Some Good Can Come From Divorce

Divorce is a rough experience for anyone to undergo, and many of us do it at least once.

According to the new book “Women on Divorce: A Bedside Companion,” edited by Penny Kaganoff and Susan Spano, almost a third of the women who marry between the ages of 20 and 44 end up divorced. And as for second chances, the book offers little good news on that front: Half of all second marriages end up in divorce court.

Men, of course, are half the equation. And they have their own means of dealing with marital dissolution.

But this book is about women. The men who fail them, and whom they fail, are on many lines (and between most others). “Women on Divorce,” however, is concerned more with who women are, and what they have left, when the wedding vows get shattered.

Most times what’s left is a complex feeling of liberation and guilt, humiliation and dizzying freedom, joy and debilitating fear. In the worst cases, the result is economic ruin. In the best, a new sense of self emerges.

And always, no matter what feeling dominates, the road there is paved with an opportunity for selfawareness.

Anne Roiphe, for example, was shocked to find that she’d repeated the mistake made by her mother: She’d wed a man who used and belittled her.

“I discovered that I had married a man more like my father than not and that, more like my mother than not, I had become a creature to be pitied,” she wrote. “Like moth to flame, I was drawn to repeat.”

Ann Hood found out that what she can accept in a friend is intolerable in a spouse.

“When my ex-husband and I were friends,” she wrote, “I would hang up the phone when he became bellicose, bow out of an evening that didn’t include what I wanted to do. I could say that I had a great friend who was a curmudgeon.”

And Alix Kates Schulman discovered a question: Why, she asks, is every broken marriage considered a failure?

“Why are terminated marriages called ‘failed,’ as though endurance were all,” Schulman wrote. “Perhaps a marriage, however brief, should 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, citizenship. By this measure, some of the most successful marriages I know (including my first one) have been short.”

So, yes, divorce is hard. But like most harsh experiences, it can lead to something good - if you’re willing to weather the emotional storm long enough to see it.

, DataTimes