Why are marriages we choose to end called “failed,” as though endurance were all? Perhaps a marriage, however brief, ought to be counted a success if it achieves the purpose for which it was undertaken — whether sexual heaven, freedom from parental rule, financial benefit, legitimization of children, companionship, or citizenship. By this measure, some of the most successful marriages I know (including my first) have been short. Of course, a marriage can also bring dire consequences: miserable sex, financial dependence or ruin, wretched children, boredom, terror. Such outcomes, to my mind, would damn a marriage as failed even (or especially) if it lasted unto death.
Similarly, a divorce can accomplish various ends and perhaps should also be counted a failure or a success in light of its consequences. A divorce that gave a proper burial to a putrefying marriage might be regarded as successful, while one that tormented the parties long after the final papers were signed might well be deemed a failure. Of my own two divorces, one was successful, one failed. The successful one was short, snappy, and to the point; the other was drawn out, bitter, and messy. In these respects each resembled the marriage it ended.
Living beyond my means in a Manhattan apartment with two babies, no income, and a philandering husband, I suddenly found myself as vulnerable and dependent as any traditional suburban housewife.
In the world of suburban Cleveland, Ohio, where I grew up in the thirties and forties, any marriage that lasted less than forever was judged a failure, and any divorce a disgrace. Divorce was so unacceptable that my friend Lydia told everyone her father had died at Pearl Harbor rather than admit that her parents had divorced. Another friend, Harriet, moved with her divorced mother from New York to Cleveland when Harriet was in junior high. Harriet’s mother was sophisticated, and attractive enough to model for a local department store, and therefore was widely presumed to be turning tricks whenever she had a date — a charge that rubbed off on poor Harriet and ruined her social life. Where I grew up, divorced plus pretty equaled slut.
No doubt Harriet’s mother had another view. In the larger world, where there were more possibilities for divorced women than vamp or victim, it wasn’t divorce per se that mattered, but who left whom, and with how many children. In Hollywood movies of the time, divorcées were as often gay, glamorous, and independent as they were pathetic, pitiful, and defeated. And the stars themselves — Rita Hayworth, Liz Taylor, Eddie Cantor, Artie Shaw — were renowned for the number of times they married and divorced. In books, on the other hand, abandoned women sometimes killed themselves.
The incidence of divorce in the United States, like that of marriage, shot upward abruptly just after World War II: all those forty-eight-hour-pass romances with uniformed heroes that couldn’t survive the transition to civvies. (This increase came despite the fact that, in most states, to obtain a divorce you had to prove adultery, abandonment, or some sordid crime — unless you took off half a year of your life to establish residence in Reno, or could afford to fly to another country.) Still, whatever the statistics, in white, middle-class Cleveland Heights, divorce remained a scandal. The only thing worse, we believed, was never to marry at all — like “Aunt” Esther, my Uncle Harry’s sister-in-law, a sad, skinny gal Friday who wore her hair in a bun and sat quietly at our family gatherings, as embarrassing as a sixth finger. So much worse, in fact, that years later an unmarried friend confessed to me that she’d invented an ex-husband for herself and kept in her wallet a false history of her life. Divorce was a clear admission of failure, but not to marry was a catastrophe.
I shared these views, but I also had glimmerings of others. My mother, who in the thirties designed history projects for the Works Progress Administration, had several divorced friends, whom I found more interesting than the married moms. Although squarely located within the striving suburban middle class, through her work my mother became involved with Cleveland’s bohemian set: artists, intellectuals, musicians, and dancers who divorced as unselfconsciously as they undressed. Of her two best friends, one, a modern dancer whose first husband died young, was married four more times, and the other, a fellow historian at the WPA, divorced her violinist husband, developed a successful import-export business, and remained confidently single. My mother’s boss, Mary “Lefty” Warner, a deep-voiced woman with a powerful stride, a broad smile, cropped brown hair slicked back in a ducktail, and the kindest eyes I’ve ever seen, shared a house with her vivacious, long-haired lover, Andrea Garrison, and Andrea’s two teenage children, Danny and Ellen — all handsome, rangy redheads. That Andrea and Lefty were lovers seemed less remarkable to me than that Andrea had divorced, rendering her children pitifully fatherless. The spirited parties at their house, where my parents were the token straights, were high points of my childhood: Andrea in flowing chiffon, Lefty in tailored slacks and shirt; animated debates, witty chatter, music, forbidden jokes, booze. Except for my four doting aunts, Lefty was my favorite grown-up: I still recall the flattering attention she paid me, as if I were an adult. But the Garrisons, despite their flaming hair, are to this day a cipher to me: I cannot recall them without the embarrassment I always felt seeing those children fatherless, stripped of their birthright by divorce.
