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Last week, I went to the Santa Monica Playhouse to see "Jack and Jill," a drama by Jane Martin centering on two divorcées who fall in love. They decide to marry, despite some obvious incompatibilities. Fighting ensues. Eventually they divorce.
End of Act One.
“Where can they possibly go now?” my theater companions and I wondered aloud, during intermission. “Maybe they reconnect?”
Act Two. They reconnect.
First, at an airport in New York City. Then they head back to her place to have sex. Which leads to a new round of misunderstandings and hurt feelings.
I should have seen this coming—both the sleeping together and the new problems it created. There are a lot of reasons why a separated or divorced couple might wind up back in bed together. It seems innocuous—not to mention fun. There's a familiarity, and a sense of safety. You might think, Isn’t sex with my ex better than having random encounters with strangers, or jumping into a new relationship with the first appealing person I meet? This is the kind of reasoning that leads to the friends-with-benefits arrangements we’ve all heard about, and maybe tried.
Divorce, however, is not a light relationship free of emotional complications. “The best estimate is that about one-third of folks have sex with each other after they get divorced,” says Barry McCarthy, a certified sex and marital therapist in Washington, DC. “This is bad science, but that’s our best estimate."
Sex after separation “usually fuels the fire of the bad divorce,” McCarthy adds. In a good divorce, it can erode a sense of clarity about the marriage’s end, and impede one's ability to move forward. We get along so well in bed, you might think. Shouldn’t we just try again at marriage?
Well, maybe you should, but sleeping together won't necessarily bring that truth to light. Marriage involves many interactions outside of the bedroom. As with the characters in the play, sex can engender a deep feeling of connection that doesn’t necessarily translate into the compatibility necessary to make a marriage work.
“When I talk about a 'good divorce,'" McCarthy says, "I mean that the emotions that most govern the couple are acceptance and sadness: Conviction that this is the best decision, and sadness that this didn’t work. Then they focus only on being good co-parents, and stay out of each other’s lives."
While openness is key to a good marriage, divorce calls for being closed in new ways. It requires what I call a "non-porousness," an ability to remain considerate of your ex without absorbing his or her problems, values, or judgments as your own. Some people so thoroughly vilify a former spouse that they’re never plagued with concern for their well-being, but even those of us who like our exes must still prioritize our own needs.
If our need is for physical intimacy, well...that can be a hard boundary to set (especially if we have a willing ex-partner). But other boundaries are challenging, too. Some people need better emotional boundaries—a wall between themselves and their former love, or against their ex-spouse's negative judgments of them. Some need more of a sense of ownership in their own home—more independent ways to manage household tasks or last-minute childcare.
Today's involved co-parenting can lead to boundary confusion. Los Angeles-based collaborative family attorney and mediator Forrest Mosten encourages co-parents to organize "blind transitions," with one parent dropping off a child at school and the other picking her up—rather than in-person hand-offs that can lead to fighting.
In the play, the man goes back to California, where he presumably continues his attempt to address the “faults” his once-second-wife cited. Cooking school? Check. Education about plumbing and basic household duties? Check. The ex-wife undergoes a much more needed, deeper transformation. She lets go of the anger she had toward men in general, gains confidence in her value as she matures and has real career success. They reconnect one more time. This time, it may actually work.
What kinds of boundaries have you found hard to set, or helpful to put in place? Write me at wendy@wendyparis.com and let me know.
My book, Splitopia, is available online and wherever books are sold. For more insight and information, check out Splitopia.com.
