Marriage Is for Keeps: How to Avoid Divorce - Love and Marriage - Heavy Lifting: Grow Up, Get a Job, Raise a Family, and Other Manly Advice (2015)

Heavy Lifting: Grow Up, Get a Job, Raise a Family, and Other Manly Advice (2015)

PART III

Love and Marriage

15

Marriage Is for Keeps: How to Avoid Divorce

When you get married, jump in with both feet. And brace yourself for those hard times, because sooner or later, they’ll arrive.

I understand the limited utility of telling a young man, “don’t get divorced”; no one sets out on that path deliberately.

There’s some good news on this front. The divorce rate is dropping:

The divorce rate peaked at 5.3 divorces per thousand people in 1981, before falling to 4.7 in 1990, and it has since fallen further to 3.6 in 2011, the most recent year for which data are available. Of course, the marriage rate has also fallen over this period. But even measuring divorces relative to the population that could plausibly get divorced—the number of people who are married—shows that divorce peaked in 1979, and has fallen by about 24 percent since.*

Justin Wolfers, “How We Know the Divorce Rate Is Falling,” New York Times, December 3, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/04/upshot/howwe-know-the-divorce-rate-is-falling.html?_r=0.

I can’t help but suspect that many members of Generation X—the generation that grew up with the consequences of nationwide no-fault divorce becoming the law of the land, state by state, from 1970 to 1985—saw the consequences of increasingly common divorce and resolved to avoid that fate for themselves.

In 2013, 191 “Certified Divorce Financial Analysts”—lawyers, accountants, and financial planners who specialize in the financial aspects of divorces—were asked, “According to what your divorcing clients have told you, what is the main reason that most of them are getting (or have gotten) divorced?”

The survey found that** the top reasons were “basic incompatibility” (43 percent), “infidelity” (28 percent), and “money issues” (22 percent). “Emotional and/or physical abuse” lagged far behind (5.8 percent), and “parenting issues/arguments” and “addiction and/or alcoholism issues” received only one half of one percent each.

“Survey: Certified Divorce Financial Analyst® (CDFA™) Professionals Reveal the Leading Causes of Divorce,” Institute for Divorce Financial Analysts™, https://www.institutedfa.com/Leading-Causes-Divorce/.

That term “basic incompatibility” doesn’t really illuminate much, does it? Who sets out to marry someone who is “basically incompatible” with them? What happens to make you wake up one morning and conclude you’re “basically incompatible” with your spouse?

As I examine the married couples I know, I’ve concluded that the divorce-triggering “basic incompatibility” must mean something deeper and more significant than fighting. Every couple fights: some rarely, some frequently. Loud fights, angry fights—none of these, by themselves, are indicators that a marriage is in deep trouble.

I do notice that my divorced friends say that fighting rarely resolved an issue. And maybe that was the problem.

There are four ways couples respond to conflict: he concedes, she concedes, they compromise, or it gets swept under the rug.

That last option might be the easiest, but it’s a short-term solution at best. Each time you sweep a difficult issue under the metaphorical rug of your day-to-day interaction in your marriage, that rug gets a little harder to walk on. Resentments build. Eventually, the issue you’re fighting about stops being the real issue; the real issue becomes your inability to resolve any other issue.

The D-word can actually help a marriage full of conflict. It can be a great clarifier. Using the D-word is the DEFCON Two of marriage. (DEFCON is short for defense readiness condition, the alert state for the U.S. armed forces. DEFCON Five is calmest, DEFCON One is most severe, basically meaning nuclear war is imminent.) When your spouse uses the D-word, it is a screaming alarm klaxon that asks you just how much you care about whatever it is you’re fighting about at that moment.

Is it worth divorcing your wife over?

Put that starkly, most of the day-to-day problems in a marriage don’t look that bad. If you can back down from that moment, you’ve endured your marital equivalent of the Cuban Missile Crisis. John F. Kennedy’s 1963 point about the basic common links with the Soviets applies to most warring spouses: “We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”

The decline in the divorce rate might reflect broader cultural trends in marital counseling and trial separations. As long as each spouse clearly understands the “rules” of the trial separation, they can do a lot of good in some cases. Absence can make the heart grow fonder; space and time can give perspective on just what the problems in the marriage are.

