The One Unusual Thing That Made My Divorce Less Ugly
I wasn’t looking to punish or destroy my husband.
La Famiglia | Shutterstock When I was out of college, I worked in sales. We used to have an expression, “Don’t talk past the close.” It meant to keep your mouth shut once you had the sale. If not… You might lose the sale.
I’m going to ask you a question: “How long did you stay in your marriage past the close?”
How many years did your anger, frustration, and grievances build up? How many years did you argue, shout, ignore, retreat, or mistreat one another?
How many years were you miserable and resentful? How many years did you spend feeling as if you’d lost a huge portion of yourself? How many years did you slowly become detached from your spouse? How many years did you feel alone?
How many years did you think about leaving? Or want to get out long before you got out?
Call me crazy. But I have a theory.
There’s one thing that might make divorce less ugly: if we got out sooner.
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By get out sooner, I mean if we left a bad relationship before it became unbearably unhealthy, if we didn’t stay past the close when it’s obvious there’s no sense continuing the conversation.
Let’s not kid ourselves. Spouses (many of them) use divorce as an excuse to exercise their anger. They use divorce as a means to punish their spouse. They use divorce as retribution and payback.
They weaponize children and money to get their desired outcome. It’s sickening. I was on the receiving end of a spouse like this. I’m not a saint. I own my behavior during the end of our marriage. But when it ended, it ended.
I wasn’t looking to punish or destroy my husband. I wanted a chance to start over. My husband was furious. He couldn’t believe that I’d left him. What followed was five years of absolute torture. A divorce hell.
No one should endure that, certainly not children. No child should have to experience an overly long and abusive divorce at the hands of their parents.
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Here’s the thing: I wanted to leave my husband 10 years before I did, but I didn’t.
Instead, I pushed aside my feelings. I told myself it was better to stay together for our children. I told myself I wanted to keep my marriage together.
I should’ve listened to my initial instinct. I wanted out. End of story. I talked myself into staying married. It seemed noble. It seemed like the right thing to do. It seemed comfortable. It seemed familiar. It seemed like love. In those aspects, it seemed right.
But it wasn’t. Nothing was right again. Not for those entire 10 years. A decade for my husband to fuel his anger. To get increasingly resentful that I had ever wanted to leave him, to begin with. I was angry with him during that period, too.
The difference? I never felt the need to punish him. A divorce involves personalities. This is what makes divorce complicated.
When both spouses are confident and mature, it can be a somewhat painless divorce. Difficult personalities can elongate divorce. But even the average person can build anger and resentment. They can feel hurt enough to retaliate.
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That’s why I believe getting out of unhealthy marriages sooner might make a difference in the divorce process.
I divorced an extreme personality. A diagnosed narcissist. It’s difficult to improve this type of divorce.
I’m still fairly certain of one thing, at least in my covert narcissistic experience. The length of time spent attempting to escape him made the punishment more severe. He was multiplying his grievances against me.
Not all narcissists or people are created equal. I’m strictly speaking from my own experience.
I believe if I’d gotten out sooner, I may have had a slightly better outcome. I may have rebounded faster. A narcissist may not have had as many years to strategize and wear me down. The longer I stayed, the more he increased his control and abusive behavior.
Don’t misunderstand me. It’s not easy to leave a true narcissist. There were times I feared my husband. Age and length of marriage don’t necessarily dictate that.
There were times I feared my husband. Age and length of marriage don’t necessarily dictate that. A narcissist can be frightening at any time. A narcissist is unpredictable. You don’t know what will set them off. In my particular case, he gained strength as he weakened me. I became diminished the longer I stayed with him.
Narcissism is an entirely different story. It’s complex. It’s complicated. Anyone leaving a narcissist should have a very good counselor, lawyer, support system, and a plan.
They shouldn’t take advice from one single source. They need to determine exactly how dangerous their situation is or might be.
I’m talking about the average divorce. The regular people out there. People who are divorcing hurt spouses, spoiled spouses, selfish spouses, or difficult spouses. The average person is devoid of complicating factors such as narcissism or other extreme maladies.
The longer we stay in broken relationships, the worse things are, all the way around.
Colleen Sheehy Orme is a national relationship columnist, journalist, and former business columnist. She writes bout love, life, relationships, family, parenting, divorce, and narcissism.