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Hey Rev!
We’ve grown so far apart. How/when do I know if we should divorce?
– Pat
Dear Pat:
There are certain letters that show up in my inbox that just radiate hurt. Yours is one of them: there is huge pain in the 18 words that you have written. I’m so sorry that this is what your marriage feels like right now. I’m so sorry that this is what your life feels like right now.
How do you know that this pain means that you ought to divorce? Well, Pat, let’s begin by talking about what divorce is.
Divorce is the legal and ritual action via which a couple names out loud the reality that their marriage has died.
There are a handful circumstances in which a marriage’s a death is indisputable: emotional and physical abuse are likely the foremost example. But there are many more situations in which it is ambiguous as to whether death has occurred, situations in which a serious illness or an injury to a marriage masquerades as death. In these situations, there may be room for a cure or even for a resuscitation.
The work of discerning just how far your marriage has fallen into ill-health is something that you and your spouse probably won’t be able to do on your own; sometimes there are things that we plain old can’t see about ourselves or about those close to us. Thankfully, observant strangers can often see these things immediately. It is time, therefore, to enlist the help of a professional observant stranger. It is time for the two of you to go to counseling.
Now, I know that a lot of folks are reflexively skeptical about counseling. But I hope that both you and your partner can put that skepticism aside long enough to participate fully in this process. Choose a counselor whom you both feel reasonably good about. And then go and tell the truth — to the counselor and to one another.
Before you begin the hard but vital work of truth-telling, I have two suggestions. First, see if you can find some new language to talk about the struggles in your marriage. While “we’ve grown apart” and its cousin, “we’ve drifted apart” are popular ways of talking about a marriage in distress, they are both problematic metaphors. That’s because they both suggest that you and your partner are passive observers of the hurts in your marriage: “growing” and “drifting” alike are things that happen whether we want them to or not, they are things that happen to leaves on trees and sticks floating on rivers.
What if, instead, you employed language that emphasized your agency, that underlined your ability to act? What if you spoke of your marriage as a garden that the two of you choose to water (or not), or a house that the two of you choose to build (or not), or a body that the two of you choose exercise and feed and take to the doctor (or not)? That kind of active metaphor might be scary; it might force you and your spouse to confront the unwelcome reality that — because of busy lives, jobs, children, or whatever — neither of you have spent a whole lot of time or energy paying careful and loving attention to one another or to yourselves. But it might also give you permission to take action, to begin to behave differently.
Second, I encourage you and your spouse to recognize that change in individuals and in a marriage is normal and healthy and good. Sometimes you will hear folks complain that their spouse of ten or twenty or fifty years “isn’t the person that I married.” Well, thank God! Do you really want to be married to a 22-year-old in perpetuity? That kind of marriage would be a nightmare. It would be an ode to juvenility, stagnation, and possibly even all-night keggers. You don’t want your partner not to change. You don’t want to stop changing yourself.
Now, let’s acknowledge, Pat, that getting to know a spouse whom you no longer know all that well – their values, what’s important to them, what they like, who their friends are, what their ambitions are – is hard and sometimes painful work. You may worry that you’ll be shut out of getting to know your partner. You may worry that it’s your own soul that you’ll never get to know.
It is in this place of anxious searching that a good counselor is invaluable. A good counselor will help you listen to one another and to your own hearts. A good counselor will help you to name what has changed and what is changing for each of you. A good counselor will help you to figure out if your marriage has died or, instead, if the two of you want to reinvest in your marriage and keep on changing together.
