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Just Married, Thinking About Divorce
Why am I so Victorian about people splitting up?
I got married at the end of April, but divorce is on my mind, and it’s my husband’s fault.
He was the one who showed me the benefits of thinking like this. “Figure out the worst thing that could happen,” he said, “then work back.” He applies this way of thinking when formulating legal strategy, but I’ve found its application useful in plenty other scenarios, too.
And the worst case scenario in the context of my marriage is that it ends.
Because divorce would mean failure, and humiliation, and the termination of the greatest love I have ever known.
Do other people think like this?
The answer seems to be not just no, but that my way of thinking — associating divorce with disgrace and shame and disrepute — belongs to a whole other era.
What used to be an absolutely mainstream viewpoint — totally plain vanilla, uncontroversial, understood to be plainly and obviously correct — is now, as is so often the way, anathema, barely statable in public, and almost guaranteed to cause offence because so many of us have been divorced.
It is something of a preoccupation of mine.
