Singular

"Oh yes
there are worse things
than being alone
but it often takes
decades to realize this
and most often when you do
it's too late
and there's nothing worse
than too late"

-Charles Bukowski

The Mother Corp has come up with some interesting summer radio programming including an environmental show with, who else, David Suzuki, a show called "The Main Ingredient" about food and food issues (you know I'm all over that one) and another called "Asunder", a show about divorce. In a country where 40% of marriages end in divorce I think it's about time we started being able to talk about it.

The curious thing about divorce is that, despite how common it is, it still seems to be a taboo subject. In many ways the loss is similar to experiencing the death of your spouse but, while the recently widowed are granted understanding and empathy, it was my experience that the separated and divorced are shunned, reviled and blamed.

If you can't make a relationship work, it's your fault. There is something wrong with you. You have no right to feel sad, or angry or upset. After all, you chose to end the relationship and whatever your reasons might be, they're irrelevant because there are other people still in relationships, at this very moment, having the exact same problems or worse and they're toughing it out. Why do you get to quit and they don't? You shouldn't. You are a failure.

Your friends and family, the people you thought would support you, most of them will not want to discuss it. What happened is between you and your Ex, they don't want to know the gory details, they just want to judge you for it. Most of them will pick a side. You think it will be yours. It most likely will not be.

When I left the Ex after six years it was after three years of hoping things would get better. I'm certain it was the thousand tiny cuts in those years that bled the relationship dry until, by the seminole day when my world came crashing round about me, we were so brittle it was nothing to snap me in two. I came home from a doctor's appointment and walked up the creaky ninety year old stairs of our house to his office. He was in front of his computer, as he almost always was, playing a fishing game.

I hesitated in the doorway. Everything in the room, including him, seemed so fixed and secure and ordinary while I felt superfluous. Finally I announced, with all the stoic pragmatism I could muster, "Well, the good news is I'm not pregnant, the bad news is I have a cancer that needs to be removed. Tomorrow. I need someone to be at the hospital with me."

"You don't expect me to take a day off work just for that, do you?" He asked, without looking up from the screen.

In that moment, on what seemed, at the time, like the worst day of my life, with terror coursing through my veins and now my heart crushed in a care less second, there was no longer any hope. Obviously things were not going to get better.



Over the next few months, during the weekly hospital visits, between the essays and exams, I finally accepted that the only thing worse than being lonely because you're alone is being lonely when there's supposed to be someone beside you. Even then it took me another few months to convince myself that I deserved better. He made it clear he felt he did too. He suddenly wanted children of his own. Children we'd never wanted before. Children we now knew I couldn't give him.

In the end it was me who had to muster up the courage to leave. And when I did there were friends and family members, who said things like, "You're overreacting. Maybe you should go back to him. You should try and work it out."

I've gotten over the loss of that relationship. Sometimes we make bad choices. Sometimes choices are good for a while and then they no longer are. Sometimes when we grow it's apart instead of together and sometimes those spiritual and emotional chasms are too wide to bridge. I don't miss him, though I hope he's happy and well, and I don't regret walking away.

But I still hear those voices every day, of the people I thought would be in my corner, telling me, essentially, I don't deserve a caring, compassionate partner. I don't deserve love and affection. I am not worthy of a day off work. I should go back. I should settle for less. I am trying harder now not to believe them. I make the effort, daily, to remind myself I am no better or worse than anyone else who has love, so it's just as likely, or not, to find me someday.

In the meantime, I can't help but hope that maybe shows like "Asunder" will finally make it okay to talk about divorce and that, once we do, maybe our ideas about marriage, unions and long term relationships will benefit and we, the divorced, will no longer be demonized as failures.