Don’t Tell Divorced People That You Want To Get Married

Unless you want the bitter and brutal truth

“Ahhh…what a lovely wedding.”

The millennial crooned that she had a wonderful time at her friend’s wedding over the weekend.

“The backdrop was beautiful. The sun was setting when they exchanged their vows. It gave me so many ideas for my own wedding.”

“Wait a second,” a colleague jumped in, “are you getting married? Did he propose?”

“No, but a girl can dream, right? After a summer of going to weddings, I’m sure he’s going to pop the question.”

This younger millennial colleague of ours went on to describe her ideal wedding to her co-workers as we were all having a bite to eat during the lunch hour.

We let her go on about destination weddings, color sequences for dresses, and even her honeymoon after the big day.

Famous last words about marriage

“Uh huh,” an elder co-worker seemed to acknowledge.

“Ok….” a couple more of us sighed under our breath and rolled our eyes at each other.

We let her get her wedding stories and marriage fantasies out of the way.

“An then what?” the soon-to-retire co-worker asked.

“What happens after the wedding? We live happily ever after, right?” the millennial laughed half-heartedly looking for reassurance around the room.

And those were her famous last words.

“Let me know when you wake up from fantasy land,” I said. “If you think marriage is about the wedding, you’re going to be shocked. Dating is the honeymoon and the calm before the storm. It’s all downhill after the big day,” I said from my deeply personal experience.

“You’re drunk the whole day. That was the only way I got through my big day,” a co-worker shouted across the room. “Biggest mistake of my life! And I’m talking about marriage, not about getting drunk.”

“This is 2023. You can live happily ever even without getting married. Getting married is like putting a gun to your head. You never know when one of you is going to pull the trigger and blow up the other person’s life.”

“So, you’re telling me that you’re going to give up your freedom and happiness for some dumbass guy? So you can have someone calling you every 20 minutes asking you what you’re doing? And asking you about every guy who talks to you or messages you? Umm…no thank you!”

Being sherpas on the mountain of marriage

Around and around we went.

A roomful of us divorcees trying to wrap our minds around the insanity of our younger co-worker being excited about getting married.

All of us had had painful, bitter, and soul-crushing kinds of divorces. We weren’t going to let one of our own walk down that plank of marriage without letting her know realistically what she was in for.

Marriage set me up for one of the biggest hurricanes in my life: divorce. It knocked me out flat for ten years. I wrote a couple of million words on heartbreak and loss.

I marinated in grief and tofu for the past decade as I roamed the world trying to find myself and recover from the pain of this loss.

I feel bad that we unloaded our experiences on her but she was the one who started it.

To be fair, she hadn’t realized that she was sharing her dreamy marriage wishes with a roomful of bitter and cynical divorcees and people who had bad experiences with relationships.

But we weren’t going to sit back and let her live in fantasy land either.

She was thinking of scenic backdrops, destination weddings, and dress selection which may make for a great wedding.

The rest of us were thinking about petty fights, blowup arguments, constant disagreements, and living a painful existence. We were thinking about suffering in our relationships compared to the happiness and freedom each of us was feeling today.

She was not going to get away with trying to convince us about the beauty of marriage when all of us in the room had seen the ugliness of divorce.

It would be like trying to convince us that walking along the Himalayas was a brisk walk and scenic affair without telling us that you could lose your fingers to frigid cold and lose your life from losing oxygen at the top.

We were doing her a favor. We were her sherpas helping her realize the dangers on the mountain of marriage.

The fantasy of getting married versus the reality of marriage

Maybe we were all particularly bitter and brutal to our younger colleague who had her hopes of a perfect wedding and married life.

We were just trying to help her set expectations.

We each had died a little after our marriages went south and then were raised from the dead to live our lives again. I was knee-deep in despair and divorce. The retiree had been through 3 bitter ones. The only reason he was working was because of his three divorces!

A woman in her 30s has been raising her son on her own. Her deadbeat husband was nowhere to be found and had little concern for his nearly adult son who my colleague was raising.

The millennial’s talk of marriage triggered many things in her audience: loss, heartache, tears, and misery.

We weren't going to stand by and let her get hoodwinked by her friend’s big day, pop songs that promised never-ending love, and social media with hashtag love stories.

Yes, weddings can be glamorous and the photos will turn out amazing.

But the real work will start the day after you’re married.

Marriage isn’t a walk in the park or for the faint of heart.

We wanted to give her the unvarnished truth and set her expectations straight as she was floating on Cloud 9.

Maybe we were brutally honest and overly cynical in bursting her bubble of love blooming and wedded bliss.

We had all been there once before, believing in love, puppies, picket fences and happily ever afters.

We just wished someone had given us a reality check and set us straight.

Our younger colleague will likely never bring up her love life to us again but at least she knows where we stand loud and clear.

Some homeowners give you a warning about their dogs so you’re beware of their dogs and won’t enter unannounced because the dogs may chew up your leg for an afternoon snack.

We felt we needed to give our naive colleague a similar warning: enter marriage at your own risk.

Were we too harsh? What are your thoughts on giving unsolicited opinions and advice on relationships :) ?

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