Divorce
I am not writing about this article because I have something mind boringly to say about this topic since it is a boring topic all on its own. Let´s face it, divorce is a legal process that I personally would never want to go through since divorce is just so messy. There are the details about a prenup, the settlement and how to split assets. A lot of back and forth about how to separate an intertwined life. Then there is the task of finding a suitable lawyer to represent one in court and all the tiny trivialities I can´t and do not want to wrap my mind around. My solution on how to never get a divorce is never to get married but that is a topic for another day.
Today I am writing about divorce is simply because my parents are considering one and I have no idea how to deal with it. Honestly, I have no idea how I should feel so I thought it was best to write down my thoughts and logically structure them to make sense of this very confusing whirlwind, instead of letting my thoughts run wild in my mind. It would be best to let my thoughts melt into words and rain onto a page instead of letting it stay a block holding up my other and more important thoughts. (And here I thought I don’t know how to use a rhetorical device. Just don’t ask me which one it is. I have no idea. Maybe a metaphor.)
To be quite honest, I somehow always saw a divorce coming. My parents fight all the time about the tiniest of details like where to put the dirty laundry, how to put the plates into the dishwasher or who is supposed to do something. Tiniest of details, which after nearly two decades of being married, should no longer be discussed. In my opinion, those things should have been sorted out long before. I just did not understand how they could live more than a decade together and still not know basic routines. It is simple math or routine in this case.
Maybe raising voices and letting anger takeover is their unique way of having a normal conversation but even I can see that something was terribly wrong. Me. The master of feeling numb and not giving a what for her surroundings. Me. The person who loves to get into verbal fistfights just for the heck of it. (Don’t judge, I am bored.) Me. The child who never learned how to control and express anger in a healthy way. Honestly, I believe I can only express anger and no other emotion but that is beside the point. Therefore just trust me when I say I believe that something is seriously wrong.
When I was younger, mother and father would argue. Sometimes their arguing and screams would wake me in the middle of the night. I can still remember how she was scared to get out of bed when she heard loud and threatening sounds. Little me wanted to believe that it was all a bad dream, a terrible nightmare but even she knew back then that it was not true. However, as a child, it was easy to brush that small shouting contest off as a dream because the very next day they pretend as if nothing happened. Either that or someone left for the night.
Now looking back at what I think I have a few pointers about what my parents should have done differently to prevent this traumatic waiting fest for their children, my first point would be rushing things. I don’t know how long my parents have dated and how they started a relationship and all that. (I was not even born back then, what did you expect and my parents were not so big on telling me about their love lives. Seriously, nineteen years and I still don’t know the first guy my mother had dated. Maybe he is a skeleton in my mother´s closet. I will never know.) However, I do know that they did not know each other very long before they got married. In research reports, I read that it would be best to date a person for at least four years before committing.
If my parents have given themselves more time to know each other, the rose coloured glasses would fall right off. When we are in love, our brains would program our vision to only perceive this perfect partner we want to see. We ignore the annoying habits and tiny imperfections. However, through this deception of our brains, we are also bound to fall in love with that idealistic individual. After a while, one may notice that that perfect partner or dashing demigod is a mere mortal after all. Someone who can´t be perfect. (Quick Sidenote, nobody is perfect since the definition of perfection is different from person to person.) Sometimes we have to overlook so many flaws to make a person seem perfect, it is almost scary just how much we overlook.
After rose coloured glasses fell off, the tiniest of imperfections may seem annoying and something worth shouting about. It probably hurts to see the person you have grown to love is not the person who is truly in front of you. The person my parents grown to love was this ideal partner who is nothing like the real thing and if my parents were to know each other longer, they wouldn´t have found that out the hard way.
Second point. Romantic relationships, from a scientific standpoint, tend to last longer if the pair were friends prior to the romantic engagement. I can say for a fact that my parents were not friends prior to their dating hence they never started their relationship from the bottom up. They started somewhere in the middle and tried to get to the top but without a strong foundation the building is bound to fall one day and it did.
My third belief is that they never talked about the little things. Instead of talking about small things like where to put the shirt or how to do the laundry, my parents bottle up their issues and brush them aside, hoping that it will never happen again. However, I, as a person with bottled up emotions, can tell you… it is bound to blow up in your face one day. The anger building up within them just led to one big explosion. One disagreement led to another and now the volcano of familiar destruction has erupted.
I swear my parents were gathering small things they hated about each other, whether it is their habits or their personality and throwing it at each other once the fight has been initiated instead of talking them through like mature adults when the problem first come to light. Doing something about it before it becomes a problem was never my parent's strong suit. Their mindset was in my opinion when it came to relationships is “if it is not broke don’t fix it, if it is broke then break the rest along with it.”
Through all the hatred, they gathered over the years leads me to the fourth point. After all these years of being married, of being legally bound to one another, of being trapped in their own decision, they got to know the person they have committed to better. The quirks they hate to the behaviours they hate even more. Through the things they disliked, the rose coloured glasses fell right off and so did the gloves. They knew each other too well so they could accurately make assumptions about the other and stabbing exactly where it hurts.
What my parents forgot is the fact that we change every single day because we constantly learn and experience something new. Statistically speaking we are a completely new people every seven years. After knowing each other for such a long time, they were destined to make wrong assumptions about the other as well. They still somewhat believe that the person they are with now was the person who they married but that is not true. I am not the same person I was seven years ago, why should my parents be?
