My marriage ended because I was cruel. Or because I ate in bed. Or because he liked electronic music and difficult films about men in nature. Or because I did not. Or because I was anxious, and this made me controlling. Or because red wine makes me critical. Or because hunger, stress, and white wine make me critical, too. Or because I was clingy at parties. Or because he smoked weed every day, and I did not think it was “actually the same thing” as my drinking two cups of coffee in the morning. Or because we fell in love too young, and how could our actual lives compare to the idea we’d had of what our lives could be when we were barely twenty and our bodies were almost impossibly firm? Or because we tried non-monogamy for three months in 2011, and it was just fine, not great. Or because he put hot sauce on everything, without tasting it, even if I’d spent hours balancing the flavors from a recipe I’d had to scroll past a long and detailed story about some woman’s holiday to find. Or because he forgot our anniversary once. Or because I did our laundry never. Or because his large Greek family had not quite accepted me as one of their own, even after I learned his yiayia’s favorite poem for her birthday. Or because he walked in on me pooping that time. Or because, in 2015, we attended nine weddings and got carried away, and a big party where everyone told us we were geniuses for loving each other and gave us $3,000 seemed like a great idea. Or because we went to Paris and had an argument instead of falling more in love or at least rimming each other. Or because I’d stopped imagining what our children might look like. Or because he’d never started. Or because I was insecure and sometimes petty. Or because he kept insisting we go vegan, then sneaking pizzas into the apartment while I slept. Or because we finished watching The Sopranos and never started The Wire. Or because when we were first getting together, I’d kissed someone else, and sometimes still thought about her. Or because he was needlessly combative, with a pretentious streak. Or because I was a coward, whose work did not “actively seek to dismantle the state.” Or because I scoffed when he said that and asked about the socialist impact of his latest Burger King commercial. Or because he called me a cunt. Or because sometimes, I was one. Anyway, it was over.
Kind of. He’d moved out, taking the cat (for now) and a gaming system and three acoustic guitars. The idea of Jon writing breakup songs in some dark sublet filled me with equal parts deep despair and incredible relief—despair, to think that I had caused him such pain he’d been driven to experimental songwriting; relief that I wouldn’t have to listen to it.
Not that I begrudged him the impulse. This morning, after he left, I’d almost immediately taken a photo of myself, wanting to “preserve the moment” and entertaining grandiose ideas about this horrible loss marking the start of a very creatively generative time. Maybe I’d take a photo of my face on every significant day for the rest of my life, compiling a gallery’s worth in time for a show on my 80th birthday: my big potato head smiling at a PhD ceremony, weeping at my mother’s funeral, chewing thoughtfully on the first food my child ever cooked, a few boundary-pushing close-ups during orgasm to generate some buzz, etc. Instead, I took the picture, saw the bags under my eyes, and downloaded Facetune. The dark circles felt right, in person. Looking in the mirror I would see them and think, there is a twenty-eight-year-old who has seen some shit. But in the photo, I realized, I wanted to look hot.
Having him properly out of the house was a relief, not because things felt better or calmer without him, but because the two weeks between “I am going to move out” and “I have rented a van” were some of the longest and slowest of my life. It had been so inconsistent: one day tiptoeing around each other, speaking in the stilted tones of new colleagues on a work retreat, then slipping into old habits and kissing goodbye, eating off each other’s plates, fucking. Every time we fell back into some old way of being—so easy, so familiar—I wondered if we were going to write off the whole thing as a few bad months, but one night he came home with some boxes, and we had to decide whose records were whose and what to do about the piece of crap couch we’d bought barely a year ago. The warranty on history’s worst sofa had outlasted our marriage.
We swore neither of us had Seen It Coming. After all, we did not have the major problems that led to this kind of thing. There were some problems, sure: in addition to the eating in bed, I had no indoor voice and did not respect his fridge organization system; he had a temper and wanted us to take up running. But we weren’t unhappy, just unsatisfied . . . until suddenly we were so, so unhappy, and we couldn’t laugh, and we couldn’t have sex, and we couldn’t order Thai food without looking at the other person like, who are you?, staring at the stranger we’d chosen at age nineteen and nineteen and a half, respectively, not hating them, exactly, but wondering if they died without warning—of natural causes or in some kind of horrible accident, not that that would be good, of course, it would be a tragedy . . . but if it did happen—if maybe life would be easier. The words slipped out of my mouth one night at dinner: “Is this working?” Neither of us had an answer, which seemed an answer itself.
