divorce – Alex Acks: Sound and Nerdery

Now that the cat is out of the bag, there are some more kind of nitty-gritty things about divorce that I want to talk about, because I think they’re dumb or annoying or just kind of funny.

It’s okay that we’re okay.

While we were going through the whole process, we kept having these weird conversations, just randomly. Mostly in the car, since thats when our housemate isn’t around. Where one of us would just say something like, “We’re not arguing about anything. I feel like there’s something wrong with us.”

Mike and I never did much arguing before, but there is this mental image you get of divorce, where there is shouting and tears and throwing things perhaps. There was a little crying while we were figuring things out. There’s always crying when something ends, just because endings are always sad even when they lead into new beginnings. But there weren’t hard feelings. There wasn’t shouting. And it felt… kind of weird that there weren’t, in a way. Like we were somehow doing it wrong.

We had a lot of conversations that started like this, going in both directions:

“Are you still okay?” “I’m okay.” “Why does it feel weird that we’re both okay?”

It’s okay that we didn’t want to argue. It’s okay that there are no hard feelings. (In fact, it’s better that there are no hard feelings!) It’s okay that we’re okay. I figure not a lot of people get to be in this position, but it’s a place that exists. And if you find yourself in that place, don’t feel weird about it.

And everyone, I know it’s super weird when someone tells you they’ve gotten divorced, and you’re not sure how to respond. And it’s probably even weirder when the people in question are both happy and okay with everything. It feels weird to congratulate people on something society in general says is a terrible thing.

But hey, you can always congratulate us on the fact that we’re still BFFs. We don’t feel like us getting divorced was a bad thing. We don’t want anyone else to feel that way either.

It’s way easier to get married than divorced

The more I think about this, the more it annoys me, to be honest. Like, I get that there are certain things that make getting divorced way more complicated than getting married; the division of property, and heaven help you if you have kids. (And I’m glad we didn’t have kids, because that’s a whole other set of people who you really have to put first… but anyway.) But it is just materially much more difficult to get divorced than married.

When Mike and I got married, we went to the DMV to get the license, didn’t have to wait at all, paid $30 and answered a few questions (eg: are you brother and sister?) and that was it. Then all we had to do was sign the thing with witnesses and there you go. Married. If you don’t count the big party we threw for signing our piece of paper, getting married was cheaper than dinner and a movie at the Alamo Drafthouse. We also didn’t even have to even be residents of Colorado.

Filing for divorce was exponentially harder. And I mean that in a literal sense as well; we had to pay nearly ten times as much just to file the paperwork. (Now if we’d gotten married in Houston, we would have had to bay $71 for the license, which is around 1/4 of the divorce filing fee.) We had to have lived in Texas for at least six months and Houston for at least three, thankfully not a problem for us. And then there was a sixty day waiting period, between when we filed the original petition and when we could even go before the judge to get the final decree approved.

Like I said, I get that a lot of that has to do with just the legal messiness of untangling property, which is why you need to drag a judge into things. I even get keeping the judge in the uncontested divorce loop and wanting their approval on the final decree, because they’re there to make sure someone doesn’t get totally fucked because of a mistake or malicious design.

But a sixty day waiting period? Why isn’t there a sixty day waiting period for marriages? Even states that have “cooling off” periods for wedding licenses, they’re nothing like sixty freaking days.

This is not to say my marriage to Mike was some kind of mistake and we wouldn’t have done it if we’d had to wait two months. At that point, we’d been living together for over five years. I’m just saying that making people wait the same amount for a marriage as they have to wait for a divorce just seems a lot more fair. And it also feels really wrong to me, to make it super easy to get married, to the point that you can quite literally get married on a whim in many states, and then make it difficult and much more expensive and humiliating to end a marriage.

Anyone who is against no-fault divorce is either severely misguided or downright evil.

Considering Texas’s hyper conservative reputation, it might come as a surprise that it’s a no-fault divorce state. (Actually, according to Wikipedia, the whole US has been no fault since 2010, which is cool.) But that meant when I went before the judge and asked for a divorce, the reason I provided was quite literally:

My marriage to my spouse has become insupportable because of a discord or conflict of personalities that destroys the legitimate ends of the marriage relationship.

Which basically means “this marriage isn’t working out for reasons that aren’t anyone’s fault, please let us out.” And that is so. Incredibly. Important. For Mike and I, this was precisely the reason for our divorce. We’d grown to a place where we just didn’t feel that way about each other any more and no longer wanted to be married.

I don’t want to get too melodramatic here, but this is important. We’re still incredibly good friends because we were able to decide that we didn’t want to be married any more, and then the state accepted that as a reason. This meant that neither of us felt trapped. Neither of us got put in a position where we could resent the other person. This allowed us to end that part of our relationship on incredibly good, cooperative, friendly terms.

If no-fault divorce wasn’t allowed, we would have needed a reason like abuse (not gonna happen) or adultery. And even when you’re both on the same side, being legally forced to blame someone for something that really requires no blame… I don’t think that would have felt very good for either of us. It wouldn’t have been fair. Sometimes things happen that aren’t anyone’s fault. There’s enough baggage on the entire word of divorce without the state forcing you to point the finger at someone and legally shame them.

I want to point this out because I remember in Colorado, political ads for certain candidates expounding upon the evils of no-fault divorce. There’s ongoing backlash and a definite sector of people in this country who would like to get rid of this kind of divorce, and their reasoning is total bullshit. Divorce is already difficult enough. Legally forcing Mike and I to remain married would not have caused us to somehow start loving each other in that way again. But it would have been a great way to destroy our friendship.

Everyone expects you to want to have nothing to do with each other any more.

