Category Archives: Huffington Post Divorce

Huffington Post Divorce: Divorce – Independence or Enslavement?

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Editor’s note: This post originally appeared on The Huffington Post’s Divorce section as part of our regular contributions to their site. Keep checking back for more Sudden Bachelor on Huff Post.

July 4 prompted thoughts of whether divorce is a declaration of independence or a form of slavery.

Whether we wanted divorce or not, if we are getting divorced I submit the goal is independence, at least from our ex. I don’t mean excommunication. In the best divorces communication and cooperation are possible or even necessary if you have kids. Even friendship is attainable if exes are willing to swap amity for antagonism. Easier said than done.

And it’s easier said than done for divorce to be a move toward independence rather than an enslaver. As in most things human, the answer in how you slice it. Factors to consider if you have a will to move your experience of divorce toward independence and away from slavery:

• Are you the ‘dumper’ or dumpee? If the former you may indeed be declaring independence and feel liberated. If the latter you may be enslaved by anger and unrequited love. Or legion injustices may have taken place within the marriage which led to the altar of divorce. There’s no easy fix for these imbalances any more than there is an easy fix for relationships where one partner loves more than the other. This is where one of my divorce mantras comes in: therapy! If you’re a thinking feeling human, divorce sucks whether you’re the instigator or an unwitting victim, whether wrongs were done to you or you were the inflictor of them. If you have any money left, get therapy. Once it’s over (see Huffington Post’s It’s Over: Readers Share The Moment They Knew to help identify the end, amazing and scary!) what you need is independence from the marriage and the tangle of emotions surrounding its end. If there ain’t no cure for love, there is a partial cure to love’s end–therapy. That may well include anti-depressant or mood elevating drugs dispensed by a therapist if needed or useful. Fall back on your friends of course. And meaningless sex if available and tolerable. Formulate a goal to be free of the emotional slavery to the end of the marriage, and treat the path to that freedom like you would a task at work or as you would evaluate a long ago war in a history book. Independence is a right and privilege you will have to work hard for, start with therapy. Continue reading →

Huffington Post Divorce: Socratic vs. Accepted Wisdom and Divorce

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Editor’s note: This post originally appeared on The Huffington Post’s Divorce section as part of our regular contributions to their site. Keep checking back for more Sudden Bachelor on Huff Post.

A lesson I took away from my two divorces: learn to flip the accepted wisdom, no matter how accepted or instinctive it is. Socratic wisdom is the best and hardest kind: knowing what you don’t know. Try hard to choose that over accepted or instinctive choices. Here’s a start:

• Accepted wisdom: Get the best lawyer you can afford and come out swinging, especially if your spouse did something bad like cheat or lie.
• Real wisdom: mediate, mediate, mediate. No matter how aggrieved you are you will feel worse if you drag yourself down into bitter expensive litigation to ‘punish’ your spouse.
• Accepted wisdom: You must get the best divorce deal you can.
• Real wisdom. Overpay. Overgive. As long as you don’t seriously impair your ability to live, good will between spouses especially with kids involved, and avoiding the emotional turmoil of a protracted battle, is worth more than any money or possessions you would take away by haggling hard.
• Accepted wisdom: My pride has been crushed, screw that $%#% I’m mad as hell and I’m going to ride that puppy– because I have no choice.
• Real wisdom: Be more Gandhi than Genghis. Yes your anger is like a freight train if infidelity or other misbehavior is involved, and yes no words and no logic can right that any more than words or logic would have stopped you from loving and marrying the wrong person. But the scorched earth battle you need to fight is against your own instincts, not against your ex. You will be happier for it.
• Accepted wisdom: Divorce is failure and one or both of you should be ashamed of yourselves.
• Real Wisdom: Divorce is evolution. Whatever makes us think we can correctly make lifetime choices like marriage or career when we are, like, babies, even at 30? Without experience of being married the Catch 22 is it’s real hard to choose who to be married to. Admit life is trial and error, move on, evolve. Heresy I know but facts are stubborn things.
• Accepted Wisdom: The kids will get used to it, and are arguably better off without experiencing and ultimately modeling a bad marriage.
• Real wisdom: The kids will hate it. Even in extreme cases of spousal abuse the shattered marriage shatters their sense of stability and home. Does this mitigate against divorce? Yes but ultimately you have to make a very tough decision, whether to put your life and happiness before theirs, it’s that simple and heartbreaking. It’s not wrong to choose that. Just be aware that you will have to put a ton of effort into making your kids feel even marginally ok about it.

