CULTURE
Gray Divorce in a Red State
by Kate Milligan
“Where the wound is, there the gift lies.” — Aqeela Sherrills
Four women gathered around a firepit on a springtime evening, spaced safely for Covid. Just before this gathering, I listened to an interview with Aqeela Sherrills through Awakin, an organization dedicated to service and compassion. Aqeela, raised in a Los Angeles war zone, who transformed from gang member to peacemaker, proposed an idea: when you share your secrets and shames, it gives others permission to share their secrets and shames. I relayed this concept to the other three women and as night fell, we proceeded to share secrets and shames, accented by sighs and laughter. Our ages spanned several decades and a spectrum of experiences: marriage, divorce, infidelity, parenting kids and pets, career change, relocation.
I shared that my recent divorce was not my greatest shame, but there was definitely emotional fallout. I rarely shared my divorce status, embarrassed about the demise of my marriage due to disintegration of our formerly shared values about culture and politics. Aqeela Sherrills embraces a second mantra: where the wound is, there the gift lies. Why didn’t we act more rationally to resolve our disagreements, to avoid these wounds? And what are the gifts?
“If everyone is rational,” Seth Godin asked in his blog, “then why don’t we all agree on the right next step? It could be…that we all like to tell ourselves we’re doing the right thing, but ultimately, all we can do is make choices based on how we see the world. The way we see things drives our choices, and, of course, our choices change the way we see things.” Is it rational for a woman in her 60s to discard shared history, co-parenting, companionship, financial security, and a home with equity? I rationalized getting a divorce, but some questioned me. My friend bluntly advised, “Don’t divorce that fool; just live your life on your own but keep your property.” His friend (in whose culture older women do not leave their spouses) said, “I’d like to talk to your wife. She is not using her brains, to put it politely.”
Rational or not, I joined the trend called ‘gray divorce.’ Divorce rates for people aged 65+ have tripled since 1990, especially for those in second marriages, according to a 2017 Pew Research Study. Gray divorce increased partly because women have greater resources, and both men and women are less willing to settle for an unsatisfactory relationship later in life. It carries potential risks, such as lower living standards and a lack of various modes of support for singles when compared to couples.
I have collected writings on marriage and relationships in a swipe file that spans decades. I have lots of company in this interest: Modern Love in the New York Times, advice from Carolyn Hax in The Washington Post and Esther Perel’s podcast Where Should We Begin? in which she records actual couples in counseling. However, successful marriage requires more than advice and insight. It requires a rational definition of love and a system of balance, a quid pro quo.
Marriage — A System of Balance
The Mirages of Marriage by William J. Lederer and Don D. Jackson was published in 1968; it is still relevant. The book delves deep into the history and state of marriage, and offers solutions to the problems of modern marriage, caused by inequality of roles and “rusty, broken down, obsolete” American patterns and values. Some observations from the mid-1960s:
The systems concept applies to marriage as unequivocally as it applies to the oxygen atoms…. To grasp this, one must realize that in its totality marriage is not just a rigid relationship between two rigid individuals. Marriage is a fluid relationship between two spouses and their two individual systems of behavior. (89–90)
In every marital situation we have ever seen, each partner has contributed to both the assets and the liabilities. Blaming the other spouse accomplishes nothing. (20)Often, only the existence of children, the restrictions of poverty, the edicts of religion, or a lack of courage blocks the decision to get divorced. (16)
This last observation has changed since the 1960s, as gray divorce and cohabitation are much more common than in that era. More women have the financial means to leave a marriage. Other cultural views and laws about marriage have evolved: religious practices, social stigma, no-fault divorce, gay marriage, and more enlightened therapy such as from The Gottman Institute.
Marriage was something I anticipated and dreamed of in my teens. College seemed out of reach for me and my mother, a widow with my 12-year-old sister still to raise. Rather than focus on a career, at age 19 I married a man from my high school. I was captivated, confident, and clueless.
After six years, I left that marriage and soon remarried Leon (not his real name), He was nine years older than me and also divorced. Neither of us had children from our first marriages. A few years later, I enrolled in my first year of college as he completed a Master of Divinity degree. I took a sociology course on marriage and family, and Leon was studying titles such as Embodiment and Codependent No More. It was our first exposure to relationships from academic perspectives. We were able to laugh about being codependent, married for all the wrong reasons, with similar and difficult families of origin. We recognized that he rescued me from a marriage that I was afraid to leave on my own. Still, we chose to stay together and shared many values and interests.