I guess maybe because that’s the way it most commonly goes? But it’s been kind of weird in that respect. We actually ended up paying a lawyer to write up our final decree for us even just because if you download the form and want to fill it out yourself, there’s an assumption that everything is going to belong to either one person or the other. We wanted to keep one of our bank accounts jointly owned (so we could pay rent and bills out of it since we’re still housemates) and also keep the house we own at 50/50 while not having to just sell it and split it. They don’t make that easy to figure out.

And yes, we’re still housemates. We’re BFFs. We’re just really relieved to be sleeping in separate rooms. I know it’s kind of weird considering how these things normally go, but it’s worked for us.

My ties are incredibly powerful.

They tell you to dress nice for court. So I did, which included one of my power ties. I needed the confidence boost, man. Going in front of a judge is a nerve-wracking thing even if you have no-fault on your side. During my time at court, I got mistaken for a lawyer countless times (I guess only lawyers wear ties?) and caused several people some severe gender confusion.

It kind of made my day.

(Bonus: I was on crutches the entire time.)

Cake

Because yes, there was divorce cake. It was not as awesome as the wedding cake.

Like we murdered a fairy on top. — Yes. A funfetti cake. That’s right.

But it was our divorce cake, and it was good.

I tend to be very careful, out here on the internet, about when and how I speak about my personal life. Ridiculous bitching about my period? Sure, why not. Navel-gazing about weight and body image? Sure. But all of those things are about me. When it comes to the people in my life and how I relate to them, I am ferociously protective of their privacy. Their lives are not for me to talk about.

I’m going to make an exception here, with Mike’s permission. Because I think this is important.

This is about failure.

I’ve never dealt well with failure. In university, the first time I ever failed an exam, it resulted in a near-hysterical crying jag because I was certain my academic career was over and I was completely without worth as a human being. I am not someone who fails with grace.

This is about divorce.

Last week, on August 26, a judge granted Mike and I a divorce. This will come as a surprise to pretty much everyone, because we chose to not talk about it publicly until everything was finalized. A lot of that was because, in our opinion, our relationship and its workings (or not-workings) were no one’s business but ours. We decided together to get married, and we decided together to end that marriage. But I think a lot of it was also because the word divorce carries a lot of highly dramatic emotional baggage.

I think nearly everyone in America knows someone who’s been touched by a really horrible divorce. Growing up, I had a lot of friends with divorced parents, in a myriad of different arrangements. And there’s also the image of divorce in the media, where it’s largely this dramatic thing that involves screaming arguments, and crying, and throwing dishes, and trying desperately to hurt someone else over stuff.

The specter of failure was what made things the most difficult as Mike and I talked and talked and ultimately came to the conclusion that this chapter of our lives was at an end. I kept thinking over and over, that because I couldn’t find a way to fix this, to fix me, I had not only failed myself, I had failed our friends, our families, and worst of all, I had failed Mike, who is still my best friend in the world.

I haven’t failed Mike. Mike didn’t fail me. And I don’t want to hear anyone characterizing our relationship, our marriage, our divorce, that way. There is this is this societal meme that deems divorce a failure of marriage, a failure of a relationship. As if finding someone compatible with you, who will grow and change as you grow and change and always maintain that same compatibility, is a simple and easy prospect that defaults in success. As if finding a single person who can ceaselessly put up with your shit (and the shit they have to put up with grows and changes too) and still love you just as much until one of you dies is the norm.

Maybe divorce sometimes is about failure. But I don’t think that’s the only potential meaning. It can also be just about ending. Failure is only one way of a multitude for something to end. And if I’d allowed myself to think about it that way, this process might have been a little less agonizing.

Mike and I have taken care of each other and supported each other through a lot of good times and bad times.We’ve shared our lives. But the thing about life is that it changes you, inevitably. The day you stop changing is truly the day you’ve ceased to live, even if you don’t get around to dying for a while after. And for nearly a decade, the changes life wrought on us kept us on the same path, and it was good.

You don’t really have control over how life is going to work that magic on you. And at some point we stopped growing together and started growing apart. That’s not anyone’s fault. That’s life. Mike isn’t the same person I married four years ago, let alone the same person I started dating five years before that. I’m not the same person he married. And if you gave it to us to do over again today, we’d say thanks, but no. But let’s have some cake anyway. Cake’s always good.

We’re not a failure. Our relationship is not a failure. Because we made each other stronger, better people. We loved and supported each other through thick and thin until we reached a place in our lives where we couldn’t support each other in that same way any more. It’s time to continue loving and supporting each other in a different way.

And you know what? That’s okay. We walked along the same path for close to ten years. But now it’s time for those paths to diverge.

When I think of it that way, in terms of the fullness of our lives and the way’s we’ve grown, I can’t really call our relationship, our marriage anything but a success. We are both greater, stronger people than we were when we started. And if it’s going to end, then let it end. Holding on to something that is no longer supporting either of us would be the real failure.

There are a lot of people in the world. A lot of people. I feel lucky every time I meet someone with whom I can connect on an intimate level of any kind. Maybe there is someone (heck, ten someones, fifty, one hundred!) who will by some miracle of statistics be that perfect one for me, who will always match me and be matched by me. I don’t know if I will ever meet that person, and I won’t know if I’ve met them until I’m on my deathbed. And that’s okay.

I am incredibly lucky to have met Mike. We have been best friends for nearly ten years now, and for a bit less than that we were more. Mike has been an amazing, integral part of my journey to where I stand now. He has made me who I am today. And he has had the courageous soul and boundless generosity of spirit necessary to keep cheering me along on my own path, just as I’ve been cheering him along on his. Even as those paths have taken us farther and farther apart.

We haven’t failed. Because wherever we end up, we will still love each other.

Friends til the end.