Divorced and happy? Yes, that’s a thing
A happy couple.
Recently I learnt about ‘happily divorced.’ Marriage is meant to be a beautiful thing. We dream about companionship, and we all enter a marriage union believing that ours will be the love story of the century.
But then, two imperfect human beings are, amongst other vices, selfish and full of pride; vichwa ngumu who will not seek to hear but fight to be heard.
Before long, where love once thrived now becomes a breeding ground for spite and resentment. In the worst-case scenarios, people turn hurtful and cruel and one of them quickly realises that it is healthier to be apart than together. We have been conditioned to think that divorce is a terrible thing, so much so that in our culture, we stigmatise those who divorce.
I learnt that happily divorced is a thing for many reasons, including the fact that someone might just have saved their life by severing ties with a former spouse. What is more precious than life?
Like most people, I would tell someone ‘pole’ when they informed me that they were no longer together with their spouse. Recently, I bumped into a former college mate. Typical Kenyan style, after the usual pleasantries, I swiftly dived into questioning him about his personal life, aka marriage to Joan. They got married within a year after graduation.
“We separated five years ago.”
“Oh! I am so sorry to hear that.” I followed this with a sad face, to which he laughed.
“Don’t be! I was dying. Now I am living.”
Nothing can pique a writer’s interest than such a loaded statement. I found myself buying coffee and pulling my seat closer.
“Tell more! What happened?”
Their relationship had started on a genuinely happy space, filled with loads of goodwill and expectations. But it had faced the vagaries of life, including substance abuse, job loss and inevitable selfishness.
“We ended up being so bad to each other and for each other. We were both dying, suffocating each other with toxicity.” She had packed and left many times, but the last break off came about when he left.
“I was plagued with thoughts of violence, just to shut her up, something I had never witnessed with my parents. Then I lost all interest in my children, in life….I was dying.” He chose life, divorced but alive. They now co parent.
“We are almost friends again, we even laugh over the phone, mostly when talking about what the children are up to.”
“Do you think you can fix what went wrong and get back together?” I asked him.
“No. We went past the fixing. We were terrible human beings when together.”
I did not know that getting out of a toxic relationship was like leaving a hospital bed and someone who just left a deathbed should not be pitied.
“We should learn to congratulate someone for making a bold decision to leave, without a care of what the society will think and say.”
I agree that we should stop exposing our children to abuse, because that just transfers the behaviour to them.
“By the way, it has taken me, us, time to be here. She is also happy apart. But at first, we were miserable.”
“How so?”
“I felt like a failure, a man who couldn’t keep his family together, and who made wrong choices, such as the wrong choice of a wife.” He was in mourning. Divorce is a loss, experienced in a similar manner like that of losing a limb or a loved one.
You see, when we get married to the person, we have expectations from here to Maralal.
We dream of growing old together, spoiling our grand and great grandchildren together, doing the bucket lists together. But divorce means letting go of these dreams and wondering - for a long time - what it was that others got right but we could not figure out.
He was also grieving the loss of the ideal, the person he had in mind vis a vie the reality of who his spouse was. Like I do, every week. Walking down the aisle, those years back, I saw a vision of a happy wife – yours truly – receiving a fresh bunch of flowers and a card in his handwriting every week, reminding me of how much he adored me. Let us just say, I have long learned to manage my expectations and buy myself flowers.
Karimi is a wife who believes in marriage. [email protected]
