The Excruciating Details of My Divorce

My wife and I had been in couples counseling for a decade when our therapist called it quits. In the previous session, she’d told my wife—let’s call her Vicki—that Vicki wasn’t The Boss and our partnership was a collaboration, but The Boss rejected that notion.

“This is who I am,” she said. It was her anthem.

We sat on opposite sides of the couch. Vicki leaned away from me, finding some fascination in the flooring. On the end table on my side was a small, sad succulent I sometimes stared at. I tried to figure out if it was fake.

The therapist sighed and waited for us to continue. We didn’t say anything.

After a pause, she said, “I’ve been going over my notes and thinking about our last sessions and coming to the conclusion that you two would benefit more from individual therapy.” What she really meant was Go be individuals, not a couple.

And with that, we were fired.

How had it come to this? When we made our wedding vows, we were all in—I was so sure I would grow old with this person. But I came to realize, about halfway into our 20-year marriage, that growing old meant You grow your way, and I’ll grow mine.

At first we were having so much fun that we had no reason to reflect on those qualities that would prove challenging later. I liked to have a good time, but I always overdid it. She was a woman raised to make her own decisions, stand her ground. Her militantly single mom taught her that she didn’t really need a partner, certainly not a man. Her dad modeled marriage for her by having three of them.

I was verbose, complicated, and raised by artists who were financially comfortable but uneven, an unsettling paradigm for Vicki. Her individualism hardened into a resistance to vulnerability and a partnership liability, even more so when we became parents to two girls.

She wanted me to follow her lead. In a way, I did, when we left a big city on the West Coast for a smaller one in the Midwest, where she grew up. I renounced my destructive social life and came to enjoy the quiet more than she did. I took to teaching—noble but not lucrative—and she gradually but reluctantly became the primary breadwinner. After only a few years in the new life with kids out of grade school, her lead—and the distance between us—had grown. She promoted herself to Family CEO, unilaterally making joint decisions that I’d learn about from the kids. Counseling was my idea. She consented.

I’d become resigned to my troubled marriage but hoped that it was temporary. Though as time went on, I felt misled, estranged, and increasingly unhappy. One hurtful recurring theme, for example, was how we handled the kids. The Family CEO also appointed herself the Good Cop, forcing me into the other role, which I played with authority but huge reluctance. When she stepped in to shield the girls from that authority, it undermined me with two blows: She looked like a martyr, and I looked like an asshole.

I was playing poker with a group of guys around this time, a few of whom were divorced—my sage elders—and one of them had a practical suggestion: Ask her if she wants to work on the marriage or if she would prefer to work on a divorce.

I did. She answered, “I want to stay married.” I thanked her for sticking it out and for going to therapy. It bought us a few more years.

Once the d-word was on the table, I slipped into the first part of the divorce process: the contemplation stage. With every disagreement, I wondered, Is this what’s going to break us? One night after work, I couldn’t bear the thought of returning to a home where I had no place. I called to say I was spending the night at a hotel. Over the phone, I heard the shrug.

Several single friends suggested that an affair would be understandable. Sex had been missing from the marriage for a while. Actually, what’s more accurate is that I was missing sex, and she didn’t seem to care. She didn’t discourage me from initiating, though, or from having all the sex with myself I wanted—as if she were inviting me to go fuck myself. This somehow translated to generosity from her and gave her an absurd power. As for the affair, one of the divorced elders counseled against it. “Don’t make a mess. Keep trying until the very end,” they said. “If the marriage does fail, you’ll have your integrity.”

Another shared his experience during a ride on the F train, and as we bounced against the clattering doors over Brooklyn, I hung on his every word. He was always the one who had it all. How revelatory to know that even his marriage could fail—and that he got out. As we got closer to Coney Island, he whisper-shouted about his exciting new girlfriend and the easy way he could now talk with his grown-up kids. Sign me up for that! But there was a rider clause: “It will suck—really suck—for about three years. It’ll be dark. No one wins.”

At home, we were posting losses. We’d begun sleeping in different rooms. In our couples sessions, Vicki continued her theme—that she liked who she was. In fact, she said, changing to please others showed weakness, a betrayal of herself, as if someone (hint, hint) was trying to brainwash her. That’s when our therapist fired us.

Which took us to the second stage of divorce: going through with it. I know it’s anticlimactic, but I can’t remember the exact moment we agreed to separate. We’d just run out of options, worn each other down. Someone had to move out, so I looked for an apartment close by. That was a dark time. I’d never felt so isolated. Sometimes the kids didn’t want to be with their dad because, yeah, sure, most teenage girls don’t. But you couldn’t convince me of that. I was sure I had lost them, that I was unlovable. It was me and the dog.

Somehow, though, the separation carried a surprising psychological boost: Without the sniping, heads cleared. Vicki and I started dropping our guard and our blame. A question was a legitimate request, not an insinuation. Missed phone calls weren’t intentional, and late replies to texts didn’t mean Fuck you.

By the second year, we’d begun to fill out the state’s legal dissolution-of-marriage document, emailing it back and forth, seeing how far we could get. We aimed for goodwill and didn’t need lawyers.

It wasn’t all smooth. There were plenty of hard conversations. For instance, there was the ring with which I proposed to Vicki—a 200-year-old heirloom that my mother gave me when I told her I was getting married. But the marriage ended, and during that time, my mother died. Cautiously, I asked, May I please have the ring back? Vicki balked, claiming it was all she had from our 20-year marriage (to which I wondered, How ’bout them kids?). It didn’t seem right that she would hold on to it. I told her that I wanted to be able to give it to one of the children when they got married. “Me too!” she said. So we came to an agreement: She would hold the ring for safekeeping, but when it came time to pass it on, we would do that together.

About a year after I moved out, I went into the hospital for something sudden, painful, and confusing. I was asked to confirm my emergency contact, listed as Vicki, and had to think about it. It made sense. I texted her and let her know. The next night, I was under meds and dreaming. Surrounded by plastic pings and soft slices of light, Vicki appeared by my bed. Or did she? The next morning, she confirmed she was there. “I’m glad you still have me as your contact,” she said. “Because if anything ever happened . . .” and she started to cry.

And so, strangely enough, 20 years after we made vows we found we couldn’t keep, we were making new vows, rooted in as much kindness as we could manage: to work together, for the benefit of our kids, to stay happily divorced, ever after, apart.

This enabled me to finally enter the last stage, the new beginning. No longer trapped in an unhappy union, I was free to be the guy I was at my wedding but maybe better: the real me. Individual relationships with each of my children are emerging but this time in a looser collaboration with the work colleague assigned to me on this Family Project.

When we finally signed the dissolution agreement and sent it to the court, we had to meet via Zoom with a judge to sanction it. I was at my old family home, dealing with Mom’s affairs, in a room I didn’t recognize. The house was stripped, getting ready for sale. It was hot and still, and cicadas droned outside. On my laptop screen, the judge paged through our agreement and asked us to confirm each clause. Periodically I said, “Yes, that’s correct,” my voice echoing in the empty room. Finally, the judge paused, breaking protocol. “I just want to say what a joy it is to see two adults work through this like you two,” she said. Her clerk laughed. “Thank you,” she said. I closed my screen.

I called my former bride and told her, “Congratulations on your divorce.”

Only last week, one of the kids had a college event out of town, and we attended together. I went over to the house to pick them up to go to the airport. I let myself in through the garage, smiling that my ex had never changed the code, the date of our wedding. We enjoyed the sun and our daughter. One afternoon we played some pickleball, as partners. Strangers assumed we got along pretty well because we were married. Only we knew we got along pretty well because we were not.