Happily, my own parents were as permanently coupled as a pair of gulls. (At ages eighty-seven and ninety-three, they are still married.) Alone of seven siblings, my mother maintained a neat nuclear family all her life, though it was not quite as neat as it appeared: when her brother’s wife died in childbirth, my parents adopted the baby, only eleven months my senior. In the early years, his father (my uncle), who lived in Pennsylvania and whom we called Papadear, paid us annual visits. Then he remarried and stopped coming. Of my mother’s four sisters, one ran off to Chicago to live with a married man; one was falsely accused of murdering her husband (who committed suicide); one left her husband to travel solo around the world on a tramp steamer; and one, local radio’s “Singing Lady,” also died in childbirth, giving me a second brother for a few years — until his father remarried and took him back. I remember the wrenching day my uncle came to take away my baby brother, can still see the once jolly, plump six-year-old stretching out his dimpled arms and wailing for my mother, who stood weeping beside me until long after the black coupe had disappeared over Bradford Hill. From that day on, I knew the suffering of orphans, the havoc of a broken family, whether by death or divorce, which as far as I could see came to much the same thing. Soon, my little brother became just another cousin, thin and sad.
Of the seven siblings in my mother’s family, only three had children, and only one — my mother — was actually able to raise them. Still, as a child in love with both my parents, I unquestioningly assumed the inevitability, superiority, and necessity of the nuclear family. The families of both my parents were touched repeatedly by death and devastation — but never by divorce, which seemed in some ways worse because unknown.
Yet, when I left Cleveland for New York at twenty, part of what I was fleeing was that neat, predictable, suburban coupledom, which seemed to permanently settle one’s life at twenty-two. Having enjoyed in college a secret affair with a married professor, a man my father’s age and a father of five himself, I was already somewhat cynical about marriage. Not that I would eschew it — this was 1953, after all, and I was a woman. But with such attractive counterexamples before me as my mother’s glamorous friends and my wayward aunts, I was determined to marry only on my own terms — which meant that divorce would be my secret fail-safe, my emergency exit, as necessary to a decent life as the possibility of abortion.
Recently, I discovered in my parents’ attic a folder of my freshman themes from more than forty years ago. One, titled “The Great Illusion,” presents the following thesis: “Because of our modern American way of life, mate selection must result from intelligent analysis, rather than from romantic love, if successful marriages are to ensue.” Evidently, I was already leery of the consequences of losing one’s heart, already practical about marriage.
In New York, resenting the confines of dorm life (back then, all dorms were single-sex, and curfews for women were strictly enforced), I married a fellow grad student. I married partly for the privileges of adulthood — freedom from external control, both parental and in loco parentis — partly for the fun of it, and partly to get the damned thing over with. But certainly not in order to settle down. Though I took my husband’s last name and went to work to support us, it felt less like marriage than going steady — plus cohabitation and sanctioned sex. No wonder that five years later, at age twenty-five, I flew to Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, to file for divorce, the first in my family. The grounds specified with a flourish on the crisp parchment document were “incompatabilidad de temperamento” — incompatibility of temperament — which, considering that the only legal cause for divorce then in New York was adultery, sounded rather frivolous. However, to my father, an upright lawyer, it had been important that I avoid the scandal of a New York divorce (even though by then I had already begun to live with my next husband, who was awaiting his first divorce), and I’d been happy to oblige: I’d never been to Mexico.
That divorce seemed to me little more than a useful legal arrangement, like the marriage that had led to it: practical, even necessary, but slightly absurd. (Why should a piece of paper determine one’s living arrangements?) Once it was final, I never saw my ex-husband again, nor did we speak until, on the eve of his second marriage, he phoned to ask if I’d be willing to submit to an Orthodox Jewish divorce to satisfy his new wife’s family. I saw that, apparently, each jurisdiction required its own particular form of hocus-pocus; but whether the magic words appeared in English, Spanish, or Hebrew, sanctified by a judge, abogado, or rabbi, made no difference to me, as long as they left me free. Again, I gladly obliged.
My second marriage, in which I became a mother, was another matter entirely. This was far more serious than going steady. Although I entered into it in the same carefree spirit as I had my first — dashing down to City Hall on my lunch hour — once I quit my job to have children, nothing about this marriage was remotely like the first. Living beyond my means in a Manhattan apartment with two babies, no income, and a philandering husband, I suddenly found myself as vulnerable and dependent as any traditional suburban housewife. No longer could I think of marriage as a lark, a pleasure, or a convenience; now it was the foundation and lifeline of my children’s lives.
While for some marriage is a prison and divorce a relief, for others, particularly women with young children, marriage is a protection and divorce (given the virtual impossibility of enforcing child support) an impoverishment. Once I had children, divorce turned from fail-safe to threat: if my marriage came to an end, my children could be left fatherless, penniless, and bereft, fulfilling the worst anxieties of my childhood. The image of my schoolmate Harriet’s mother suddenly flashed before me, a perilous shooting star.
