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Resilience
Divorce and the Other F-Word
Three (or four) questions for Carlin Flora.
Posted October 13, 2015
I was giving a reading about the history of marriage at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, presenting a demographic and sociological view of marriage and divorce. For centuries, marriage was a critical part of the extended kinship effort to stay alive. Today, it's largely a choice. Since we chose to enter it, we can chose to leave it, too.
After the talk, a woman about my age approached me. She was an artist and certainly liberal. “I appreciate that view, but I think you have to acknowledge that many people see divorce as a failure,” she said. “I do. I think it was the best choice in my situation, and for our child, but I still feel a sense of failure for not having been able to make my marriage work, or maybe for having married the wrong person.”
I didn’t see divorce as failure. I grew up with it. Divorce seemed more a part of life than an aberration. But many people, as I've since learned, do feel as this woman did.
Failure. The other F-word. Whatever you think about divorce, failure in general is so universal, you could write a book about it. Many books. Many people have. There’s a recent subset of books on failure promoting its economic upsides, including Fail Fast, Fail Often and The Upside of Down.
Carlin Flora, author of Friendfluence: The Surprising Way Friends Make Us Who We Are, recently wrote a feature for the magazine about some other, often overlooked reasons to be grateful for the failures in our lives.
Wendy Paris: Why did you investigate failure after writing a book about friendship?
Carlin Flora: It seems like the message now is that failure will lead to success and you have to fail to succeed. But they’re talking about traditional views of success. "You have to have five failed companies before you have one successful one. You have to have 500 auditions before you get the lead role." I was interested in instances where failure does not lead to traditional success. A lot of people never have that success. Failure can still bring benefits, even if it doesn’t lead to clear success.
WP: Are there relationship or friendship benefits to failure?
CF: Yes! Empathy. Before you experience failure, you might be able to relate intellectually to other people’s sadness or hardships. But afterward, you know how it feels. You find yourself saying the right thing, really understanding. Empathy connects us to people. It leads to more successful relationships, and more tolerance and acceptance.
Failure also helps with your own social comparison. You might feel down, and look around and think everyone else is doing great. Once you experience a failure, you know that other people have pain about something, too, even if they’re not telling you.
There’s also a vulnerability that comes with failure, and it’s attractive to people. It’s hard to become close to someone who has a hard exterior and never lets on that anything’s wrong. We live in a society in which you’re always supposed to be achieving and posting your happy pictures. Failure lets people feel they can let their guard down with you and be themselves.
WP: Are there other benefits of failure, absent some dazzling, quantifiable later victory?
CF: Humility, as opposed to entitlement. We hear a lot today about the problems of entitlement. When you realize that you don’t have a special right to success, and that no one does, it makes you more grateful for the things you do have. It also makes you better able to accept that bad things happen to people. You can take them less personally. I think this really applies to divorce. You could feel like, ‘I’m a good person! I deserve a happy marriage!’ But no one deserves anything. Much of success is arbitrary, not merit based. Everything doesn’t turn out well just because you work hard and are nice.
Failure and success are not individually-achieved outcomes. We want to say, ‘He pulled himself up by his bootstraps.’ But that’s a huge myth; there are others around who helped him. People with successful friends and who are embedded in a social network are more successful. The same is true with failure. People don’t individually fail; others contributed. If you’re not solely responsible for your success, you’re not solely responsible for your failures.
Also, Maturity. Some psychologists define maturity as having a complex view of life, instead of a black-and-white one. It’s about acknowledging a loss but still maintaining hope for the future, finding new ways to feel motivated and to grow. Say you see divorce as a failure to achieve the life you wanted, to grow old with your partner. The mature way is to feel that loss. Paint that picture. Grieve that. Then move on and focus on new goals, attainable goals. The reward is a more complex view, which allows you to see all the different factors at play in people’s outcomes. Gaining maturity also improves relationships because it lets you see your friends’ lives as complex. You can give them better advice and be a better friend.
Wendy Paris: Thank you. That's really interesting. And just to add one ka-ching!-style upside . . . if your goal is to enter a new marriage that really works, developing empathy, humility and maturity can help.