After Leon’s graduation, we drove our VW Rabbit to a small town and launched into a new phase of our lives. I finished community college and we had a daughter the next summer, then a son five years later. I attended several colleges in between parenting and moving, finally completing a bachelor’s degree. We attended to our children (and two foreign exchange students), communities, churches, and our large extended families.
Leon retired in 2012 and we purchased a house in the nearby city where I worked. Resettling occupied the next couple of years as I continued to work, and he remodeled the house and taught part-time. Both of our children had completed college by 2015 and we began to plan a trip to Europe to visit our former exchange students.
A few years into Leon’s retirement, in late 2015, we found ourselves on divergent paths, slowly at first but increasingly influenced by the social, cultural, and political climate. The voices and writers that informed us ― news outlets, magazines, classic and modern books ― were similar for years. Now I heard different, more strident voices on television, YouTube channels, and in new books. Our values and viewpoints had been largely congruent before, at least I thought they were. We started attending different churches as theological shifts occurred. Over the next two years, the chasm grew between the topics and proponents that informed our worldviews.
Bothered and blindsided by these developments, I queried my friends; what did they think was going on? I consulted a therapist, whom I had seen intermittently for some years. What I did not do was what Kathryn Dickel counsels in her Pollinate Magazine article about the right way to leave a relationship. I did all of these things (some of them in another state).
Don’t Involve Others There are exceptions, especially with young children…but in general bringing other people into a goodbye only complicates it. Wanna leave your marriage? Don’t have an affair. Wanna talk to a loved one about your decision to leave? Don’t…have the conversation with everyone around that person and not them.
This is where I contributed to the liabilities of the situation: I was not honest with myself or my partner. The disconnect affected my health and I developed hives, which a dermatologist told me was stress-related and commonplace. Later I learned: the body is the one thing that will never lie to you. The more intense and negative the rhetoric, the more I shut down emotionally.
The Mirages of Marriage says that conflicts will inevitably arise, and when they do, couples must have enough trust in the relationship to say what they really think, and that it’s sometimes necessary to tell your spouse to ‘go to hell.’ (79–80)
Why I Decided to Leave
I didn’t consider leaving until a couple of years after we began traveling these parallel paths. By that time, most of our lives — work, church, social — was separate. In late 2017, I moved in with a friend, a person I met at the meditation group, and planned to seek a divorce. Over the next two years, my living arrangements changed several times. I lived with my friend, then moved back home. We counseled with a therapist who advised us to find ways to stay on the road together and not go in the ditch with our patterns and interactions. We took the summer trip to Europe. The sites and tours with our friends were fantastic — even the weather was ideal. But our emotional connection was strained by my reaction to his political rhetoric. I didn’t voice how much it bothered me, but I withdrew, went in the ditch, and he knew.
Some months later I adopted the rationale that we could agree to disagree (our own Good Friday peace agreement). We consulted with a new counselor who used Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT), as described by Dr. Sue Johnson in her book, Hold Me Tight. EFT addresses a couples’ negative patterns of interactions and how to change them to emotionally supportive, safe spaces. This counselor advised: stop trying to change each other. The insight about changing each other was crucial; a stance that we could not seem to overcome. We did want each other to change — he was vocal about it while I simply grew more distant, more reticent.
I was seeking, looking for a light to shine on these separate paths, a way to live out ‘we agree to disagree.’ I turned to many books, podcasts, poems, and music, using bibliotherapy or therapeutic help through reading. A favorite is the Irish theologian/poet, Pádraig Ó Tuama, whom I first heard in an On Being interview about the Good Friday agreement of 1998. Pádraig hosts the magnificent Poetry Unbound podcast and many online teachings. I found deep satisfaction soaking in what I call Pádraig-o’therapy. Here lies a gift.
A later discovery is how trauma remains in the body and is passed on through generations. Listening to recent podcasts on generational trauma, I see how that played out in our family system, in our marriage and with our children. It’s the trauma of poverty, struggle, abuse, fighting in our families of origin. Maybe that was where the judgment came from, as we could not seem to stop judging each other, to regain our former forgiveness and acceptance.