What I’m saying in a word is: flip flopping is a bad thing in politics, not necessarily in divorce. If you find a way to flip your natural reaction and the accepted wisdom about divorce as you go through it, you have a better shot at ending up, if not overjoyed, at least not destroyed.

Huffington Post Divorce: The Sudden Bachelor Part 2- The Stone Age

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Editor’s note: This post originally appeared on The Huffington Post’s Divorce section as part of our regular contributions to their site. Keep checking back for more Sudden Bachelor on Huff Post.

You wake up at 11 to the blackberry buzzing. You see it’s Ben.

“Ben! Hey.”
“I want to sleep at your house.”

That’s a 180 from the derisory treatment he and Louisa gave the new apartment last weekend, when Louisa asked, “Are you poor now?”

You said “No, sweetie, of course not. I just don’t need as much space as the house.”
Ben said “As much space? This is like- the den.”
“Oh come on, it’s not that bad. It’s like the den and- your and Lou’s bedrooms!”

That’s when they both started clamoring to go home. You are puzzled but also happy with this turn in attitude just a week later.

“Sure, I mean, if your mom is ok with it.”
“She is.”
“OK- can I talk to her?”
“Why?”

Ben drops the phone unceremoniously. You wait, nothing. Wait some more. Finally you hang up and call back. Barbara answers. Continue reading →

Huffington Post Divorce: The Birthday Party and What You Learned

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Editor’s note: This post originally appeared on The Huffington Post’s new Divorce section as part of our regular contributions to their site. Keep checking back for more Sudden Bachelor on Huff Post.

As the guests arrived at the party, they took sides. Is that human nature? Ask John Boehner. The relatives divided neatly across party lines, hers on her side of the room, yours on yours.

In the large party space at her new condo, the friends were not, however, as susceptible to easy division. All of them greeted you and Andrea in turn, some with sympathetic murmurs directed at one but not both of you. Why not both of you? Because the friends mostly took a side too, based on whose friend they were first, from each of your high schools, colleges, work, etc.

The ones that didn’t have a natural side were joint friendship acquisitions, nearly all parents of Ben’s school and camp friends. You didn’t know then six months into sudden bachelorhood, but only one couple out of this group would be at Ben’s next birthday and none at the following. For now, they clung together uneasily in their own cluster near the doors like settlers surrounded by native Americans

Ben and his friends, however, showed nothing of the dynamics going on among the adults. Overtly that is. They ran through the space laughing and yelling, playing pool as a contact sport, which resulted in the first casualty of the party, a girl who made unfortunate contact with the cue ball as it vaulted from the table smack into her forehead. You found yourself in close proximity to Andrea as you both felt the little girls lump, gave her two party bags as a lame consolation and apologized profusely to her parents. Continue reading →

Huffington Post Divorce: The Sudden Bachelor Part 1- The Supermarket

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Editor’s note: This post originally appeared on The Huffington Post’s new Divorce section as part of our regular contributions to their site. Keep checking back for more Sudden Bachelor on Huff Post.

You see that guy? The one making his way down the supermarket aisle, picking up cans and putting them back, eying things like mops and pots and pans, holding them as if to weigh them, like an ape holding rocks, putting them down. You rightly surmise that he is a sudden bachelor.

You craned your neck as you passed him in the aisle, as if going past a car wreck. You noticed he could use a shave and his shirt was mis-buttoned so one tail hung lower than the other. That dull, scared look in his eye? Surely you had seen that before? Like an animal in one of those Sarah MacLachlan commercials? You thought, finishing up your errand and preparing to head home to your warm house, replete with wife and kids, there but for the grace of God go I.

What you didn’t know, passing the lost-looking guy in the aisle, that flashing forward 2 years after the apparition in the supermarket, there with or without the grace of God you went.

You are at the same supermarket, it’s 11 at night, and now it’s you fumbling through the aisles trying to figure out what it is you need. To paraphrase the immortal words of Christine O’Donnell, you are him. Actually she said I am you, but whatever, it’s still creepy.

That’s right–your sudden bachelorhood number came up, like snake-eyes or something else unlucky, and then there you were, blinking in the pitiless fluorescent light while you ran the same gauntlet down the aisles.

