I’m Thinking About Divorce
Pondering the failure of marriage after almost 20 years
Earlier this week, I found a YouTube video called “How Good Couples End Up Divorced.” I clicked on it and watched the whole thing (even though it was a bit long and kind of boring), because I’ve been thinking about divorce a lot recently.
I’m not thinking about getting a divorce myself—I’m thinking about divorce in general.
Divorce—the death of a marriage—is a sad, awful thing. The older I get, the sadder it makes me for two reasons:
First of all, because the number of people I know who are getting divorced is pretty big, and it keeps getting bigger. This is very depressing.
Second of all, because in the earliest days of my marriage, I used to tell my wife:
“We’re not even going to talk about divorce. That’s not in our vocabulary. That word is not even allowed in this house.”
I now realize that this was foolish. As I edge closer to the age of 40, I understand now that this was a pathetic attempt to prevent a problem from ever occurring by simply refusing to acknowledge that it could even exist.
That’s like saying: “We live in a safe neighborhood. Nothing bad could ever happen here.” But no matter how many times you say that, it has no bearing on reality.
I saw this firsthand when I bought my first house in Colorado in 2008. I spent months trying to find the safest house I could find in our town, and I thought I had finally found it.
The neighborhood I picked had very little traffic, the neighbors were nice, and it was a quiet, family-friendly location in an old, established area where most of the people around us had lived for decades.
The house I bought had beautiful Aspen trees in the front yard that made it look cozy and picturesque. I was proud of being able to provide such a “cute,” quiet, safe, peaceful home for my wife and three kids (at the time).
We now owned a house in a nice, friendly, safe neighborhood. In the evenings, my wife and I would sit on camp chairs in our front yard and watch our children ride around on their trikes and scooters on the driveway as the sun set. Everything about it was great. It was like we lived in a Norman Rockwell painting.
That is, until one day, when the man who lived directly across the street from us killed his own son by shooting him in the back during an argument one night.
He fell down and bled to death on the pavement while his father stood there, doing absolutely nothing.
I watched in horror that evening as dozens of police cars and ambulances swarmed our neighborhood, putting up crime scene tape and cordoning off our street.
The next morning, a detective knocked on our door and asked us what we had seen and heard. I told him my perspective, but my wife didn’t want to talk about it at all.
This whole experience was so completely shocking. My wife and I cried when we finally heard the whole truth. What kind of a heartless bastard could do something so profoundly evil as killing his own child, and then stand there, cold and heartless, watching as he died?
For weeks afterward, I wondered: “How didn’t I see this coming? How could I have prevented this? Why didn’t I pick a better neighborhood?” I was speechless at the depravity and the evil that occurred on my street, just 10 feet from where my children played under my careful watch.
Living in that house was never the same after that. We could never get over it. How could we?
Every time I came home from work, I saw the place where I’d seen the young man’s dead body. I remembered watching the city employees pressure wash his blood off the driveway, and I could never get that image out of my head.
Eventually, I came to the conclusion that there was absolutely no way I could have foreseen something so horrific happening so close to my home, my castle, the place where I was raising my children.
It just… happened.
I had done everything I could to find the best, safest neighborhood for my family, and yet, it didn’t work out that way.
That’s just life.
Sometimes you do the best you can, and you make decisions with the best of intentions, and it just doesn’t turn out the way you want.
Marriages can be kind of like that. They aren’t often bloody or violent, but when they fail, they can leave behind the equivalent of a crime scene that forever taints a house and a neighborhood.
The corpse of a dead marriage can haunt everyone who comes into contact with it for years or even decades.
On my phone, I keep a written list of all the couples I know who have gotten divorced since I’ve known them. This is not just a list of “everyone I know who is divorced.” That would be creepy. I have no interest in keeping tabs on that.
But my list contains the names of married couples I knew who were married when I met them, who are now divorced. (Or they were single when I met them, then they got married, and now they’re divorced.)
This is an interesting list of names to ponder because:
As I said, it’s getting longer all the time, and;
The people on this list are not necessarily the people I would have expected.
To be sure, some of them are totally the couples I would have expected to get divorced. Not because I wished that on them—I don’t wish divorce on anyone—but because it was just so easy to see it coming.
Some couples I know who are divorced now had no business getting married in the first place. They were kidding themselves and had no idea what marriage really was or what it would require of them.
They clearly thought it would just be “days of wine and roses” and “Lah-tee-dah, isn’t this great? We’ll live happily ever after,” and apparently, this was all very obvious to everyone else but them.
Those people quickly found out what marriage is and how hard it is, and (from what I perceive as an outsider) woke up one day and realized: “This isn’t fun. I want out.”