As I reflected on it then, I felt that voices that Leon listened to exacerbated trauma, resulting in waves of negative ideas to persuade me to see things from that fearful point of view. Of course there are dangerous and volatile happenings in our world, but the contemplative path that I was drawn to seeks to counter them through lovingkindness, equanimity, compassion. He viewed this as escapism, and there was no evidence that this impasse was going to change. Neither of us held a safe space for the other.
Letting Go — Being Alone
In the fall of 2019, I moved into a place by myself, the first time I had lived alone as an adult for more than a few months. Pollinate Women’s Weekend happened in October. Driving to the camp for the retreat, I pondered what it would be to stop seeking, to just be. As in the call to prayer: be still and know that I am God… be still and know…be still… be…
The retreat was grounding, to be among strong women, sharing their gifts, tears, and laughter, telling stories around five campfires. In the sharing time called Pollinate Circle, several of us explored our difficult relationships. I wrote in my journal: I have to decide about leaving. I heard at the retreat: you become strong by lifting something heavy. Keep what you need, leave what you don’t. Relax. Shame is to be released, purged from your lexicon, not worth your attention.
In November, one of the retreat practitioners led a forest bathing (nature therapy) walk at Walnut Woods Park. She invited us to be among the birds and trees and to listen, see, touch. I found a large tree and leaned against it. A recollection arose: early in our marriage, we heard an opera singer, Clamma Dale, at King’s Chapel at Cornell College. She sang the folk song The Water is Wide. One verse says:
I leaned my back against an oak, thinking that it was a strong, old tree
But first it bent and then it broke, as did my own true love and me.
Soon after that, I visited my children in California and while there, removed my wedding ring. I made the decision to leave, and my hives disappeared. My daughter has done extensive therapy; she observed how flat I was emotionally. I was out of touch, not only with others but within myself. I knew I needed to do inner work to wake up, to be present and conscious and honest. Carolyn Hax had great advice about this:
Be honest with yourself about who you are, the good and bad in balance. You’ll make better decisions, for one, about everything. And you’ll be more mindful of having one set of standards by which you judge both yourself and others, which in turn will make you more open-minded, less judgmental and all around on better terms with your surroundings. For further reading, Google “fundamental attribution error.”
The Mirages of Marriage says that “probably just as much work — energy, strength, and time — is required to support a bad marriage as to support a good one. There is simply a difference in the ways in which the energy is used.…” (20) Leon and I agreed on one thing: we could have been enjoying this time in our life together. We had good health, savings, a small but comfortable home. Instead, we allowed outside conflicts to encroach on our relationship. I was exhausted, and he was hurt and incredulous that I would be indulgent enough to leave. I directed my energy to letting go.
That winter and throughout 2020, I did inner work through online classes, spiritual practices, and working with a yoga intuitive. Inner work is lifelong, cathartic, painful, an immense gift. I also prepared for the divorce. I consulted a financial planner and researched divorce steps through the county court system. All the petitions and documents were filed online. I spent weeks separating accounts and preparing documents to file. We negotiated and agreed (mostly) how to separate our property and belongings. What we did not agree to, I let go of. Agreement saved us thousands of dollars and avoided a court hearing.
The most difficult reality is that our family, once cohesive, is fractured. Our children are estranged from their father, also over misconstrued values and wide-ranging issues that are viewed as toxic. Elizabeth Gilbert said that when she was in India, she asked a wise man about a toxic person that she loved. He explained that sometimes, we must “love from a distance.”
All of the Wisdom teachers that I follow assert that we all are interconnected, every person and every being on the planet. So we remain connected, from a distance. Some of my secrets are revealed here, and that releases shame. For my family now, the greatest gift I know is this: “Be kind whenever possible. It’s always possible.” — Dalai Lama
Notes:
Aqeela Sherrills on Awakin.org
Seth Godin’s blog post: “Everyone is Rational”
The Mirages of Marriage is available from the Internet Archive online library
Pew Research Study on Gray Divorce
The Gottman Institute
Esther Perel — Podcast
Carolyn Hax — Advice Column
If You’re Going to Bail, Do it Right by Kathryn Dickel in Pollinate Magazine
On Being with Pádraig Ó Tuama Belonging Creates and Undoes Us
Poetry Unbound
The fundamental attribution error, recalled from Psychology 101: when we attribute our actions to external circumstances, while we attribute others’ actions to their internal character.