All of this gets a lot more complicated when kids are involved.

Obviously, it’s a lot more difficult to raise your child by yourself than with a loving partner. If you’re a single parent, doing the best you can, God bless ya. The Lord knows—and I know—you’re doing the best you can in extremely stressful circumstances.

My only tastes of single parenthood come when my wife is away on business trips or sick. A few years back, she had one particularly nasty bout with bronchitis that left her bedridden, and I can say with pride that I handled all the household duties with our two boys like clockwork for four days. By the fifth day, I was checking on her with new urgency. By days six and seven, standards were slipping—“Okay, fine! You want cereal for dinner? Go right ahead!” “You don’t want to wear a coat? Fine. Go freeze.” By the eighth day, I was pointing out that even God got to rest on His seventh day. Thankfully, by day nine she had recovered.

To take care of every little detail in raising your child or children, day in and day out, with no relief on the horizon, is Herculean.

To quit a marriage because of it is more than a mistake; it’s shirking your responsibility. Unfortunately, it’s increasingly common in America today. Through a million individual choices, our society is engaging in a giant, high-risk experiment: Just how well can a child grow and develop without a father in the picture? According to the Pew Research Center, in 2014 just 46 percent of American children under the age of eighteen lived in a home with two married heterosexual parents in their first marriage. A generation ago, in 1980, 61 percent of kids grew up in those circumstances. What dramatically expanded in the past two generations were single-parent households: 9 percent in 1960, 19 percent in 1980, 34 percent today.

I can’t think of a better definition of a failed man than a deadbeat dad. If you bring a child into the world, your purpose in life is to be involved with that child and guide him to adulthood. Fatherhood is a job you don’t get to quit. Fathers teach sons how to be men; they teach daughters what to expect from men.

Maybe a divorce will be an unavoidable chapter in your life’s story. If it occurs after you become a dad, you absolutely must dig down deep and try to keep your relationship with your spouse as cordial and respectful as possible, and to keep the focus on your children’s best interests. You may be raging inside, but neither she nor the kids need to see that. Save it for your buddies or your lawyer.

There are amiable divorces, and there are children of divorce who go on to live happy, fulfilled lives. But there’s some distinctly disturbing social science research out there.

Psychologist E. Mavis Hetherington is one of the preeminent social scientists researching divorce, and her book, For Better or for Worse, was generally seen as indicating that many children of divorce grow up just fine. But take a look at the fine print on those statistics: “Twenty-five percent of youths from divorced families in comparison to 10 percent from non-divorced families did have serious social, emotional, or psychological problems.”* One way to look at that statistic is to say that 75 percent of children of divorce will turn out okay. Another way is to say that divorcing parents increase the odds of their children enduring those serious problems from 1 in 10 to 1 in 4.

W. Bradford Wilcox, “The Kids Are Not Really Alright,” Slate, July 20, 2012, http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2012/07/single_motherhood_worse_for_children_.html.

“Boys raised in a single-parent household were more than twice as likely to be incarcerated, compared with boys raised in an intact, married home, even after controlling for differences in parental income, education, race, and ethnicity.”

For girls, “one-third of girls whose fathers left the home before they turned 6 ended up pregnant as teenagers, compared with just 5 percent of girls whose fathers were there throughout their childhood.”

There’s a considerable public wariness about the increasing rate of single parents, in particular single mothers. In 2011, the Pew Research Center asked Americans how they felt about a variety of social trends,** including more single women having children without a male partner to help raise them. They concluded society was split into three roughly equivalent groups, Accepters (31 percent), Rejecters (32 percent), and Skeptics (37 percent).

Rich Morin, “The Public Renders a Split Verdict on Changes in Family Structure,” Pew Research Center, February 26, 2011, http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2011/02/16/the-public-renders-a-split-verdict-on-changes-in-family-structure/.

That categorization feels like a deliberately opaque way of describing public attitudes—along with the headline “The Public Renders a Split Verdict on Changes in Family Structure.” “Split” can mean anything. When a sample divides 99 to 1, it’s still technically “split.”

