David Baxter PhD
Late Founder
Divorce and separation: a woman's view
by Justine Picardie, The Times
March 20, 2010
Justine Picardie describes the agony of separation after a 16-year marriage
The end of a marriage, like the diagnosis of a terminal cancer, is not necessarily something that you see coming, whatever anyone else might think. Certainly, when my husband left me last year, I was shocked in a way that a number of acquaintances seemed to find unexpected. ?Surely you knew something was wrong?? they said in the aftermath of what felt like a bomb going off. But to be honest, I believed that divorce was a tragedy that happened to other people; that my sons would never experience the heartache of a broken family.
This might seem curious, given that my own parents divorced, and I have several close friends in their 40s whose marriages have ended in unhappy circumstances. (Husband falls in love with another woman and departs for new horizons; you know how it goes.) As with cancer, everyone knows someone who has suffered; there is, as they say, a lot of it about. Hence the flurry of news stories this week lamenting the decline of marriage, prompted by the announcement of the separation of Kate Winslet and Sam Mendes after seven years together, on the same day that Baroness Deech, chair of the Bar Standards Board, commented on the erosion of traditional fidelity and the easiness of divorce.
As it happens, the facts are not quite as straightforward. Government statistics, like habitual philanderers, are notoriously unreliable; but they nevertheless suggest that divorce rates are declining (falling 5.5 per cent in the UK in 2008 from the previous year). One could manipulate the figures in several different ways: the mean age for both men and women at the age of divorce has steadily risen (it?s now hovering in the early forties), although the highest divorce rate is for men and women in their late twenties. While politicians and policy-makers squabble over what the statistics do or do not prove, the reality of the end of a marriage is immeasurably painful.
No matter how dignified or gracious you try to be ? and Winslet and Mendes are to be commended on their insistence that the split is amicable ? it is usually horrible for all concerned. I?d been married for 16 years ? five years longer than the average for divorcing couples (it tends not to be the seven-year itch that is our undoing, despite the example of Winslet and Mendes, but the 11-year yawn) ? and in a relationship with my partner for most of my adult life. We had two teenage sons, a joint mortgage, entwined narratives, and a shared history. I simply couldn?t imagine life without him, but it turned out that he could no longer see a future with me. In that seismic shift, the landscape of an apparently stable marriage gives way to the ashes and aftershocks of a natural disaster.
I have yet to meet anyone who walks away unscathed: even those who choose to end a marriage must grieve; for it is, after all, a loss of hope, as well as a kind of bereavement, haunted by the living, however deadened they seem. We live in an age in which people use tidy phrases such as ?no-blame divorce? or ?by mutual agreement?. But despite the level language of legal mediators and family law specialists, the feelings that arise are primal, savage, and ? especially if infidelity has been involved (which it usually is) ? clouded by rage, shame, humiliation and jealousy.
Worst of all, if you are a parent, is the terrible sense of failure ? that having failed to make a success of a marriage, that having been found lacking as a wife, you have thereby failed your children, who you should cherish and protect from hurt and unhappiness. No matter that you have tried your best; it simply isn?t good enough, not when a marriage is unravelling. It?s not their fault, but they are suffering, because when it comes down to it, children want their parents to stay together. Forget the politicians? lecturing on family values and the importance of marriage: I understood that from the day that my sons were old enough to ask to swing between their parents? hands; I knew in every cell of my body that my children needed stability, that a happy family matters more than anything else in their world.
Honestly, it?s enough to make you weep, which I did, for days on end when my husband left, in embarrassing quantities and inappropriate places. I didn?t collapse altogether ? I got up, made breakfast for my sons, promised them that things would get better, even though I could not answer their obvious question of ?when??; I told them I loved them, and also that their father loved them; that he would always love them, even though he was no longer living with us. And I kept working, in the certain realisation that their lives would get a whole lot worse if I couldn?t pay the mortgage.
But in between trying to be a responsible mother, I cried, with a grief that I hadn?t experienced since my sister died. I wept on the Tube, at bus stops, in my car; I sobbed my way through train rides and boat crossings, and once, before appearing at a literary festival in Cornwall, I went for a walk along a cliff top and howled amid a herd of cows. Now that I come to think of it, much of the weeping was done on journeys, of one kind or another, and perhaps this is not coincidental. Just when you think you?ve arrived safely in your forties, having navigated a path through the confusions of youth, you discover that what you foolishly believed to be the map of your life has been torn up into tiny little pieces and thrown to the four wild winds, before anyone warned you that a tempest was coming.
That?s the bad news, and there?s nothing easy about it, whatever Baroness Deech suggests. It hurts; it hurts with such jagged intensity that you wonder if the pain will ever go away, even though you know that loss, like love, is a part of life, the common ground that we share. But there is some good news. If the anecdotal consensus is that more women in their 40s are being abandoned by their husbands, it doesn?t mean that they will face the rest of their lives alone (although some may decide that living without a man does not necessarily equate with loneliness). I could tell you about a dozen or so friends who have gone through similar experiences to mine in the past couple of years, and each of them has subsequently discovered new companions, fresh passions, precious joys, as well as sustaining the deep bonds of parenthood, and those enduring threads that bind families together, even when they seem most fragile. The end of a marriage is the start of the terrifying, yet exhilarating, discovery of what it might mean to be a grown woman, rather than a longstanding wife; and also the wonderment of falling in love again, when you least expected it. The map may have vanished, its certainties gone for ever, but the journey is beginning, as it always does; and out of this dark place, we find ourselves, in all manner of extraordinary and ordinary ways.
by Justine Picardie, The Times
March 20, 2010
Justine Picardie describes the agony of separation after a 16-year marriage
The end of a marriage, like the diagnosis of a terminal cancer, is not necessarily something that you see coming, whatever anyone else might think. Certainly, when my husband left me last year, I was shocked in a way that a number of acquaintances seemed to find unexpected. ?Surely you knew something was wrong?? they said in the aftermath of what felt like a bomb going off. But to be honest, I believed that divorce was a tragedy that happened to other people; that my sons would never experience the heartache of a broken family.
