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Most of us have a story in our heads about a fairy tale romance, the perfect wedding, The Ideal Husband, who may or may not resemble the powerful politician in the Oscar Wilde play of the same name. But the fairy tale divorce? We don’t have a backlog of cultural expectations that our own divorce is somehow failing to meet.
Which is great, because we can write our own divorce story now.
First, we may have to let go of an old, negative narrative, such as the notion that a blended family must include an “evil step-mother,” or the more recent myth that all happy families are alike, and they resemble each other by featuring two married adults—no exceptions permitted.
The woman I wrote about last week who couldn’t get past her anger clung to a false narrative—the idea that divorce necessarily devastates everyone involved. She had her work, her children, her home. She organized regular social events for large groups, attended church weekly, had the funds for manicures and the body-hugging purple dress she was wearing when we met. We were out at a good party on a Friday night in Los Angeles, the lights of downtown twinkling far below. Yet the story in her head had been abruptly interrupted by her husband’s defection. She’d been a character in The Perfect Marriage. The movie had stopped midway. Without a new plot line, it was as if her life were a roll of film spilling out all over the floor, chaotic, flapping, un-spooled.
So many people I’ve spoken to about divorce struggle almost as much from narrative disconnect, believe it or not, as from the logistical changes. Their story about what should have happened plagues them almost as much as the facts themselves.
Narrative disruption happens to all of us at some point in our lives. We lose the girl we loved, the job we thought defined us, the election or position that seemed rightfully ours. Rand Fishkin, the developer of the successful marketing software company, Moz, recently wrote a thoughtful post about clinging to a false narrative in his career.
Understanding the narratives you’re telling yourself can help you rewrite them. “Our stories create core schemas about ourselves,” says Hoboken, New Jersey-based child psychologist Daphne Anshel. “A lot of times when someone has a huge amount of change to integrate into their lives, they haven’t made meaning of it. That can lead to a sense of internal conflict.” Anshel stresses nuance as a key to moving past limiting narratives while remaining honest with yourself and the reality of your life. You don't want a black-and-white story, such as "divorce is devastating" or "my spouse is a jerk," but rather one that includes the uncomfortable facts or actions of both parties, but also leaves room for new possibilities.
Rewriting your narrative to include the new facts of your life is not only necessary, but also powerful. This is the core insight of the new field of posttraumatic growth. A decade-plus of research shows that many people become stronger through the effort to make meaning out of unwanted, even traumatic, events. A recent paper about posttraumatic growth looks at how unexpected loss disrupts a person's belief about the world and therefor initiates a powerful process of creating new understanding. As authors Lawrence Calhoun, Richard Tedeschi, Arni Cann and Emily Hanks write, “During this process, many people come to realize their own strengths, appreciate the impact of their relationships, and have new spiritual insights.”
Stephen Joseph, author of a great book about this called What Doesn't Kill Us: The New Psychology of Posttraumatic Growth, also stresses that most people go on to live good, more actualized lives than before. Those who bounce forward from trauma create a “mosaic” out of the shattered pieces of their former lives. Instead of clinging to an old vision (“Divorce destroys everyone!”) or throwing out all their old beliefs ("I thought you could trust people, but now I realize everyone is a liar,") they pick out the pieces of the old vision that are of critical importance, that represent their core ideology, and use them to create a beautiful new “mosaic” for the future. One man I interviewed whose wife left him said that he eventually realized that while you can't control another's behavior, you can take charge of how you react. That sense of personal power helped him move through the divorce and commit to a new relationship down the line.
The play An Ideal Husband, in some ways a narrative of a divorce averted, is not only a hilarious, moving classic piece of theater, but also an example of Anshel’s point about the value of nuance. The wife in the play learns of an early, shady business deal of her husband, a man she’d believed to be morally flawless. Her first instinct is to condemn him, turn away from the marriage, sink into shattered despair. Instead, she develops flexibility. She finds a way to accommodate a deviation in her script of what constitutes “ideal,” to accept a new view of this man she loves that includes the fact that in a moment of weakness in his youth, he’d made a dishonest deal that helped his career.
Those of us divorcing don’t have the opportunity to save our marriage through a new narrative, but we can work on taking a flexible view of the ideal life more broadly, a belief that lets us hold onto the best parts of the past and build a future—and a present story line—we love.
What does your good divorce look like? Write me at wendyparis.com and let me know, and tell me if you’d like to be featured in an upcoming post. Also . . . I've started a monthly newsletter. Sign up at my site.