And for some of these subsamples, that’s exactly what they found. Unsurprisingly, 98 percent of the “Rejecters” say “more single women having children without a male partner to help raise them” is a bad thing for society. What you might not expect is that 99 percent of the “Skeptics” feel the same way. So taken as a whole, something in the range of 68 percent of Americans think it’s bad that more single women are raising children alone.

Quite a few media outlets, including NPR, construed the poll result as a public expression of condemning single mothers. But the poll question isn’t so precise. I’d bet a doughnut that if you sat down with those Rejecters and Skeptics, they would express great sympathy for those single mothers, and contempt or disgust for the absent fathers.

I don’t know why the statement “kids need moms and dads”* gets construed as an attack on single parents. I suppose it’s a short psychological step from “divorce is bad for kids” to “divorced people are bad people,” and most people who go through the emotional, psychological, and financial toll of divorce feel like they’ve been through enough without another serving of societal disapproval. And they’re right. It’s needlessly cruel to kick them when they’re down.

You may have noticed this whole book is really, really “heteronormative,” as the social justice warriors say. Look, if you’re gay or lesbian, I hope you’re enjoying this book and I hope life treats you well. I don’t doubt gays and lesbians can be fine parents.
But please refrain from whining that a book about parenting and manhood written by two straight guys doesn’t spend enough time discussing the gay perspective. Based on data from the 2013 CDC National Health Interview Survey, 96.6 percent of American adults identified as straight, 1.6 percent identified as gay or lesbian, and 0.7 percent identified as bisexual. The remaining 1.1% of adults identified as ‘‘something else,’’ stated ‘‘I don’t know the answer,’’ or refused to provide an answer.
For some reason, Americans walk around believing that gays make up a very large minority in this country. Gallup found in 2015 that “the American public estimates on average that 23% of Americans are gay or lesbian.” The mean estimate from respondents ages eighteen to twenty-nine was 28 percent. So let’s be clear: when we talk about the “One Percent,” we’re talking about the super wealthy; when we talk about the “Two Percent,” we’re talking about homosexuals.

Divorce is a hard road to travel—hard enough to make exploring every alternate route worthwhile.

The Kids Are All Right

You may have noticed that, compared to most of the chapters in this book, Jim’s piece on divorce was a little long on data and short on personal anecdotes. That’s because, luckily for Jim, he doesn’t really have any personal experience with divorce. I, on the other hand, watched my parents get divorced before I was ten years old. I married a woman whose parents were also divorced, and whose first marriage had fallen apart a few years before we met. And over the eighteen years that I’ve been married (as of this writing), there’ve been a few times when divorce seemed like it might be in my future as well.

Jim paints a pretty grim picture of the children of divorce: more likely to end up in prison, more likely to end up on a reboot of Teen Mom, and simply more likely to end up messed up than the product of a two-parent family. Thankfully, I’ve never been to prison, I’ve only impregnated my wife, and I consider myself to be fairly well grounded, though I did have my share of adolescent angst when I was younger. Growing up, I had plenty of friends who were being raised by single moms, and they all turned out okay too (at least as of the last high school reunion).

That’s not to say my mom wasn’t concerned about my mental well-being while she and my dad were going through their divorce. My mother had moved my older brother and me back to Oklahoma, while my father stayed in New Jersey (where we had moved a couple of years prior). She sent us to a seemingly endless series of counselors (I remember three, but there may have been a few more), which I think may have done more harm than good. At the time, while I didn’t like the fact that my parents were splitting up, I didn’t know what to do other than try to adjust to my new reality. Talking to counselor after counselor about how I “really” felt just made me feel like I was supposed to be taking it harder than I really was. I was upset, but I wasn’t devastated. Dad was a salesman who was gone half the time anyway. I missed him, but I grew up missing him. This wasn’t really anything new.

Rarely will you hear a therapist tell someone, “Hey, you know what? You’re good. I really don’t think I can do anything for you.” No, in my case I must have been repressing my true feelings about the divorce. And the prime piece of evidence the therapists had was my science grade.