You grabbed random items many of which you would never use and would ultimately leave, three years later, shoved into a closet of the apartment above the pizzeria when you were finally able to move into something normal. Reflecting on it years later you realize you were desperate to start bringing a semblance of order to your furniture-less and barren apartment and, for that matter, to your deconstructed and chaotic life.

You got home that evening and unpacked all the stuff onto the floor only to discover, shortly before midnight when you prepared your dinner, i.e. a poured a bowl of cereal and nuked some frozen waffles, that you forgot the milk. Okay. Alright. It’s just another blow, another stupid test, like the court skirmishes, like the frozen bank account, like the kids walking into your apartment and laughing at it then saying they want to go home. It’s just another step. Backward. Don’t they say one step forward ten steps back?

After debating whether to just pour Coke on the Corn Flakes, but then remembering the movie from which that idea came, Where’s Poppa, God that truly dates you, you are old, really old, no one remembers that movie now except you–you conclude that it’s too pathetic, even for your current reduced state, to have cereal with Coke. Accordingly you get dressed and venture out once again into the frigid January night and arrive at the supermarket parking lot about 5 minutes after the market closed.

No milk? Really? Like you had such a big list? You didn’t even have a list. It’s not like when your wife would send you out and you would just do as you were bidden. Apparently when it comes to domestic things, you were a better soldier than general.

You also didn’t know–another lifetime ago swerving by the befuddled guy in the aisle–that upon arriving in the vacant parking lot, you would sit in your car under the dull glare of the parking lot lights, your mind racing as the car idled, reviewing yet again the ruins of your once vibrant life and how you got to this place. Your thoughts careened between searching your memory banks for a 24 hour market, berating yourself for not moving to the city like any self-respecting suddenly-bachelored guy should do where 24-hour markets and women and lots of things abound, and then as the first few flakes of snow began to fall, rehearsing in your mind pretty much every error you ever made from dropping that pass in the end zone in eighth grade- to earn the name flubber for the rest of middle school and all of high school, that’s right, ALL of high school- to the last fight you and your ex had in a restaurant, can’t remember which, can’t even remember what it was about but it was a marriage-ender, that’s for sure.

There it was, your whole life spread out before you like–to quote Eliot–a patient etherized upon a table. And here you are. Smack dab at the beginning of your sudden bachelor journey.

Huffington Post Divorce: A Tale of Two Cities

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Editor’s note: This post originally appeared on The Huffington Post’s new Divorce section as part of our regular contributions to their site. Keep checking back for more Sudden Bachelor on Huff Post.

Does it ever feel to you, after you’re separated or divorced, that there are two parallel towns you live in? There’s the one you lived in when you were married, peopled with the couples you hung out with, and if you have kids, populated also with the parents of your kids’ friends, possibly (in some egregious cases) in-laws… There was a whole teeming population of people many of whom- when you got divorced, got wiped off the map. And then, Alice In Wonderland-like, you suddenly found yourself in a whole other place, you could call it Second City. Even if you stayed in the same apartment or house, it’s different, your town has become a much less populous and thriving place. In fact, around this time of year, it can be downright depressing if you haven’t at a minimum found someone new to repopulate your bed let alone your neighborhood.

Why is it that you need to move into this second, somewhat barren city? You kind of liked the one you were in, relationship discord notwithstanding. It’s like punishment, banishment, for a crime you didn’t commit! (on the other hand…) It can feel like a bad dream or a Twilight Zone episode where you are waving and shouting “helllloooooo” to everyone as they pass, the parents of your son’s friends, the couple who were your movie buddies, but they don’t see you, you are walking through your town like a ghost.

Before you become the ghost of Christmas past, here are some random do’s and don’t's for repopulating your new world and dealing with the deconstruction of the old: Continue reading →

Huffington Post Divorce: Storage and Letting Go

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Editor’s note: This post originally appeared on The Huffington Post’s new Divorce section as part of our regular contributions to their site. Keep checking back for more Sudden Bachelor on Huff Post.

I met my ex at the storage room last week. I took away a lesson in letting go.

The storage room is in a nondescript concrete structure in Yonkers, and until last Saturday held the remaining detritus of my marriage and some archeological evidence of life before that.  I met my ex in front.

