Reflections on Identity
I Needed My Marriage to End to Become Myself
On how divorce brought me the wholeness I had expected from marriage
By midlife, many of us arrive at the realization that the notion of happily ever after exists only in fairy tales. Note my use of the word notion, as we are never actually shown evidence of the happily ever after; we are privy to the magical kiss or grand wedding that signals the start of this eternal happiness and are then abruptly cut off from the story. We probably also realize how flawed it is to desire the classic fairy tale trajectory in the first place. Have you ever read a fairy tale that is not fueled by violence, misogyny, abandonment, threats, neglect and abuse? And yet, we continue to search for and blindly believe in it, for ourselves, our friends and children. A wedding is a success story; a divorce, its tragic opposite.
These are not the jaded musings of a bitter divorcee. I was with my husband for 27 years, from the time I was a cherub-faced twenty year old, and then our marriage ended. In classic fairy tale fashion, it wasn’t a slow fade, but a beheading. One day we were together, and the next day we were not. We had built a life together, of which I was quite fond: two daughters with a son sandwiched in between; two homes — an immaculately…
