Is Divorce Selfish?

Is it wrong to walk away not for a better life, but to stop the pain?

Divorce isn’t a single event. It’s not like graduation day or a birthday party, where everything leads up to one moment and then immediately fizzles out.

Divorce is like moving. There are many plates to juggle and usually, you have to move quite a bit yourself before the movers arrive. There are still things to get after the move and things to clean up. And then there are months and months of unpacking while also realizing what’s missing that needs to be replaced.

It’s ongoing. While movers may arrive on one single day, plenty is going on before and after.

My divorce feels like it took years, despite the legal process taking exactly six months as required by California law. I didn’t walk up and say “I’m filing for divorce”, snap my fingers, and suddenly everything was filed. I don’t know how people with complicated or tenuous situations survive it.

It’s like being in a war that an unlucky few experience. No matter what, it changes you. We can’t undo ever going to war. We’re marital vets but no one is giving us a free lunch at Ruby’s for our service.

Ten months ago, I moved out. That’s the most drastic change as part of my divorce because I lived through most of it during a little thing known as the “Covid Pandemic” (maybe you’ve heard of it). That’s when shit got real. That’s when it stopped being only an emotional change; financial and physical changes were thrown in the mix.

I thought I’d have it all together within six months. Maybe my finances would take a while to build up but the kids would see how much better their lives are (spoiler alert: they’re not). I thought emotionally I’d recover because I’d no longer be in the presence of a bitter, pissed-off ex-spouse. The dust would settle.

Uhhhh….no. Ten months later and I’m still a disaster in many ways. Divorce is a club no one wants to join and when you’re in it, there’s the comfort from friends who understand versus the unspoken judgment anytime you mark a marital status box as “divorced”.

Why the hell is there a divorced box for non-census-related topics? Why does my dentist need to know, can’t I just mark the box “single”? This is a harsh truth one learns after divorce.

You are not single. You are divorced. Remember, this is life after the military. You can’t undo going to war.

I still cry and long for my kids. I still get pissed when I can’t afford things that were a breeze before. I still grumble when I take out the trash or have to handle bug-related things outside. I still feel like a failure.

I don’t feel like I failed at my marriage.

I feel like I failed at making the right choice in the first place.

It’s like all of us in our twenties, freshly graduated with shiny new jobs, began at the starting line of life. As everyone ran, they grabbed a partner along the way. I grabbed the wrong person.

Toughing out the marriage meant trying to make something work with someone who wasn’t right, to begin with. It makes me angry that everyone else made the right choices but I’m of course the odd one out who picked the defective one.

My marriage was less about improving a bad situation and more about learning to tolerate it. Repairing it only made it worse or slapped a bandaid on something much too broken.

There is a significant amount of shame and guilt that goes with having a bad marriage. Unlike boyfriends, a wife can’t easily complain to her friends because there is the whole sacred-union-don’t-disrespect-the-spouse situation. So we smile and pretend all is well, while inside feeling embarrassed that we fucked up the spousal choice.

Pretending hurts. It rubs salt on the shame wound. It’s like you can see what your marriage should be and how much life would be better if it were the truth. Then you come home and remove the mask to unveil the grisly sadness underneath.

I’m still angry. I’m still so, so unbelievably angry.

I’m the one who wanted the divorce. It made me the bad guy (despite that I was the bad guy in the marriage as well). It’s not like there were a few arguments and I tapped out because it wasn’t fun anymore.

It’s like I was being punched in the face every day. I asked for it to stop but it didn’t. I tried to dodge and it still happened. Eventually, I decided I no longer wanted to be punched anymore. And that made me the bad guy; not because he was doing the punching, but because I no longer agreed to be the punching bag.

To be clear, he was never physically violent. I’m just bad with metaphors.

There is underlying selfishness to asking for a better life. I feel selfish asking to be treated better and demanding the bare minimum of a partner (no, really, it’s a low bar). I’m an asshole for not putting up with another few years of punching for the sake of my kids. I could have tried, right? I could have sucked it up just a bit more, right?

Maybe if the pandemic didn’t happen, I would have stuck around longer. That’s because my ex-husband was barely around, which was the only saving grace since he was like a teenage son who made my life more difficult. I could have a side fling to satisfy other needs and my children would have both parents together.

I cry still, from the guilt that I was too selfish to not tolerate name-calling anymore. Or the tiptoeing when I wanted to ask for change. Or craving intimacy with another human on an emotional level. Or heck, an adult conversation more than once a week. The fighting ripped my soul until I had nothing left. He thought things were fine when in reality, I had no fight left in me to care anymore.

I was a shell of a human using the last bit of emotional resources towards my children and the façade of a normal marriage to the outside world.

Not everyone gets what they want in life. Do people who lose their limbs in an accident look at able-bodied people and think, “that should be my life”? That’s how I felt in my marriage. Looking at others, knowing that even if a few of them were also secretly bad, most were good and they experienced a life I’d never know.

And it all boils down to how much someone is willing to suffer for the sake of their kids. Our children are the only reason to justify martyrdom. While it’s acceptable to divorce if there’s fighting or violence in front of them, it seems fickle to have done it when my kids rarely witnessed it.

My phenomenal acting allowed me to smile for days on end until I could bring up a subject (if I should dare to do so) with my ex-husband. The kids rarely saw us fight so they weren’t adversely affected by it. My children still beg me to reconcile with their dad; they cry that they don’t care about fighting as long as we’re all under one roof.

I used to beg my parents to divorce because of their fighting. It was a disservice to not have my kids see the reality because now they don’t trust that things can look great but get ripped apart in an instant.

Will this feeling of guilt over my selfishness go away? I know it will dull over time, but will it ever disappear completely? My kids feel alone and isolated (yes, they are in therapy). They feel their lives are different and they’re “unlucky” because they lead bad lives.

That’s how I felt as a kid, growing up in a strict religious household with violent immigrant parents who fought at 100% max capacity. I hated being different and not letting on to others what it was like. And now my kids are in the same boat, wishing they led the life their friends had.

Wishing they led the life they had before my divorce.

The divorce I got because I was too selfish to continue the metaphorical punches to the face.