We proceeded to the room through a chilly labyrinth of corridors lined with rooms just like ours. My somewhat morbid thought: there are lives condensed into each of these cubicles, kind of like rows of drawers in a crematorium.

The clanging of the storage room door opening echoed down the corridor as we talked studiously of neutral things, like Melissa’s daughter/ my stepdaughter and her travails at her new school.  Once in the room, we quickly decided which furniture would stay or go: none for me, I was already jammed into an apartment half the size of the house we had lived in. She would take the Mies chairs, notwithstanding their total dilapidation.

After the junk guy joined us and moved some furniture, Melissa and I started digging out and opening the boxes. I picked through the toys in the first box and noticed at the bottom some Hot Wheels tracks- the ones my son and I played with for hours and hours well before I knew Melissa. There was also some artwork, paintings which unintentionally looked like abstracts, a therapist’s dream image of a very little stick figure kid and looming parents on either side, pieces of cardboard with things like buttons and feathers pasted to them. Melissa and I laughed when we could not figure out which kid did what and also how the stuff had stayed pasted to the cardboard for so long!

I shut the boxes. There were no tears or anything, no Citizen Kane moment.  The junk man asked, junk? I nodded yes.

The rest of the room was jammed floor to ceiling with furniture which we and the junk man removed, dolly load by dolly load, until the chairs were in Melissa’s car and the rest of the furniture down near his pickup truck.  It was when Melissa was gone and the junk man was breaking up the final sticks of furniture with a crowbar so they would fit in the truck, that I thought about storage and letting go.

I arrived home feeling a bit liberated, telling my girlfriend that the storage room was cleared, ready to accept her many boxes shipped from across the country.   During the rest of the day though, a lingering question echoed in my head: what had happened during the preceding decades the skeletal remains of which ended up deposited in that room to leave me in this kind of pleasantly numb, more expectant than mournful, state?  And in that state, what could I take from the wreckage of the lives I had led, to move forward into this cool clear fall Sunday with some pinprick of light to shed on the fallout from the failed relationships that led me here?

It was amazing how easily the furniture all came apart, the crowbar went through it all like butter, it had looked so- durable! So many dinners on that table, so many books, stereo equipment, TV lodged in the bookshelf unit for years Maybe it was that, how easily all this furniture freighted with years of use and meaning came apart coaxed by the crowbar, that flagged for me that letting go is the easiest and hardest part of marriage and divorce.

We tend to keep grievances and expectations boxed up within like we keep things in storage.  You could call it- baggage.  We take it from our childhood to our relationships, then from relationship to relationship, we open those boxes in every therapy session until we might as well play a tape recording.  What is so hard about letting go?  Isn’t all we need a crowbar?

Huffington Post Divorce: Capital, Marriage and Divorce

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Editor’s note: This post originally appeared on The Huffington Post’s new Divorce section as part of our regular contributions to their site. Keep checking back for more Sudden Bachelor on Huff Post.

We live in a particularly capital-focused era. As capital rushes to the top 1 percent and drains from the remaining 99-ers, as our government printing press works overtime to inject capital into a still-damaged financial system, as we salivate over lifestyles of the rich and famous while clinging to our ever more embattled jobs- capital arguably rules our consciousness. But capital is more than money.

The potentially record-breaking several billion-dollar divorce payout rumored to be in the offing for Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev to his wife prompted these thoughts about capital, marriage and divorce.

The news is replete with big money divorce stories: Tiger and Elin’s $110 million settlement, the reputed $450 million or so Mel Gibson paid to be free to bring on the crazy in his life, Charlie Sheen (not yet quantifiable but on the boards for 8 figures or more for sure…). Huge chunks of capital change hands in the interest of freedom, revenge, lawyer enrichment, even fairness, all drivers of divorce. But lately I think of capital in a different way, courtesy of my marital and divorce experiences and time of life.

Ben Franklin reputedly said time is money. I would amend that to say: time is capital and capital is time. And a key form of capital is the quality of the minutes we are given. And- finally to the point — toward the end of my second marriage, I found myself thinking about capital in relationship terms. In other words, relationships have capital.