It’s pretty hard to fail fourth grade science. If you can spell “earth” and know how to make a dinosaur diorama for the Science Fair, you’re pretty much guaranteed passage. Yet for some reason I wasn’t turning in my homework for fourth grade science, and when the teacher finally told my mom about halfway through the semester, both my mother and the various counselors were convinced that this meant I was acting out to get attention. It had nothing to do with the divorce, though. It was all about my mom’s lunch schedule.

See, one day not long after the semester began, I spaced on doing my homework. The teacher told me to go to the principal’s office and call my mom to let her know. I left the classroom, walked through the cafeteria, and into the school office. I told the secretary I needed to call my mom, dreading having to tell her that I was getting a zero on my homework that day. When I called her office, however, the receptionist told me that my mom was at lunch. Did I want to leave a message? Well, I wasn’t about to tell this woman to tell my mom that I was in trouble for not doing my homework, so I said, “No thanks,” hung up, and walked back to class. The teacher asked if I’d called my mom, I said yes, and that was the end of it.

That Was The End Of It. Nothing else happened. And so I quit doing my homework. I didn’t tell my mom, and about every three days my teacher would tell me to go call my mom. I would, I’d never leave a message, and I’d go back to class. Looking back, it’s kind of bizarre to me that my teacher didn’t reach out to my mom earlier, because this was a problem, just not a cry for help. It was more about laziness and shortsighted stupidity.

Anyway, I relate this story because I’m not sure I buy the statistics that try to prove that divorce is going to cause irreparable harm to the kids involved. That’s not to say it doesn’t suck, but it’s also not an excuse to destroy your life if your parents end up splitting. Absolutely none of the parents I know who’ve gotten divorced say it was because they just had to get away from the kids, so try not to take it personally if it happens.

It’s harder not to take it personally when they’re not really involved after the divorce, however. As I mentioned, we’d moved back to Oklahoma while my dad was still in New Jersey, so joint custody was a non-issue. I saw my dad when he’d come out to Oklahoma for business, which was about every six months or so. We’d talk on the phone more regularly than that, but our conversations were always pretty brief (even today, it’s rare for us to have a phone conversation that lasts longer than ten minutes). The nadir in our relationship came one October, when a package showed up in the mail. Inside was a birthday card and my sixteenth birthday present: a beach towel. My birthday is in August. And seriously, a beach towel for my sixteenth birthday? It’s not like I was expecting a new car or anything, but a beach towel?

I actually didn’t talk to my dad for a couple of years after that. With the impeccable logic of a hormonal sixteen-year-old, I decided Dad’s belated gift must mean he didn’t care much about me. That being the case, I was bound and determined not to care much about him. As I grew up, my feelings thawed. One evening during my freshman year of college I picked up the phone and called his house. I almost hung up when he answered, but instead took a drag off my cigarette and said, “Hi, Dad.” To his credit, he knew who I was immediately, greeting me by name.* I told him that I was tired of being angry at him and tired of not having my dad in my life. He told me he was sorry for not being as involved as he should have been. It was another short phone call, but it started to repair the damage done.*

This is a bigger deal than it might seem. My dad was notoriously bad about calling all of us kids by each other’s name, or even the names of family pets living and dead. I do the same thing now that I’m grown, but I’m not sure if it’s because I have so many kids and pets or this is a weird genetic quirk passed down on the father’s side of the family.

My father and I have a great relationship now. He’s a good man, if somewhat forgetful about birthdays. I love him dearly and am so glad that I grew up enough to get over my fit about feeling unimportant.

Flash forward a few years and I was dealing with another father who was largely absent from the scene. Only this time it wasn’t my dad, it was the biological father of my oldest kids. When my wife and her kids moved from New Jersey to Oklahoma, it’s not like anyone had any expectations that he would be able to come visit on a regular basis. Still, regular phone calls or letters to the kids would have been nice. When a birthday or a holiday would go by with no contact, I would see the looks of disappointment on the faces of my kids. I’d get so angry that I’d write letters to him that I never sent (eventually we wouldn’t even know where to send them). The fact that child support was sporadic (to say the least) didn’t bother me. We could take care of our family without his money. What killed me was seeing my kids go from disappointment that they didn’t hear from their biological father to the resigned expectation that he was going to let them down again. Eventually, on one rare occasion when he called, my daughter declined to talk to him. The next time he called, my son followed his sister’s lead. Their dad never called back.

