Myths About Divorce

It would be nice if the divorce rate were just a matter of fluffy-headed people not taking their vows seriously, but divorce - like so many things in life - is something that people often don't understand unless they've lived with it.

When people are young and making those vows they often have not lived through enough experiences to really know the person they will become or how they will handle some things if/when they arise. Further, it is equally impossible to know how one's new spouse will handle some things. The experiences will not only test the individuals and the marriage, but they will reveal parts of those people's personalities that otherwise would never be revealed.

Some couples are lucky and are generally similar in how they respond to life's experiences. Some are lucky in that the challenges and tests to their marriage are just the "routine" ones or else are rare enough to be something they can get past in time. Some, however, get hit with one thing after another. I know one couple who didn't get through the first year of marriage before a complicated miscarriage, failed business, and resulting serious financial consequences occurred. This same couple went through a cancer scare for one of them, cancer with one of their mothers, a premature baby, loss of the husband's toddler-nephew, heart problems of the husband's father, health problems of the wife's mother, adopting a child, going through the the husband's father bi-lateral amputation of his legs, and then going through the very same thing happening to the wife's mother a couple of years later. Then the husband became "depressed" (although it may have really just been unrelenting grief).

These two people cared about each other, adored their children, and wanted the marriage to work; but with each big event that occurred each partner the differences in how they dealt with such loss/sadness became more obvious, and each partner pulled more within himself to deal with what there was to deal with.

Neither understood why the other made choices or acted one way or another because they were just two different people. The trouble was they had thought they were so much alike before life showed them otherwise. One day they woke up and realized they were two individuals who were trying to stay emotionally afloat alone and what they had had between them had been killed by years of pulling within. The deep-down incompatibility that had been revealed had made it impossible for them to do otherwise, so each had done what it took to try to stay whole in his own way.

One day they woke up to realize there was no fixing the marriage or gaining back what had been lost forever, and even then they waited five years or so just to see if things would get any better. They did care about each other. They wanted their marriage to work. The trouble was they no longer had what it would take to make it work, and they didn't have the emotional resources to live with yet one more source of loneliness and resentment as it got worse and worse. By the time they divorced even the divorce was something they "weren't on the same page with" when it came to how to handle things. When the storms come too fast and too big and blow out the "pilot light" in a marriage there's no re-lighting it, and without it a marriage is completely cold.

Without the destructive forces of having to deal with life as a couple, this couple returned to their pre-married, best friends, relationship - except that even as they share good times and laugh together, there is a palpable sadness between them that they weren't strong enough to survive all they had had put on them in life.

When couples appear to divorce over trivial matters there's a good chance they just aren't talking to outsiders about the deeper, damaging, destructive things that they're going through behind closed doors. Not all couples go through the string of serious sadness and turmoil that the above couple did, but then again these were super-strong, solid, people. Other people may have smaller or fewer bad times but may not be as strong.

Some people are lucky enough to marry someone without those deeper, hidden, differences. Some are not tested beyond the normal troubles and stresses of life. For some, though, when that pulling away starts to pick up speed; and when the storms keep coming, it is a serious loss, itself, to know that the marriage is dying - and that adds yet one more source of grief.

Sometimes, too, both partners take the vows seriously, but only one keeps them. That's another source of divorce, and assuming that every divorced person didn't take the vows seriously isn't fair to the half of the couple who did.

I give people credit for generally not making life choices lightly. Most people take marriage seriously and divorce even more seriously. When people make those vows they are made based on the person they believe they're marrying and not on the person the other may turn out to be, or become. Some couples thrive. Some stay in empty marriages if emptiness is the only problem. Some, though, reach a point where the most caring thing they can do for one another is break up and hope that each has a chance at happiness.

Most couples would choose to keep their marriages "strong and alive" if that were possible, but it isn't as much about what they would choose as it is what they have discovered about their own marriage.