My second marriage was contentious. Despite relationship therapy then marital therapy, supplemented by individual therapists for parents and kids all around, cluster-therapy you might call it, we couldn’t get past the constant fights which were like a hydra-headed monster. I couldn’t help thinking toward the end, we are spending our capital on fighting and I didn’t mean therapist bills (not to belittle those). The trauma of the constant flareups and then prolonged cool-downs chipped away, I see in hindsight, at the emotional reservoir, the warmth and trust, that are the backbone of a good relationship. Finally, the positive capital was drained and legal euthanasia ensued.

If my ex and I had had the foresight to see the Pyrrhic nature of each fight, could we have stanched the outflow of relationship capital? Maybe. Or, maybe we were just incompatible and should have bitten the bullet a lot earlier instead of spending massive emotional capital trying to jerrybuild our lives together.

On the flip side, when it comes to divorce, capital also has a dual meaning. In traditional divorce, financial and mental capital are too-often severely depleted. It’s just a variant of what I experienced in a contentious marriage. If you come out swinging in divorce, perhaps fueled by the worst emotions of lawyers and clients: avarice, jealousy, hatred, tainted love — you are forced to invest and ultimately lose hunks of emotional and financial capital. At the upper echelons of society this is what hits the tabloids, pitched battles ending in 8 or 9, or even 10 (!) figure settlements the amounts of which, I honestly believe, do not match the emotional devastation wreaked on people we think we envy.

What if, as we enter our next marriage or longterm relationship, we are able to pay attention to the emotional “capital” in it, with a view to preserving and growing it like we try to grow our IRAs? And what if, when we end up in the clutches of the legal system getting divorced, instead of coming out swinging we approach it with a view to preserving as much emotional capital of everybody involved as we can? Would we be able to sacrifice conflict for concord?

Kind of goes against human nature dunnit? Maybe so, but sometimes, a mere intention is worth a thousand words.

Huffington Post Divorce: Midlife Madness

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Editor’s note: This post originally appeared on The Huffington Post’s new Divorce section as part of our new regular contributions to their site. Keep checking back for more Sudden Bachelor on Huff Post.

Midlife crisis is a cliché, unless you’re living through it.  And midlife divorce is also a cliché, though I don’t know that we automatically think of it that way.

For my midlife crisis I quit my job, moved my family to Newport, and then ultimately separated from my wife.

The emotional and financial costs of these events are very much with me today.  Is it madness to throw everything up in the air in midlife?  From a helicopter view, sure.  But since I spend so much time on suddenbachelor.com talking about divorce, instead I’m going to take a few steps backward to question the answers on marriage itself (not knowing the answers myself, mind you).  A couple of threshold questions:

  • Marriage should be forever- T or F?  True of course.  That is, if we end up on the right side of the damning divorce statistics, the successful 50%.  In other words, marriage works forever if the coin flip goes in our favor.  The case for F?  When it doesn’t work, the consequences are dire.  Lives ripped apart, lawyers enriched, kids put in a world of pain and uncertainty, surgery conducted on people’s lives with the butter knife of a cumbersome, outdated, antagonistic and self-interested legal system.
  • Alternative?  Isn’t there a movie where at the end they have a not-getting-married ceremony?  Is it possible to have and expect, even plan for, different committed relationships for different times of your life, to admit it’s not one size fits all seasons, the same way career changes can be made to accommodate life or economic changes?

As a child of the afterglow of the 60s, I fully recognize that “free love” and all that is mostly silly and counter to human nature. It was great to be revolutionary as long as my parents were paying for the accessories.  But to every wrongheaded ideology there is sometimes a seed of truth.  And really good music.  Here’s a quote from Jefferson Airplane: Life is change, how it differs from the rocks.

As a child of that 60s afterglow, I am old enough (sigh) to know that many of our most critical decisions are made under the influence, if not of drugs (weddings in Vegas anyone?), then their emotional equivalent i.e. love, and dreams about marriage.  Long after the death of the 60s I have been made aware through the wrenching, heartbreaking, nearly bankrupting experiences of my not one but two midlives (I’m sparing you the second), that our waking-dream expectations of marriage often do not bear out in the harsh light of day.

The concept that with the donning of the rings a couple is branded as each-other’s permanent exclusive property- that concept is belied by the infidelities and divorces emblazoned on the front pages of the rags lining every supermarket checkout counter.  Yet, in love we cannot imagine nor tolerate anything but forever.  To me now, love is an evolutionary imperative, a Darwinian addiction which went just a little overboard.