It seems like everywhere you look at the moment, there’s a book detailing someone’s marriage falling apart. There’s This American Ex-Wife: How I Ended My Marriage and Started My Life by Lyz Lenz; No Fault: A Memoir of Romance and Divorce by Haley Mlotek; Sucker Punch by Scaachi Koul; Liars by Sarah Manguso; and one of the most buzzed-about novels of 2024: All Fours by Miranda July.
Bit by bit and then all at once, the concept of leaving one’s spouse has become, for women, almost fetishized—a rite of passage on the way to meeting one’s true self. As Lenz describes her experience in This American Ex-Wife, “I wanted to remove myself from the martyr’s pyre and instead sacrifice the roles I had been assigned at birth: mother, wife, daughter. I wanted to see what else I could be.”
I can certainly understand that point of view. Growing up, I figured out quickly that marriage was a tricky business. My single mother avoided it like a contagious disease, her attitude being, Why would you want to be confined? Who wants to sign up for one man, one outcome? It was the 1970s, the era of the pill, and men represented opportunity and adventure. She was okay with ambiguity, didn’t automatically rule someone out who may have had a wife tucked away somewhere. It was all about the hunting, not the keeping. “People are meant to be enjoyed in small doses,” she liked to say.
As I watched an assortment of small doses fall in and out of favor with my mother, I didn’t want to replicate her patterns. But I did—and it started early. I chafed at rules, obligations; when I was given a difficult assignment in high school, my first thought was, Do I have to do this?
The same applied to love. My first husband and I met in a yoga class, and in quick succession I was pregnant, married, and then a mother. But as the wedding approached, I felt panicked. I longed to settle down but felt emotionally ill-equipped for the burdens and discomforts that came with it. Being trapped in a house with a spouse I couldn’t get along with while caring for a young baby became unbearable. There was never any question I would leave; it was only a matter of when. (I would later write about that period and its aftermath in a divorce novel of my own called Synchronized Breathing; at the end of the book, the protagonist has taken steps to find out who she is without a man, throwing herself into creative work. There is the possibility of love on the horizon, but nothing’s wrapped up in a bow.)
Still, I decided to try again in my 40s—and my second husband, Rob, and I have now been married for 13 years. Nobody is more surprised about this than I am.
At times I have had to choose marriage each day in the way I imagine an addict chooses sobriety. What my friend refers to as the pause-and-attend factor (having to pause whatever she’s doing to attend to her partner’s needs when he’s home) sometimes feels about as natural to me as peeling my skin off. But after so much instability, the fantasy of escape—of belonging to myself and my own desires—has slowly lost its allure.
When Rob and I met, he was divorced and busy raising his four kids, his life a type of free-floating chaos. Over the nearly six years that we dated, I liked to paint him as the one with the resistance to getting married again—the one who wasn’t all-in on committing—until my best friend gently shattered that illusion: “Everybody knows it’s you.”
When I was younger, I longed to meet a man who was experienced, whom I felt safe with. Now, my challenge was to stay with him.
Rob played a good long game. For months after he and I moved in together, I wouldn’t unpack all my boxes, in case I had to make a quick getaway. Eventually, he called this out.
“It makes me feel like you’re not committed to this relationship when you won’t unpack your stuff,” he told me. “It makes me think you’re only here temporarily.”
I apologized, but the boxes didn’t move. He changed his tack: “Okay, how about we tackle just one box this weekend?”
Learning to ignore that old fight-or-flight instinct—to build endurance and set new neural pathways—hasn’t happened on its own. It took therapy, both on my own and with Rob; a few guided psychedelic sessions (great for letting go of built-up resentments); and filling my life with more activities and engagements outside of my marriage—volunteering with seal and sea lion rescues, writing, seeing friends, dropping in at book signings, taking classes—to understand how I could stick to a partner without losing touch with who I was and what I wanted. Some of that related to how my husband and I operated as a couple; other parts began and ended with me.
I also finally discovered how deeply comforting it is to be known by someone over time. Rob and I have blended our families and shared in the lives of our respective children. He’s been there for the moments of triumph and the disappointments—including when I was navigating open-heart surgery and a long recovery—just as I have for him. There is an undeniable solace to sharing a life with someone and building that bond, having that witness to the events that have shaped it. I could easily have missed all of that.
Some people divorce in order to find themselves, and I tried that. For others, the most radical thing you can do is stay married.