But aside from just two or three couples who were obviously doomed from the beginning, most of the names on my list range between “Wow, okay, I didn’t see that coming,” all the way to “HOLY SH*T! — THEM TOO?!”
The couples I’ve watched get divorced include friends, family, people older than me, people younger than me, people I know from work, church, sports, music, and more.
It includes those who’ve been married for longer than me, and those who have more kids than me, as well as those who’ve been married for fewer years than me and those who have fewer kids than me (or no kids at all).
There’s no common denominator, really.
It seems kind of pathetic when people can barely even make it a year or two as a married couple. I kind of feel like: “Really? Is that it? Come on, you barely even tried. You quit before you even started.”
But it seems even more pathetic when people can make it all the way to year 30 or 40 and THEN say: “You know what? After all that, NOW I’ve decided I can’t take it anymore.” In those cases, I feel like saying, “Why even bother? You got 25 miles into a marathon and NOW you give up?”
All of this is just SO strange to me.
But part of the reason why I keep thinking about these people is because, the closer I get to two decades of marriage myself, these many failed marriages remind me: this could happen to me, too.
…and that is a sad thought.
As of today, my wife and I have been married for 19 years, 6 months, and 23 days. If we can hold on for just six more months, we’ll hit the twenty-year mark.
Twenty years.
That is mind-blowing.
When I watched my beautiful bride walk down the aisle to meet me at the altar all those years ago, I totally expected that we’d be married twenty years later.
Of course. That’s why I committed the rest of my life to her on that day. Duh.
But two strange things have happened since then.
The first is that we got married thinking, “We’re doing the normal adult thing of getting married; all of our friends will be next.” We started a family, expecting that our peers would follow suit. But then they just… didn’t.
A year went by, then two years, then five, then ten. Most of my friends and most of my wife’s friends didn’t get married. And didn’t start families at all.
They just stayed single, in what seemed like a weird, perpetual larval stage. Like a caterpillar that grows and gets bigger and fatter but never turns into a butterfly, lots of our friends just got older but didn’t develop or change their life stage at all.
Even all these years later, some of my wife’s closest friends from childhood are still single. Almost all of them—even the married ones—don’t have kids. That’s something I never expected to happen, and it’s very strange.
But what I expected even less, and what’s far stranger, is how there are 37 couples on the list of friends and family who are divorced who weren’t when I met them.
That’s at least 74 people I know who have experienced a failed marriage.
That is very sad, and, as I mentioned, sobering because I am well aware that it could happen to me too, at any time.
(To be clear: No, I don’t think I’m better than them. No, I don’t think I have a secret. No, I don’t think I’ve figured it all out. That’s part of what I’m saying here!)
Going back to the “How Good Couples End Up Divorced” video, it’s fascinating because the narrator—who is speaking only to men, by the way, since that’s what his counseling business focuses on—hones in on one of the most perplexing challenges about divorce that husbands often face.
They wonder: “How on Earth did this even happen? What went wrong?”
Women and men are different in many ways, of course, and our respective experiences and frustrations about married life are different and are felt differently.
One fact that may shock you (if you’re a man) or may not shock you (if you’re a woman) is that studies show that women initiate divorce almost 70% of the time.
A woman in an unhappy marriage thinks: “Doesn’t he know how bad it is?”
A man in an unhappy marriage thinks: “Wait, what? I have an unhappy marriage?”
Before I clicked on the video, I ventured a few guesses about what he was going to reveal as the “causes” of such an unexpected divorce. I’m proud to say: I was totally right.
He uses one couple as an example, explaining how a husband came to him for counseling, saying he had just gotten done building this beautiful, new, huge, expensive custom home.
His family had finally moved into it, and life was great and wonderful. Then, out of the blue, his wife told him, “I’m leaving you.”
You can watch the video if you want to hear the whole story, but the long and short of it is: building a house puts stress on a marriage for at least three reasons:
It always takes longer than expected.
It always costs more than expected.
It always puts more strain on a marriage than expected.
As someone who’s worked in and around construction since my first summer job as a 14-year-old boy, I can confirm that all of this is true.
Married couples will often spend a decade or two saving up for a big, beautiful “dream home” that is the grandest effort they’ve ever undertaken in their entire lives, and they find that it’s too hard, too expensive, too stressful, and takes too long.
By the time the whole, stupid, miserable process is finally over, they realize (if they even make it that far) that the dream died and their marriage is now over, too.
The interesting thing is, while the video is about a real story about a real couple who built a real house, it is just as true metaphorically as it is literally.
The “house project” is a placeholder for all kinds of things, really.
Anything that’s big and expensive and ambitious and emotional and traumatic puts pressure on a marriage—even a seemingly healthy one—and exposes the fissures in the foundation that were already there, whether anyone noticed them or not.
