Today is the first day back at work for many following the Christmas break. But it’s also been dubbed ‘divorce day:’ the busiest day of the year for divorce lawyers as couples, hoping to salvage their marriages over tinsel and twinkly lights realise that their relationships are in fact dead in the water and reach for the phone on that first working day after Christmas, to make that initial call to a legal firm for advice. But you can avoid lawyers. Read on!
But is that the best thing to do? I got divorced 12 years ago. I’ve had plenty of time, over the years to think about what went wrong and why. I’ve chatted with many others who have either been through divorce or who have been through a very happy 60 year marriage. I hope I might be able to help you by telling you some of the things I’ve learned along the way. My book ‘The Catholic Woman’s Dying Wish’ (reformed from my first book ‘The D Word’) is partly about my own experiences and the things that have gone wrong in my own relationships and some readers have told me it has helped them understand their partner better. I have tried to get right into the mindset of men. It’s taken a lot of first hand research and note taking to achieve this! Here’s the link:
12 years on from divorce this is what I fundamentally believe.
- People don’t change. You remain the same people. For example one of you promised the other that you wanted children. Now you are telling him/her you don’t. You haven’t changed. All you did was con them in order to win them over. If you’d been honest in the first place they would never have married you. When I met my husband he spent every evening in the pub. I didn’t like the pub. It was a smoking dive in Bognor Regis. Every Sunday they held pub quizzes. He sat there talking about computers with a friend. There was nothing for me in that pub. I wanted to spend time in Brighton instead – dancing, walking round the Lanes, putting coins in slot machines on the pier, trying different restaurants. But I was a classic ‘putter upper.’ I wasn’t assertive. I was a passive mouse that wanted to please her man, keep him happy and so I suppressed what I truly wanted from the relationship. As the years went by he began to drink more and more. I let him. I put up with it until I couldn’t anymore. This is where I went wrong: I should have been upfront, more communicative and we should have tried together to develop some interests we both enjoyed. So instead of booking to see a lawyer why not distract yourselves by joining something together, taking up a new interest that you would both enjoy.
- Don’t rush into marriage. Get to know somebody over four seasons. Don’t make any decisions in those heady, romantic early days. Did you rush into getting married? I did. We got engaged after 3 months, married after 10 months of meeting and the first child arrived 13 months later. That is where I went wrong. I wasn’t using my head. He wasn’t right for me but I was wrapped up in the romance of it all and acted from the pulse in my knickers and the throb in my heart. Use your head. Act on your gut. Feel your gut churning? It’s trying to tell you something? If however you are telling me that you didn’t rush into getting married. You waited. You dated for a year, two years, five years even then you were wise, you are mature and you do know your own mind. You still loved that person after five years of dating so you got married. Well that’s great. There is every hope that you can revive what you had and return to how you felt in those early days. You’re an adult! You made careful decisions. Trust that decision. It was the right what then and it is the right one now. All that has happened is that you’ve both lost your way. You need to find each other again. You can be happy again. Step back. Take some time apart. But don’t make any decisions you’ll later regret. Believe me divorce is a massive decision. I cannot begin to underestimate the pain that is involved for everyone concerned.
- Read this book now. It helped me and it continues to help me in my relationships when I feel uncertain about a new partner:
‘Too Good to Leave, Too Bad to Stay’ by Mira Kirshenbaum.
The book goes through a series of questions for you to answer as honestly as you can. By the end of the book you will know the answer and if you don’t then your gut will tell you. Your relationship is either too good to leave or too bad to stay in. Which is it?
- Please please don’t waste your money on lawyers. They will bleed you dry. Their sole interest is making money, lots of it. For goodness sake it’s your children’s inheritance! You can sit down and work things out with your husband/wife. There isn’t much to work out. If you argue about a few thousand pounds the lawyers will take the same again. My divorce settlement was worked out over the kitchen sink. It is possible. We weren’t amicable at the end but we acted like adults over the settlement. Our divorce cost us £36. My dad clapped when I told him!
I’ll be back again tomorrow with more advice on divorce and avoiding lawyers and more snippets from my own experience. Hold back from making that call until you’ve heard everything I have to tell you.