Two Cents and Divorce Parties

I read a post called My wife is not the same woman that I married, which is an anti-divorce judgefest, because a blogger I admire shared it on her FB page. I commented to her that the post was a "bummer" to me and gave her a quick bit about meeting Ian at our joint divorce party. And then that wasn't enough to calm me down, so I went to the original post and left the following comment:

I met my husband at the party my sister threw to recognize my divorce, as well as my husband’s recently filed divorce paperwork from his first wife. It was dubbed “The Second Chance Club” and was a hugely cathartic gathering that I desperately needed after my marriage fell apart. It was a party – make no mistake. There was karaoke and drinking and loud, obnoxious laughter. But everybody there knew it was a divorce party. There was grief involved, absolutely.

It wasn’t until months later that my husband and I began getting to know one another, but when we did, we always knew that we had met one another in this vulnerable post-divorce space, and so we were able to be gentle with one another in ways I think would have been at least a little more difficult had we met under different circumstances. Having that party and acknowledging our common pain was essential to both of our healing processes, and actually continue to be a touchstone in our relationship. And this is by far the most rewarding and freeing relationship I have ever had the privilege of experiencing. I am one of the luckiest people alive.

Getting divorced from our first spouses was awful, but necessary in our cases. I won’t go into the personal circumstances because I shouldn’t have to divulge those details to have my experiences respected, but I will say that our previous marriages were more than just unhappy. It was more than just a matter of our spouses changing. Although if I saw someone in a grocery store who went off on some anti-divorce tirade, I wouldn’t have much more eloquence to offer than did your acquaintance. In fact, I would probably caution you that you were being self serving and uncaring. I know you think you are being the opposite of that, but you aren’t.

Marriages don’t fall apart because people change. Of course everyone changes. When we marry,we commit to growing with one another, rather than away from one another. But sometimes that is not possible, for a lot of painful reasons. And when we don’t hold divorced persons in our kind hearts, we are subjecting them to pain upon pain.

Yes, people get married and then divorce for frivolous reasons. But people also get divorced after long struggles and despite every iron clad conviction that they would never ever break their wedding vows. We owe it to each other to pick each other up at these moments, not call one another names like “sad” and “pretentious.” Those words help absolutely no one. And really, shouldn’t we err on the side of being more caring, instead of more judgemental?