Divorce — A Word of the Week
(Noun) The legal dissolution of a marriage; a court order or other document establishing such a dissolution. A separation between things that were once connected or associated.
(Verb) To dissolve the marriage bond between. To cut off. Separate or disunite.
I don’t know if my ex or I will be able to eat at a P.F. Chang’s restaurant ever again. It was, after all, at the Briarwood Mall location in Ann Arbor that I suggested we should explore divorce. We had moved back and forth, in and around the subject for weeks, months leading up to that lunch, but that was when it felt official. That was a, if not the, moment that the process felt real. That we just weren’t working, and couldn’t work long term, and we needed to come to terms with that. It’s been since September 25th, 2017, and neither of us have been back to a P.F. Chang’s. We haven’t been able to associate it with their food, and I don’t know if I’ll ever do so again.
The first time I ever heard about divorce, it was with one of my uncles. I knew of Aunt Karen, but was still so young that she primarily existed in pictures and hazy memories, and I knew she and my uncle were “divorced.” It was explained to me as “when people who are married don’t love each other anymore.” Seemed weird to me. Why get married to begin with if you just stop loving your partner?
The next time was with another uncle. I actually had memories of Aunt Kara; Christmas celebrations, family pictures, outings and trips…I always associate her with an Old West-style attraction where my brothers and I got to pan for gold. Little things. And she and my uncle seemed happy. Then one day, she wasn’t. The story I’ve gotten is always one-sided: she wanted the divorce, she left my uncle. In short time, Aunt Kara joined Aunt Karen is names that fade from memory, but still hold weight. Aunt Kara’s face was starkly replaced by Beyonce in all family photos. Divorce, for the longest time, was a bad thing that happened.
The thought faded for a time, making a resurgence with a childhood friend of mine. We often hung out at her house while we were growing up, one or both of her parents generally around by that time. Compared to other parents, compared to my idea of what married people were supposed to be like, they didn’t fit a lot of the bills. They seemed annoyed with one another, consistently at-odds, frustrated. They just seemed unhappy. Divorce still seemed grim, but now it seemed like a natural progression: if people are unhappy in a marriage, maybe they should just get a divorce. Granted, younger Mike didn’t have the insight of older Mike, and how many other factors could come into play for deciding whether or not to pursue divorce, but all things are easier in youth. It was a question of why hadn’t it happened yet, not why hadn’t it happened at all. But it seemed like the next step in a sequence, not a monolithic, villainizing Bad Thing.
At some point in high school, my parents sat me and my brothers down at our living room couch. They had thought about things, talked about it, and were getting a divorce. My youngest brother didn’t take it well; his definition was probably closer to the stigmatized definition, a Bad Thing. I remember my middle brother leaving for his room at some point. Mom left for her room, Dad stayed out in the living room. I stayed with him for a while. We recognized the gravity of things, and I threw out (jokingly) that it’d be neat to have two Christmases. He laughed. I laughed. There were hugs.
I never told him, or anyone, about the journal I found in some chest in the house, years prior. Entries detailing a loss of passion, a diminished feeling of attachment…death knells of a relationship. I thought nothing of it at the time, yet never forgot the feeling of those entries.
Things descended steadily, then all at once when I was in college. That divorce process turned into full-blown “leave the house as soon as you can pack.” My partner (eventual ex) was at the house to meet my parents during that “leave” portion of their divorce. It was a hell of a way to break the ice, and continued to slam into my head that divorce was bad. Divorce was a disintegration of something good. Divorce was the opposite of marriage. Divorce sucked.
And we’re back in P.F. Chang’s, circa September of 2017. Our marriage was a series of youthful assumptions, of boxes we were trying to check, of thinking that we needed to be something we just weren’t, and we were starting to realize that piece by piece. We pushed that boulder down the hill right then and there. But in the weeks and months following, we vowed to do it better than our parents, both of whom had been divorced.
So I helped them move elsewhere in town when the time came. Helped them pick out a couch that we couldn’t fit up the stairs to their apartment, then take back to replace, all in the frigid, Michigan dead-of-winter. We didn’t hang out all the time after that, but we still stayed close. It helped the transition before we could officially divorce.
I’d moved to Chicago the following Spring/Summer, and had to take an Amtrak back into Michigan for our actual divorce. My soon-to-be-official ex met me at the station. We hugged, hung out, watched movies, slept in the same apartment (we both got comfortable having our own beds real quick), and went to court the next morning. Leading up to our hearing, we got to sit in on the other divorcees on the docket. Lawyers, nitpicking, the judge ripping someone’s ass in twain for wasting her time…it was equal parts fascinating, hilarious, and terrifying. And then my ex and I were called up, representing ourselves. Presented the documents, stated our cases, agreed that it was a mutual decision, and were officially divorced. We were so excited to have done everything right that we tried to leave the courtroom without our documents. Going back in for the actual divorce papers is in my Walk of Shame Hall of Fame.
We went to brunch immediately after. Joked that I could be their wingman if they wanted to try and get the cute server’s phone number. Went to see Deadpool 2. Had Chipotle. Rushed to the train station to get back to Chicago. We became closer after the divorce. We still joke, we’ve always been better friends than we were partners. The boulder had stopped flying down the hill, and now lay at rest. We could plant flowers in the earth it had ripped up on its way. The definition of us had changed.
And with it, my definition for divorce changed. It wasn’t necessarily a terrible thing, it wasn’t the antithesis, and it wasn’t a failure. Divorce was, and is, an out. It’s a necessary out for an ever-changing life. It’s an evolution of human bonds and relationships. It’s not a stigma of where people fell short, it’s an acknowledgment that this partnership no longer serves their needs…or maybe it never did. And that’s okay.
Sometimes, it leads to new, happier partnerships. My uncle met my Aunt Madeline sometime after Aunt Karen was out of the picture. I remember their wedding. Choruses of glasses clinking, catalysts for them to kiss. I was young and didn’t appreciate that as much then, but now, even as an older ace, I get it now. They’re still together. The rare times I’ve seen them, they still act like their wedding was only months ago.
My mom met her now-husband on a dating website some time after my dad left the house. She’s since moved out to the lake with him, and they contracted a house of their own design to live in. They were married in that house. She changed her name to his, despite her personal attachment to the “family” name that she held onto for so long.
And I got a chance to see my best friend as they truly are: my best friend. We’re still a couple of dinguses who forgot to get the vehicle title signed over, but it’s a point of pride that we can do that without lawyers. We have papers and documents that detail our legally-recognized union and dissolution of the union, but we’re still friends. We’ve gone to weddings together, had road trips, slept over, replayed games we’d beaten over and over, made art for one another, and loved each other more than we ever did as a married couple.
Divorce is, by definition, the end of one thing. But by our own definition, it can also be the beginning of another, even better, thing.