Always Remember Why You Got Married in the First Place

While my wife’s ex was slowly removing himself from the picture, our own marriage hit a serious rough patch. As I said earlier, there’ve been a couple of occasions when divorce seemed like it was a possibility, and this was the first of those times. There were moments where both of us would have said that the primary reason we were staying together was for the kids. I know I felt like I couldn’t let them down. I couldn’t walk out on them. If my wife had been childless when we married, we very well might have both walked away at the first real difficult moment. Instead, neither one of us was willing to do that to our kids. And it was that recognition that we were both on the same page about our kids that ultimately allowed us to work together to make our marriage stronger.

We decided to see a counselor, and after a couple of sessions we realized that we were actually getting along better. It’s not that he was a brilliant mind or anything. Actually, he reminded us of Ned Flanders from The Simpsons. We were both highly amused, and we’d get in the car and start talking about him instead of arguing. Maybe laughter really is the best medicine. After three weeks of this, we came to some conclusions: We did love each other, and we loved our family. We didn’t want the marriage to end. We both needed to make some changes to be more engaged in our marriage, and not just go through the motions of playing our roles of spouse and parent. And that’s what we did.

We actually enjoyed a second honeymoon period for a couple of years. Many more years passed where our marriage was strong and stable, if not burning with the white-hot passion of a newly recommitted relationship. Eventually, though, the shared spheres of our lives began to become more separate. Our conversations dwelled on the dull and mundane, our interests were becoming more divergent, and our patience with each other became more strained. A deep chill had set in over our relationship again, without either of us really becoming aware. On some level, despite the problems we were having, we both convinced ourselves that our marriage was just fine. The truth was it had become a zombie marriage shambling along, slowly rotting away but still moving forward.

“Irreconcilable differences” is a pretty vague phrase, but I wonder how many divorces start with this kind of scenario; no huge nasty split but a simple drifting apart. Most people continue to grow as individuals throughout their life, but what happens when we grow apart from someone we love? When do the differences stop being reconcilable and become insurmountable problems?

At the lowest point, the only thing keeping us together was the fact that neither one of us wanted to be the villain leaving the other one. I read a book about the Stoics around the same time, and I adopted the habit of trying to imagine the worst moments about getting divorced, like telling my wife that it was over and that I was giving up. Sitting my children down and telling them I wouldn’t be living with them anymore, but that I still loved them. Coming home to a sad, empty apartment. There were dozens of vignettes I would play out in my head. My body would ache inside as I walked myself through each scenario night after sleepless night, but it helped me understand that I didn’t want my marriage to end. I wanted my marriage to be better. Thankfully, my wife wanted the same thing, and we once again decided we were going to address the issues in our relationship.

This time around, it wasn’t so much a second honeymoon as it was a new chapter. We were older now, and our relationship troubles hadn’t taken the form of too many loud and angry arguments, but rather cold looks and frosty silences. When we began working on our troubles, our chilly relationship began to thaw, and in addition to our recommitment (or our re-recommitment, I suppose) there was a sense of renewal to our relationship as well. We weren’t interested in simply shoring up our marriage or patching over the problems. We wanted to rebuild a better foundation, and I think we have.

I understand that not all differences are reconcilable, and most of the friends I’ve had who’ve gone through a divorce tried very hard to make their marriages work. Both my parents married multiple times, and if it weren’t for my wife and her ex splitting up, I would never be the man I am today. I am not here to condemn divorce or people who’ve gotten a divorce (I generally try to tend to the beam in my own eye before worrying about someone else’s mote). All I know is that I’m glad we stuck with it through the hard times. I’m thankful our differences were (and are) not irreconcilable, even if they can still lead to … let’s say spirited debate on occasion. I am truly blessed to have my family, to love them and be loved by them, and I’m mindful of this fact every day.

What Would Ward Cleaver Do?

Ward had his priorities straight: he kept his focus on his relationship with June and the kids. Work paid for the mortgage, but a marriage and family is forever.