to this point, but it’s time to take a deep breath and get ready to experience the next phase of your life, which is sure to be satisfying in its own way. Because, after all, Snowball’s Chance really is a great name for a cat.
