Remembering My Divorce Hearing

With a stifled conscience and against my wishes*, I entered a divorce hearing in the first week of January, 2005, stood in front of a judge and stated, when asked, that I believed that the differences between my wife and I were irreconcilable and that I had tried to the best of my ability to work them out. I lied for practical necessity. I had no choice in any meaningful sense of the word "choice." After I'd been charged $200/hr by two different lawyers to merely look over my settlement agreement and learned the harsh fact that my wife really intended to break our marriage whether I liked it or not, I clearly saw what my answers to those stock divorce hearing questions must be.

You can rationalize the answers by thinking, for example, that there is really no difference less reconcilable than that one spouse wants the relationship to continue and the other does not. There is some truth to that and many marriages have ended and will end with no other reason cited. But there were no specific, enumerated "differences" other than that one. If we could have listed some actual differences and worked on them we wouldn't have been at a divorce hearing ending our marriage. There were no outstanding disagreements we'd tried to reconcile. There was only one difference that mattered -- she didn't want to be my wife anymore.

A one-sided divorce legally forces another person's arbitrary, self-centered, like-it-or-not, undiplomatic choice on you. To survive it requires the acceptance of helplessness, powerlessness and tolerance of a kind of act that you probably spend much of your life trying to avoid inflicting on people around you if you have a conscience and are at all sensitive to the feelings and thoughts of others. Being the subject of a one-sided divorce felt like being the victim of a sociopath.

Here is my account of my divorce hearing, as I wrote it down the day it happened.

I got there at 8:15am, doors didn't open until 8:30. She showed up at the same time. I said "Hello" and she said "hi" and I stood like a statue watching the yard across the street and waiting. I recited the Serenity Prayer in my mind. I watched people come walking up to wait for the doors to open. I listened to them chatting. I recited the prayer again. And again. And again. And again. Over and over. After going through metal detectors, we all waited in carpeted hallways for another 10 minutes until the court room opened. Then at 9am the court clerk showed up. She made everyone get in line and reviewed the cases, one at a time. Some people were sent to other courtrooms, some needed to fill out forms or confer with lawyers. Lawyers needed to confer with clients. Then we all waited another 15 or 20 minutes for the judge to appear. I spoke to my wife for a few seconds in the interim.

She looked terrible. She had acute acne, which was in remission most of the time we were married thanks to some medication she used to buy and apply regularly. I'd never seen it look this severe. She looked gaunt too. When I saw her I felt terrible, worried. Was she losing it? Is she destitute (her job at the time pulling in a mere 20K)? Why wasn't she taking care of her skin? That was the only thing I asked her aside from whether she would be able to take care of our two cats. After I noticed her skin I felt bad for asking her to take care of the cats. She has no room for them and I wonder whether she could afford to feed them. She's living between a boyfriend's place and her brother's basement.

We finally got in front of the judge around 10am, ours was the 3rd case, for a 2 minute litany of questions with "yes" and "no" answers. Done. 120 days later, judgment is final. Unlike a regular breakup, everything in a divorce is documented to the enth degree, every bit of your joint assets is accounted for and dealt with, and your mutually separate futures are virtually guaranteed. Your relationship is mashed, shredded, burned and rubbed into the earth.

I asked her afterward if she wanted to talk. She agreed, but there wasn't much to talk about. I asked her "Why'd you make us go through with this?" She said, "Why did I want a divorce? Because I wasn't happy and I thought I'd be happier alone." I asked, "are you alone?" She said she didn't want this to turn into an inquisition. Her brother told me she'd hooked up with another man in a relationship several weeks after leaving our house in July. She said, "OK, I wasn't happy with you. And I knew it would take a massive change in both of our personalities for things to get better, as I told you in the therapist's office." A half-dozen thoughts on what I have learned and believe about happiness ran through my mind, but I didn't say anything. After a pause, grabbing my car keys in my pocket, I said, "Are you happier?" She said, looking me in the eyes, "Yes. And, believe it or not, I think in the long run you'll be happier too. It sounds like things are going well for you. I want you to be happy too, hard as it may be for you to believe." I didn't think or feel anything. The whole thing was an avoidable disaster in my view, but for her, the differences were irreconcilable. I said, softly, "OK," ignoring her patronizing consolation and trying to will myself to believe what she said about her own happiness, and started walking to my car.

I called back to her once to remind her we needed to get in touch when the house is sold and to file our last joint tax return. She offered to do the taxes in Quicken. I went to my car. I thought of the Serenity Prayer again. I felt the sadness coming up. I got in the car. I drove out. We drove out of opposite exits and went in opposite directions at the same time. I started to cry, just a little. But I straightened up. I'd been through the horrible days, the desperate days, the grief-stricken days, the days of crushed hope and hopeless pleading. I wasn't going through it again. It's done.

Yes, it was done, and I would spend much of the rest of the year in grief and deep depression because of the destruction of my marriage. It was wishful thinking at the time that the hearing healed anything in my heart or mind. And I sit here now, almost a year later, most days pretty good on the whole, life going on, fully aware of the wreckage behind me but going on anyway, without purpose other than to survive.

Divorce changes you. Some of my most heartfelt hopes and life goals died with the end of my marriage. I got to hear the person I loved most tell me things I never dreamed I would hear her say, such as "I wasn't happy with you." And I still remembered vividly the warm, youthful days of hope and love which led to us cementing our fates in marriage. Cement your fate you do, for good or ill, in marriage. I'll never forget my first marriage nor, I hope, all the hard lessons I won from it.

Now I am on the run, like many others, seeking to turn some corner where I will forget my dead dreams and remember them again as if I had never watched them strangled before my eyes. I recall the myth of the River Lethe that washes away the memories of life. I am a person who sometimes seeks the total death and obliteration of my past because simply remembering it seems to make a happy future impossible. I never want my fate, my mental health, much less my hopes and dreams, to be subjected to the fickle fiat of another person again.

* I emphasize the opening phrase because, looking back, I realize I have regret about my actions that day. I wish I'd been nobler, more principled, more loyal to some higher cause, less pragmatic. Does it matter that I was on antidepressants? Does it matter that everything I read about divorce and was told by my therapist urged me to practical action rather than idealism? Does it matter that the ideals of love, marriage and family died when I went in there and did the socially acceptable thing and accepted my divorce with so little fanfare or resistance? Time will tell. But it doesn't feel good today. It feels like I did something wrong with unforeseen consequences that have been dire and destructive to what I might call my "soul."