It had been working, or appeared to be working, for almost a decade. Jon and I fell in love at university, his cheerful nihilism a surprising complement to my chronic overthinking. We’d been friends first (important, everyone says!) and even had exciting, slutty freshman years before realizing sometime in the first semester of sophomore year that not only did we get along great, we were also deliriously horny for each other. We attached ourselves at the mouths and genitals and didn’t unlatch until graduation. We liked enough of the same things and made each other laugh, and our arguments were only as dramatic as the arguments of all our other twentysomething friends. We took modest vacations and met each other’s parents. Eventually we moved in together—we’d been dating the right amount of time and neither of us could afford to live alone. We painted part of a wall with chalkboard paint. There were poorly judged birthday gifts and petty jealousies and one or two mild betrayals, but mostly there was comfort and an easy understanding. After six years of date nights and pet ownership and learning how to make a carbonara, there was simply nothing else to do. Jon said, “What do you think, Maggie?” and I said, “Yeah, okay”; and so we got married, because everyone else was, and because nothing being particularly wrong felt, at the time, like everything was right.
It had always been slightly surreal to me that we were legally wed. When I said “my husband” to people, their eyebrows would raise and I would think, totally, yes, how bizarre. Jon did not find it strange at all. It was not that he was a romantic per se, but his were the last set of mutually enamored parents on earth, so he had above-average faith in the institution. To him, marriage was a natural response to being in love for an extended period. When we checked into the honeymoon suite at our budget Italian hotel, the chatty American concierge had shrieked, “Oh my god, you’re like a child bride!” and Jon had laughed, but I felt weirdly bashful. There was something naive about it. Hadn’t I crunched the numbers? Did I really think our marriage would last, when so many didn’t? Maybe I felt embarrassed because yes, I really did. I wanted to tap that version of myself on the shoulder: honey, if you’re embarrassed now . . .
The first morning without him, I swear to god I woke up crying. My pillow was wet, at any rate, and instead of flipping it over or changing the pillowcase, I rolled out of bed and let myself land heavily on the floor. Even if we handle it as well as possible, I thought, it’s still going to be terrible. Even though we were going to be well-behaved exes, the type who didn’t gossip about each other, or have sex with that one coworker the other’s always been jealous of, or post vindictive thirst traps on social media, or tweet excessively about our exciting new lives as single people, it was still going to feel awful for years, possibly forever. It certainly felt that way now.
It was important to me that we have a Good Divorce. As we’d packed his clothes away, we’d agreed that handling whatever came next with kindness would be a nice way to honor what we meant to each other (or had meant). We’d composed a little speech to say to friends—“we just grew in different directions”—that was true, but also meaningless, and promised to stay in touch—for the first while, anyway. He’d been gone twenty-four hours, and we’d both checked in a few times already via text, variations on how are you and i’m sorry it’s like this and have you told your parents. In time, I could see us being the type of exes who went to each other’s birthday parties, stayed for a tasteful number of drinks, hugged the new partner, and left before things got messy. But for now I couldn’t see anything, except how badly we’d fucked it up, how quiet the apartment was without him, and how few plans I had for the weekend.
I stayed on the floor until mid-afternoon. It didn’t feel great, but it was the kind of thing you were supposed to do when your marriage fell apart. In the movies, when you get divorced you lie down on the floor, and then you get drunk, and then you pick yourself up by the sweater shawl and learn to love yourself again at a beach house rented from a charming and handsome older man whose first wife died, and although he clearly still loves her in a respectful way, he feels like he might be ready to move on, like the two of you might help each other heal. In the movies, when you get divorced you have a big fight with lawyers, and it’s very painful because the children resent you and you can’t decide who gets the house—the big, beautiful house you spent years decorating together, into which you have poured your life’s savings and where you raised several children or at least one sizable dog. In the movies, you are Diane Lane, or Keaton, or possibly Kruger, a beautiful middle-aged Diane who is her own boss and knows about the good kind of white wine. Usually, you do not continue living with your ex for weeks because you can’t make the rent on your dusty one-bedroom apartment alone. Generally, you are not a glorified research assistant and an advertising copywriter, respectively, whose most important shared financial asset is your one friend who always gets free phones from work. Certainly, you are not supposed to be twenty-eight years old and actively planning a birthday party with the dress code “Jimmy Buffett sluts.”