When I realized the seriousness of my situation, I scrambled to alleviate my dependence and strengthen my position: I found freelance work I could do at home, took a lover of my own, and, discovering feminism, embraced the movement that, with its dazzling ideas, enabled me both to understand and to fight my predicament.
Feminist ideas about marriage, motherhood, and divorce transformed me from an anxious, homebound observer of my life into an active shaper of it. As part of my transformation, a decade into my marriage, I drew up an agreement by which my husband and I committed ourselves to equal responsibility for child care and housework. It was 1969, and the idea of equality in marriage was so outrageous that a piece I wrote about the agreement was widely reprinted (including in New York magazine, Ms., Redbook, and Life ) and attacked (by Norman Mailer, S. I. Hayakawa, and Russell Baker, among others). But, for all the hoopla surrounding it, our agreement rested on nothing more substantial than our own floating goodwill. When that failed, we separated.
Our children were nine and eleven when my husband, claiming to be off for a two-week vacation, disappeared out West, leaving no forwarding address. At first, relieved of the constant tension of his presence, I basked in the unexpected calm. But as the weeks stretched into months, with only an occasional call from a distant pay phone, and the children grew despondent and withdrawn, I became increasingly frantic. I had envisioned a civilized divorce, with my husband ensconced somewhere across town, participating equally in child care, or at least seeing the children on alternate weekends. But he had something else in mind, and made it clear that unless I took him back or moved us all to California, where he was staying indefinitely with his lover, the children might hardly ever see him.
Though I longed to be free of him, I was afraid to sacrifice our children, who were bewildered and betrayed by his disappearance and were sinking daily before my eyes. I remember the exact moment at which I was stricken with a grim understanding of the stakes. The children, badly in need of cheering, had perked up visibly when I promised to take them one Sunday to the Bronx Zoo for the opening of an elaborate new birdhouse. Arranging our weekend outings had long been their father’s province, but, determined to be mother and father both, I packed us a picnic lunch, and off we set. My forced smiles turned hopeful when, emerging into the dazzling light from a gloomy hour-long subway ride, the children dashed excitedly up the stairs before me. But fifteen minutes later, as we milled around the birdhouse entrance with a large crowd of animated families all waiting to get inside, I became aware of how lost and sad my children seemed. Suddenly, I knew what it meant for a family to be “broken”: broken, damaged, and — the word circled like a buzzard over their heads — fatherless, that most potent dread of my youth. Seeing my unhappy children watching the scores of happy ones sitting atop their fathers’ shoulders or clasping their parents’ hands (and remembering my own anguish as my baby brother was wrenched from my mother’s arms), I feared it wouldn’t be long before my childhood terrors overcame my adult desires.
If I’d known how resilient children in divorced families can sometimes be, or that divorced parents would be commonplace in the next generation, I might have held out. But I was a creature of my generation, and felt acutely my children’s present suffering. I tried to be strong for them, but, as the months went by and they slid steadily into the pit of depression, I slid down after them. Finally, the pain became unbearable, and, after less than a year, I gave up in defeat and summoned their father back.
When he returned, we were flooded at first with false expectations and blissful relief; our sex was never more passionate. But before long the rejoicing fizzled into resignation, and we reverted to what we truly were: a family of conflicts, crises, holidays, birthdays, and secrets. Without children we certainly would have divorced immediately, parting graciously and dividing our property neatly in half, as my first husband and I had done. Instead, until the children were grown, we remained in a marriage that was really divorce by other means.
A decade later, when our arrangement finally disintegrated after twenty-five years of marriage, enough bitterness had collected that my second divorce was the customary nasty mess, the opposite of my first one. It dragged on for years instead of weeks, produced intransigence instead of compromise, exacted heartache and malice in place of regret, and cost half a fortune instead of the price of a trip to Mexico. By then our children, for whose sake we’d stayed tied, had gone off to college, but neither their age nor their absence protected them from the accompanying anguish and grief.
Now another decade has passed since our final papers were signed, and each of us has another mate. Still, my ex-husband can hardly speak to me without an edge in his voice — which probably means our divorce is not yet final. How much longer will it take? A witty woman I know says that when lovers break up, getting over it takes about as long again as the pair were in love. But I wonder if, when children are involved, getting over the breakup might not instead take a time equal to the age of the children when the breach occurred. Ours were nineteen and twenty-one when we filed for divorce. That means we might still have some time to go. It might also mean — as our children have begun to suggest — that we could have divorced much sooner, that in the end it’s unclear which is worse: a failed marriage or a failed divorce.
“A Failed Divorce” is excerpted from Women on Divorce: A Bedside Companion, edited by Penny Kaganoff and Susan Spano, © 1995 by Penny Kaganoff and Susan Spano. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace & Company.
— Ed.