Father makes assumptions about mother that may have been true a few years ago but are no longer true and vice versa. Because they believe they know what the other may be thinking and how they will react, they are actively depriving themselves of the chance to talk to one another. For example, mother thinks that father won´t listen to her because she thinks that he thinks that her opinion does not matter to him, therefore mother does not even try to make a case and convince father of her opinion henceforth drawing a wedge between them even more. Mother ends up with one more invalid reason to hate father and father ends up knowing that mother hates him for no apparent reason. This vicious cycle just goes on…
Then comes my fifth issue with my parent´s relationship. Regret. After a long time of building up a solid case against one another with no concrete evidence, things took a sharp turn when they stopped caring. Suddenly they gave up fighting, gave up making things right, instead they just let it spiral out of control. Shouting instead of talking and walking away instead of discussing. Then the regrets come flooding in. The what-ifs and what could happen when. Not about, what if I listened instead of assuming. No. They were way past that at this point. It turned to what if I just let go instead of hold on. Daydreaming about life without each other. The regret of tying the knot.
Worst of all, my sixth reason, distrust. I have no idea how this happened but after all the build-up of hatred, the distrust starts developing. Turns out my parents are just like teenagers with mother asking why father was her phone without permission to father locking doors because he thought that mother was snooping in his stuff. Unlike, teenagers, however, they had the resources to make it happen. I am just glad that none of it was put into place otherwise this house, which is supposed to be a home will turn into a surveillance state. This distrust and hatred just feel like civil war with both sides at a clear disadvantage.
The seventh reason, children. After falling out a long time ago, the children were the only thing keeping them together but now that the children grew up and no longer fully rely on their parents, the parents fall apart. Even though I am not fully out of the house and neither is my sibling, we become more independent as people and are no longer dependent on our parents. My parents don’t need to work together anymore to take care of yucky time bombs anymore. They are empty nesting and they found out that the empty nest is not an interesting one. To not share the empty nest anymore, they decide to divide the nest in two and go on separately with their lives or at least dream about it.
However, the pre empty nesting phase led to my eight-point. Living with the familiar. I believe that my parents already knew a long time ago that their relationship was going downhill but they couldn’t be bothered to do anything about it since being married was something familiar, something they don’t want to get rid of, a habit that is hard to kill. It could be that my parents just didn´t want to step outside of their comfort zone at their age. As mentioned, divorce is a messy and arduous process so they may have thought that they could just live it out. Bear one another for another day.
What they might not have considered is what living together may have done for their mental health. The constant state of being annoyed by one another only made them despise each other more. You have no idea how many hours I spent listening to what my parents had to say about each other. What I understood is that they are constantly complaining to me instead of working it out with each other. Back then, divorce might not have crossed their minds because they just didn’t want to change how their life currently is. The partner is just a frustrating variable in the whole ordeal. Now the tides have changed.
Number nine. Following a trend. My parents are not the only parents getting divorced or thinking about getting one. Many of my classmate´s parents are getting divorced or are already divorced. By my classmate´s parents, I also mean my parent´s friends or at least someone they know and stalk on social media. It is easier to do certain things if many people around you are doing it. For example, many people keep talking about how good this one book is and even though you are not a bookworm, you still get the book to find out what everyone is talking about so you can talk about it too. Divorce is just like that but with lasting consequences.
Last but not least. Ten. The pandemic. As if the pandemic didn´t already have so many terrible things it is accountable for but now this as well. Early in the pandemic, there has been news about how the filing for divorce has gone through the roof ever since lockdown started. Now nearly at the end, my parents are getting divorced. I just believe that we are seeing the light at the end of the pandemic tunnel but before they get to the end, they quit? That is just so confusing. Maybe the pandemic gave them enough reason to finally get the divorce they always wanted or through lockdown, they figured out how annoying they actually are if they have to spend the whole day with one another. I don’t know but I still believe that the pandemic played a role in this sudden (at the same time not so sudden) divorce.
There is a video on YouTube from my favourite comedian slash late-night talk show host explaining this issue on the daily show (a show that adds comedic elements to what I believe is rather mundane news. If comedy news shows are better than the standard news shows is a completely different question.)
All in all, I believe there are a lot of things my parents could have done to prevent. (This feels like a to-do list for when I get into a relationship. All the things I need to do differently to make things work out.)
Take things slow
Start from the beginning
Talk about little things as well as big ones
Don’t make assumptions
Don’t regret the past
Don’t distrust your partner
Be prepared to empty nest
If you hate it let it go
I am fully aware that there are only eight solutions to ten reasons but the ninth and tenth reason I state is clearly out of my parent’s control. Something they couldn´t have anticipated. Technically, there is something they could have done about it by not constantly being at each other´s throats but if it weren´t for the eight previous reasons, the trend and the pandemic would not have affected their relationship too much.
I also understand that everyone´s relationship is different and relationships don´t have a one size fits all solution. However, I know that it could help to examine what went wrong with someone else´s relationship to learn what should be prevented in one´s own. At the same time, the issues other relationships may show are not what oneself may experience, so I have no idea why exactly I dissected my parent´s relationship in this article. Seems like a bit of a waste of everyone´s time.
There is a lot of things that went wrong in my parent´s relationship, which is slowly coming to an end. This is actually the reason why I wanted to write an article about relationships and love, to sort out my thoughts towards those. I will still do that one day but not any time soon. It is simply because I currently haven´t really figured out what exactly I want to write about. There is so much. Tackling my parent´s decision to divorce is only a tiny fragment of a huge picture. One day I may have something to write but today is not that day.
Edit: There are more factors, which led up to the decision to divorce like the fact that we moved to a completely different country but these are just ten reasons.