Divorce: Check
This week I got divorced. That is to say, a judge formally and legally ended my marriage in court. I wasn’t there, my solicitor represented me. It feels oddly anticlimactic. My ex and I stopped being together over 3 years ago. But the requirement to be separated for 2 years plus the slow working speed of solicitors and the courts means only now it is over.
Two things are true: my divorce is a cause for celebration (although not at the same scale as my wedding as I cannot recoup the cost through presents) and I will love the person I married until the day I die.
I was around 10 years old when divorce became a part of my vocabulary. In 1995 Ireland we had a referendum lifting a constitutional ban on divorce — the referendum passed by the slimmest margins 50.28%. The nation, ironically, was split on the issue, with the church insisting that divorce threatened the core of family life.
The legislation was signed into law on my 7th birthday, on the 27th of November 1996. As it required couples to live apart for 4 of the previous 5 years, it wasn’t really until the early millennium that it became a reality in my life.
I remember a wave of it hitting my class like a virus. In my gentle Educate Together School (one of only a handful of schools in Ireland not run by the Church) it was discussed often, and my classmates cried fat hot tears. Two parents, I thought, were not worth the hassle, and I was grateful I had just one solid parent, then these two moveable units. Outside my hippy school divorce was a hushed word, like meningitis and Sellafield.
In my sullen teenage years, I would say things like “I don’t believe in marriage” and never dreamed of my wedding day. No doubt I had some internal churnings surrounding my own queerness and the lack of marriage equality in Ireland at the time. How funny it is just 10 years later at the age of 25 I would walk down the aisle to be wed.
I do believe in marriage but only because I also believe in divorce. It remains a sort of taboo in my culture in comparison to say America or even other parts of Europe. We have the 7th lowest rate of divorce in the world. I don’t want to feel like getting divorced is a failure or my comeuppance for being a romantic 25-year-old in love. It’s just one of the ways my relationship ended and I would not have entered the marriage without the option.
A divorce is like a mirror image of a wedding. In the run-up to a wedding there is paperwork, significant expenses, and a sense of relief when it’s done, all the same as a divorce. However, it has all the romance of a tax audit and the joy of a rectal exam, only more invasive.
I remember needing, and being reluctant to get a solicitor. I was passed numbers from friends’ parents, being too young to have any friends who have gone through the same thing. I spoke to two solicitors. One said my marriage was barely marriage at only 4 years, despite that we had been together for 9 years, spanning nearly my entire 20s. It felt like a marriage to me. The other asked me how much money my ex made which I told her. Then how much I made and when I told her she asked why I earned so little.
She was about 60 years old, and for her getting a degree meant you were set up for life. I worked in a little charity which I held onto like a life raft after the breakup. She said charities were all well and good, maybe I should join a board. I didn’t use her as my solicitor.
My hesitancy with getting a solicitor was not from me wanting the relationship to continue but rather me not wanting it to end in such a sterile way — as an administrative exercise. I wanted us to go to the woods and bury our rings in the wet earth, but time for such excursions had passed.
Divorces have a beginning, middle, and end — an agreement of separation, exchange of an affidavit of means, and a court date. Marriages end a thousand times before they do, but divorces have a strict starting point. There is a letter, it will have a date on it, and whoever sends the letter first has the advantage.
It is a mistake to think a divorce begins when a marriage ends. Many marriages end and divorce never happens, especially in Ireland. People stay separated for years on end, living completely separate lives. Also, many divorces happen before a marriage is truly over. For me, my divorce began with being ghosted by my husband. Without warning, I was blocked from all forms of contact, and the locks were changed. I had moved out but it was meant to be temporary and the majority of my things were still in our apartment.
Marriages end a thousand times, and I contributed my fair share to those endings, I am as much to blame for it as he is. But after much reflection, the ghosting — I did not deserve that, and it is a hurt I will carry for the rest of my life. I think that is why the actual date of my divorce is getting to me. I have moved on, I have found love, and I have changed jobs and country. I can honestly say I am happier. But this court date means our story really did end this way, with less thought than one might end a summer fling.
Right after the ghosting I had to hang on to life very tightly. My world was teetering back and forth on an axis and I needed to grab on with white knuckles, or I would fall off. I drove my car wildly and screamed like a banshee until flecks of blood marked my windscreen. It felt like a death. Not only was I completely cut off from the person I loved more than anyone in the world, but it felt also like my death, the part of me that could love with such wild abandon died.
It is so hard to draw the line between that horrific time and the bureaucratic process which legally dissolve the marriage. I cannot find any connection between that pain (the breakup) and this pain in the ass (the divorce). It just became a thing on my to-do list; do laundry, pick up a new collar for the dog, email solicitor re. divorce, buy nachos. I guess in a way it helps.
I talk about this now openly, I never feel the need to keep my marriage or its ending a secret. I’m met with a variety of reactions but mostly people are awkward about it. No one will be there for you as much as you need them to be, except, hopefully, yourself.
I am happy to be counted as part of the 0.7 in every 1,000 people in Ireland to be divorced. I read that in the statistics of divorce rates, they call married people “at risk of divorce”. So I guess I am no longer at risk, but rather I am at risk of getting married, so I had better watch out.