This might seem curious, given that my own parents divorced, and I have several close friends in their 40s whose marriages have ended in unhappy circumstances. (Husband falls in love with another woman and departs for new horizons; you know how it goes.) As with cancer, everyone knows someone who has suffered; there is, as they say, a lot of it about. Hence the flurry of news stories this week lamenting the decline of marriage, prompted by the announcement of the separation of Kate Winslet and Sam Mendes after seven years together, on the same day that Baroness Deech, chair of the Bar Standards Board, commented on the erosion of traditional fidelity and the easiness of divorce.
As it happens, the facts are not quite as straightforward. Government statistics, like habitual philanderers, are notoriously unreliable; but they nevertheless suggest that divorce rates are declining (falling 5.5 per cent in the UK in 2008 from the previous year). One could manipulate the figures in several different ways: the mean age for both men and women at the age of divorce has steadily risen (it?s now hovering in the early forties), although the highest divorce rate is for men and women in their late twenties. While politicians and policy-makers squabble over what the statistics do or do not prove, the reality of the end of a marriage is immeasurably painful.
No matter how dignified or gracious you try to be ? and Winslet and Mendes are to be commended on their insistence that the split is amicable ? it is usually horrible for all concerned. I?d been married for 16 years ? five years longer than the average for divorcing couples (it tends not to be the seven-year itch that is our undoing, despite the example of Winslet and Mendes, but the 11-year yawn) ? and in a relationship with my partner for most of my adult life. We had two teenage sons, a joint mortgage, entwined narratives, and a shared history. I simply couldn?t imagine life without him, but it turned out that he could no longer see a future with me. In that seismic shift, the landscape of an apparently stable marriage gives way to the ashes and aftershocks of a natural disaster.
I have yet to meet anyone who walks away unscathed: even those who choose to end a marriage must grieve; for it is, after all, a loss of hope, as well as a kind of bereavement, haunted by the living, however deadened they seem. We live in an age in which people use tidy phrases such as ?no-blame divorce? or ?by mutual agreement?. But despite the level language of legal mediators and family law specialists, the feelings that arise are primal, savage, and ? especially if infidelity has been involved (which it usually is) ? clouded by rage, shame, humiliation and jealousy.
Worst of all, if you are a parent, is the terrible sense of failure ? that having failed to make a success of a marriage, that having been found lacking as a wife, you have thereby failed your children, who you should cherish and protect from hurt and unhappiness. No matter that you have tried your best; it simply isn?t good enough, not when a marriage is unravelling. It?s not their fault, but they are suffering, because when it comes down to it, children want their parents to stay together. Forget the politicians? lecturing on family values and the importance of marriage: I understood that from the day that my sons were old enough to ask to swing between their parents? hands; I knew in every cell of my body that my children needed stability, that a happy family matters more than anything else in their world.
Honestly, it?s enough to make you weep, which I did, for days on end when my husband left, in embarrassing quantities and inappropriate places. I didn?t collapse altogether ? I got up, made breakfast for my sons, promised them that things would get better, even though I could not answer their obvious question of ?when??; I told them I loved them, and also that their father loved them; that he would always love them, even though he was no longer living with us. And I kept working, in the certain realisation that their lives would get a whole lot worse if I couldn?t pay the mortgage.
But in between trying to be a responsible mother, I cried, with a grief that I hadn?t experienced since my sister died. I wept on the Tube, at bus stops, in my car; I sobbed my way through train rides and boat crossings, and once, before appearing at a literary festival in Cornwall, I went for a walk along a cliff top and howled amid a herd of cows. Now that I come to think of it, much of the weeping was done on journeys, of one kind or another, and perhaps this is not coincidental. Just when you think you?ve arrived safely in your forties, having navigated a path through the confusions of youth, you discover that what you foolishly believed to be the map of your life has been torn up into tiny little pieces and thrown to the four wild winds, before anyone warned you that a tempest was coming.
That?s the bad news, and there?s nothing easy about it, whatever Baroness Deech suggests. It hurts; it hurts with such jagged intensity that you wonder if the pain will ever go away, even though you know that loss, like love, is a part of life, the common ground that we share. But there is some good news. If the anecdotal consensus is that more women in their 40s are being abandoned by their husbands, it doesn?t mean that they will face the rest of their lives alone (although some may decide that living without a man does not necessarily equate with loneliness). I could tell you about a dozen or so friends who have gone through similar experiences to mine in the past couple of years, and each of them has subsequently discovered new companions, fresh passions, precious joys, as well as sustaining the deep bonds of parenthood, and those enduring threads that bind families together, even when they seem most fragile. The end of a marriage is the start of the terrifying, yet exhilarating, discovery of what it might mean to be a grown woman, rather than a longstanding wife; and also the wonderment of falling in love again, when you least expected it. The map may have vanished, its certainties gone for ever, but the journey is beginning, as it always does; and out of this dark place, we find ourselves, in all manner of extraordinary and ordinary ways.
