Divorce Balance

Negotiation > Recovery > Enhancement

Wednesday, March 23, 2005
Thin File Divorces

"Were we ever really married?"

As divorce questions go, this one seems pretty straightforward. And apropos, perhaps, for divorce autobiographers never destined to find their stories along side the great epics of Homer.

It's a question I hear a lot from my clients, post-divorce. It's a common thread in a good number of Divorce Balance eMails I receive.

One of the most painful things in divorce, generally, is the feeling of isolation. That you are the only one. Forever more, you've been sentenced to wear the label "flawed" or "defective."

You don't fit in.

Now imagine with me that you are not just divorced, but that yours was a fairly low-key divorce event, as divorces go. Your pain is excruciating, because divorce is divorce. But is it really worth mentioning? I mean, "it could'a been a lot worse."

Then, given how it ended, you wonder (to no one in particular): Would anyone really believe you were married at all? Did it matter? Did you matter?

Talk about feelings of isolation!

When impressions of "divorce" are called for, our minds easily conjure up images of drama. Ask for audio, and the volume invariably moves to decibel levels exceeding "opera" — times two. We don't wanna miss a single weekly update if we're following high conflict divorce mythologies contemporaneously.

Mosey on over to the Clerk of Courts office for the Cliff's Notes. "Real" divorce files are thick. They're chock-full of interim orders, transcripts, and a climactic Judgment of Divorce that reads like The Warren Report.

The longest line in your Judgment of Divorce is the type-written name of the judge in your divorce case. And you never even saw that judge: Your former spouse (by non-controversial, mutual agreement) gave the pro forma courtroom testimony required make your divorce (by consent) final.

How do you compete with all that?

You don't have to. Homer isn't the only poet to convey feeling through poetry. Deep, complex emotions can stir behind the fewest, simplest lines. Here is Emily Dickinson, a century and a half ago, on thin file lives, perhaps.

I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you — Nobody — too?
Then there's a pair of us!
Don't tell! they'd advertise — you know!

How dreary — to be — Somebody!
How public — like a frog—
To tell one's name — the livelong June—
To an admiring Bog!

One of my all time favorite professors as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, Dr. Robert Weisbuch, could (and did) write an entire book on Dickinson. His treatise, and countless others, expansively grapples with the struggles and insights that Dickinson shares in mere twenty-something-line stanzas.

The loss of every marriage to divorce is uniquely painful. All uniquely defy simple measures.

Yes, you were married. And it needn't be The Odyssey to make it epic. Your divorce story is priceless, thick file or thin.

However you share your loss, its weight is more important than its words or volume. You're not alone.

—posted by Dell Deaton @2:22 PM EST 3/23/2005 [499]

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