Happily Ever After Marriage: There’s Nothing Like Divorce to Clear the Mind
By Sarah Hampson

The final chapter of a marriage doesn't always end with a spectacular fight, a brilliant put-down, a drunken rant. It can end in prolonged silences, resignation, depression. It can end because no one has the energy to unravel all its knots. And when you have children, the calendar is always full with someone's birthday, a school project, a family event, an important holiday. It is easy to put off a monumental decision like divorce. You barely have time for a yoga class let alone the end of your life as you know it.

More stories of other divorcees : Marriage on Tap Now Serving : Fences Divorce Taught Me about Being a Man It's complicated but it is family

And so after that afternoon at my desk, when I slipped off my wedding rings, another year passed. Yes, another year. I feel embarrassed to say that, but thinking back, I only remember fear and anxiety. The big, breezy confidence I once had was gone. I put my rings back on a few times, only to remove them again when I felt stronger. Eric didn't notice their absence until one day about two or three months later.

"Fine," he snapped. "If that's how you feel. Let's separate."

He was unhappy too. All marriages have two sides, two stories, which is why they're tricky to write about. But I don't know everything he felt. All I know clearly are my thoughts. When he called for separation, I was surprised. I wanted him to ask me why I had taken off my rings; what I was feeling. (The whole thing sounds very passive-aggressive, but hey, a marital implosion is never healthy.) I tried to tell him, but we got nowhere.

We had both descended into paralysis: he wouldn't work through the issues, and I wasn't willing to bury them under another room makeover. In the end, his approach -- as I later came to see it -- was to provoke me, pushing me to decide the fate of our marriage.

"I need to know by the end of the week what you're going to do,"; he would say to me. I think he figured he could call my bluff, make me see that I couldn't, wouldn't, leave, and that I should just be nicer or something. Finally, with the help of my therapist, I realized that my response should be simple and straightforward.

"You're right," I said to him one night in the spring of 2001. "We need to separate."

This article was excerpted by Divorce Magazine with permission from the book The Happily Ever After Marriage: There's Nothing Like Divorce to Clear the Mind by Sarah Hampson, published by Knopf Canada, ©2010. Sarah Hampson is an award-winning journalist with the Globe and Mail. She has been writing the Hampson Interview column for over ten years. In 2007, she began her popular weekly Generation Ex column about marriage and divorce.

For more articles on marriage, relationships, and divorce, visit  http://divorcemag.com/articles/yourspace

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