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Last week, I wrote about the benefits of talking about divorce while married, and making a personal commitment to treating your spouse well, should your marriage end.
My ex and I transitioned pretty smoothly into a positive, post-marriage relationship. I like our interactions now more than I did while married, and I feel better about my own behavior as an ex-wife than as a dissatisfied spouse. For many, though, a cooperative, peaceful divorce does not come easily. Here are four steps to try.
1. Focus on Friendship
Many people I've met with decent divorces said they were friends before they began dating. They entered the marriage with a genuine regard for each other, and this made it easier for them to focus on creating better lives for both, unwed—rather than spinning out into bitterness and ever-escalating law suits.
While befriending your ex may be the last thing you want to do, if you have children together, that intensely important shared interest can spur cooperation in much the same way as a pre-existing friendship. I've spoken to many parents who said they put aside their anger to prioritize creating a calm, stable family life for their children—and that this effort paid off. As I've written about before, high conflict between parents is one of the most damaging experiences for children—in divorce or in marriage—whereas happy, healthy children can come from a variety of basically cooperative family structures.
Working together in business also can act as a form of “friendship.” One woman in her 50s whose marriage ended after her husband cheated told me that she was determined to keep their joint business going. This goal forced her to speak more kindly toward him than she might otherwise have, and even to push herself to find help with her own emotional recuperation.
2. Decrease Negative Rumination
Albert Einstein College of Medicine neuroscientist Lucy Brown says that people in successful relationships can suspend negative judgment of the other person. As with many actions that work in a good marriage, this mental effort can help create a good divorce.
In one study, researcher Mona Xu, Brown and others looked at the brain activity of people in the early stages of romantic love, and then reconnected with them five years later. About half were still together. The researchers went back and reviewed the earlier brain scans; the still-happy couples had shown low activity in the region associated with negative social judgment. “To our amazement, it wasn’t the activation in any brain area but the decreases in activity in others, such as this one that has to do with social judgment, the ventral medial prefrontal cortex,” says Brown.
In a divorce, or the waning days of a frustrating marriage, the default of many of us is to criticize, to dwell on the ways we’ve been wronged. Talking back to your habitual inner judge can help you move on. “You need to be aware of the activity and inhibit your response,” says Brown. “Just practice that again and again. You’ll have the thought and you’ll say, ‘Let that thought go.’”
I found myself far less angry and ever-more appreciative of my spouse, once we split. If this doesn’t happen naturally, you can consciously work on replacing a habitual focus on his faults with intentional appreciation for his strengths—or for the positive moments in your own life without him.
3. Learn from the Past
One of the stealth benefits of having divorced parents is that you know what not to do. Many people I've interviewed said they remembered their parents’ horrible divorces, and vowed to handle theirs differently. People told me their parents wouldn’t speak to each other, or put the kids in the middle of arguments, making them feel like a “ping-pong ball between them.”
You can discuss healthy family relationships with your ex, or even with a spouse or fiancé. Talk about what you did and did not like in your family of origin, and how you hope emulate the positive characteristics and avoid the negative ones.
You also might learn from your own divorce. A retired Army veteran from Oklahoma told me he was handling his second divorce in the opposite way he’d managed his first, destructive divorce. “Whatever she wants to do, is fine with me,” he said. This attitude was enabling him to go slowly, listen to her needs and his own, and better protect their children.
4. It's Never Too Late for a Prenup
Okay, technically a prenup is out of the question after you've been married for 20 years. But if you haven't yet wed, consider it. A prenup sounds so unromantic; who wants to discuss the marriage breaking down when you’re looking at wedding dresses and rings?
The point of a prenup is not to sap the spark out of marriage, but rather to prevent an emotional and financial battle, should it end. “In 100-percent of the high-conflict divorces I’ve done, there was no prenup in place," says Regina DeMeo, a family law attorney in Maryland. “A prenup is an indicator about how you’re going to handle really difficult conversations. There is no more difficult conversation in the middle of wedding planning than a prenup. Divorce is a known risk. The best way to prevent problems on the front-end is with a contract.”
You can use a contract to protect a good divorce, too. I met one couple in Washington, D.C. who created a post-nup, a contract they signed agreeing that neither would take the other to court if their good divorce soured in the future.
To sum up: None of this is to say that a good divorce is easy. “When I think about how hard it is, I’m amazed that any of us can change the way we think and behave,” says neuroscientist Lucy Brown. Still, we’ve all seen the emotional and financial destruction of bad divorces—a good reminder that the effort is worthwhile.
Follow me on twitter for daily updates and ideas @wendyparis1, or sign up for my newsletter and find more resources on wendyparis.com. You can preorder my forthcoming book now: Splitopia: Dispatches from Today's Good Divorce and How to Part Well (Atria Books/SImon & Schuster March 2016).
Here's another interesting study by Brown and Fisher, this one on the neural systems associated with breaking up: Reward, Addiction, and Emotion Regulation Systems Associated With Rejection in Love
To read more on preventing a bad divorce, read (or share) last week's post: Can You Prevent a Bad Divorce . . . While Married? Other ways to help prevent a bad divorce see For Happy Kids, Keep Your Divorce Out of Court and Bounce Back From Anything (with Tal Ben-Shahar).
