Tag Archives: Huffington Post Divorce

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: 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.