That’s precisely the problem.
That’s how, in a nutshell, “Good Couples End Up Divorced.”
It’s not just silly things like building expensive custom homes, either.
Death is also a huge traumatic event that causes tremendous collateral damage.
Strangely enough, my wife and I have actually experienced both of these things in our marriage. We had to remodel our house (the one across the street from the murder) because we found mold in our master bathroom.
In a bizarre twist of events, as our lives were totally upended by ripped up floor boards in our master bathroom, as we dealt with tradesmen who showed up way too early in the morning or dropped in unannounced, and lived with a total loss of privacy and tried to accommodate cost overruns and all the minutiae of a home renovation project… we got an unexpected phone call one night from my wife’s father.
He told us her sister had died.
Let me tell you: that was a long, complicated, depressing, miserable few weeks.
Trying to put our house back together, and what also felt like trying to put our lives back together while making funeral plans and dealing with the emotional fallout of such a staggering, life-changing, emotional blow, was one of the hardest things we have ever had to do.
And somehow, dealing with moldy walls, rotten flooring, and the death of a family member—none of which had anything whatsoever to do with us personally—was a very trying time for our marriage.
That’s a strange and confusing aspect of all of this: none of it was related to any failure of mine as a husband or a failure of hers as a wife, but the brunt of all the stress in our lives pressed down on us and our relationship.
It’s just the cold, harsh truth: marriages are brittle because human relationships are hard, and an unforeseen wrecking ball can come along and shatter them when you least expect it.
My wife and I experienced this again when yet another death in the family hit us a few years ago: this time, it was my brother. We were already in the throes of COVID-era woes, and had just moved to a new state, and this terrible news sent me reeling and nearly put me in a death spiral of my own.
Our marriage was very fractious as a result, and eventually, my wife told me just how unhappy she was. I was somewhat shocked, but dealing with my own hurt and pain made it so hard to see outside of my own struggles that I didn’t know she was suffering.
Last year, I met up with one of the men on my list of divorcees.
He was a pastor.
My pastor.
Words can’t even describe how bizarre it was to sit there, eating breakfast with the guy who told me it was God’s will that I not have sex before marriage, and that when I get married, I should STAY MARRIED FOREVER, describe how his own marriage unraveled.
I asked him what happened, and he explained.
Basically? His marriage just… failed. There were many reasons.
He made mistakes. She made mistakes. Somehow, it all eventually spiraled out of control.
Here they are now, parting ways and living separate lives. (Note: I’m not betraying his confidence here—he has openly admitted this online. I’m not saying anything he hasn’t already said publicly.)
The wrecking ball of life came for his family, and his marriage wasn’t strong enough to withstand it. At a basic level, it’s really just that simple.
I don’t have any major conclusions about this right now. I’m just quietly pondering it all.
Currently, my life is very difficult. My marriage is very important to me, yet very much in the throes of the difficult stress test of raising teens and “rounding second base,” as my wife and I are about to turn 40.
I want the vows I made back in 2005 to last for twenty years (which hits this October), but I also want them to last longer than that… much, much longer.
I love my wife more today than the day I married her.
I like her more today.
I need her more today, too.
I didn’t understand the distinctions between those things when we were first married, but I do now.
It’s not easy. It’s not simple. Every day is a challenge. But it’s worth it.
I’ve had several business mentors over the years through my local Chamber of Commerce. Two of them are men who have been divorced.
A few months ago, I met with one of them to talk about my life and things going on at work, and I was seeking his advice about some things I struggled with in my business.
At the beginning of our conversation, he immediately put up his hand and gave me a disclaimer: “Ron, as a reminder—I’m divorced. If you’re coming to me asking for advice about work/life balance or how to stay married while running your own business, don’t. I’m not the right person to tell you that.”
I really appreciated that level of candor and humility. I also appreciated how he described how he (and his wife) had failed in their marriage.
They had broken their own wedding vows… obviously. But he explained what went wrong in greater detail: how he should have seen the signs coming, but didn’t, and how he wishes he had done it all differently.
“Just so we’re clear,” he said, chuckling, “When people ask me, I tell them ‘I do not recommend divorce. Avoid it if you can.’”
I laughed at such an obvious statement, then asked him: “…and how do you avoid it?”
He told me, “That is a very good question. I’m not sure yet. But I know what not to do. I just take it one day at a time.”
Me too.
“Divorce” is now in my vocabulary. I’m even willing to say it out loud. But I still don’t want it in my home.
Please, pray for me. Hope for me. Let’s see if I can make it.
P.S. Also, I’d love to hear your stories about marriage, commitment, or surviving hard times. Tell me about your struggles! I am here, I care, and as I hope I’ve conveyed, I do not have all the answers, but I am listening.