But there I was, semi-prone, texting the group chat about how much a banner reading Parrothead Pussy would cost, and whether a margarita-flavored cake was within the scope of Clive’s baking abilities. It was widely agreed that he could handle it, and not only that but it was surely something his enemy, a handsome television chef who had recently taught viewers how to “make” corn on the cob, could not achieve. Further, Amirah had found a party bus that had wipe-clean seating inside: it seems like it’s probably used for some kind of bang-bus scenario rather than birthday parties normally, but it’s cheaper than the other one by almost $100 . . . Lauren, whose birthday it was, wrote back: maybe we don’t think about it too much and spend the extra cash on booze? The rest of us agreed.
The group chat comprised my four closest friends from university: Amirah, a lightly frazzled, emotionally turbulent nurse I had met in residence halls; Clive, a large and elegant gay man who was always describing himself as “chaotic” for doing normal things like paying for cabs in cash; and two Laurens—one who cried at everything and another who maintained she had cried only once in her entire life, when McDonald’s stopped doing pizza. For simplicity’s sake, we called the former “Emotional Lauren.”
I had not confessed to the group chat that Jon had left. They knew we were considering separation—that things had not been great lately—but I couldn’t bring myself to type the words he’s gone. I think part of me assumed we would get back together, even after we agreed he’d go, even after everything. I couldn’t envision it lasting, this time apart. Who would I complain to about the speed of the wifi? What would he do when he needed to remember his mom’s birthday? By whom would I run every single decision I made every day of my life? What about Sundays, what would we do? I assumed he would eventually come back and we’d both say, that was exhausting, ha, ha, and then we’d get stoned and watch The Great British Bake Off, an activity that constitutes, as far as I can tell, a full 60 percent of all marriages.
I had also not told them because it felt unbelievably stupid. It is hard to explain exactly how mortifying it is to have had a wedding when your marriage ends almost instantly thereafter. The relationship had been longer than the marriage—much longer—but so what? To have that all-eyes-on-you, congratulations-on-your-big-moment, till-death-do-you-part day, with its attendant preparation and fights with family and guest list issues and thousands of dollars turn out to simply have been a very expensive Tinder photoshoot for your friends is . . . well, it’s not ideal. And you don’t even get to use the photos for Tinder yourself, first, because you do not know how Tinder works, and second, because you are wearing a wedding dress in all of them.
Instead of confessing, I entertained: telling stories about funny dogs I’d seen, or a recent medical appointment where I’d taunted my doctor with tales of my healthy, active lifestyle as she blinked confusedly and tapped the orange-to-red section of the BMI chart on her clipboard. don’t get Maggie started on BMI, wrote Lauren. we’ll be here all night. Clive told us he’d recently decided that it really stood for “Beautiful Man Index,” which made sense, because his was so high. Emotional Lauren said she’d heard a podcast recently that would change our lives. Amirah sent a link to a video of a seagull shoplifting, and then we were off, riffing about marine animal gangs, gossiping about acquaintances, and complaining with equal vigor about real injustices in the world and the corniness of a Toronto micro-celebrity’s social media presence.
Eventually, I knew, I would have to tell them, but I was waiting until I found the right opening. I couldn’t face their questions before I had the answers myself. Was I ready to be single again? Where would I live? What was I going to do about money? I had some money, sure, but Jon had lots of it—from his job, his family, his savvy financial habits. He knew how to save and how to invest and how not to spend a long-awaited freelance check on risky crop tops or a new kind of fancy cat food. He had subsidized my rent and paid for our groceries, and when we went on holidays, he’d pay for everything except my flight, which I was “allowed” to pay for the way children who clear their plates at Thanksgiving “help” with the dishes. A few weeks before our wedding, I’d joked that I was running out of time to get him to sign that prenup; what if we split and he took me for everything I was worth? He told me I could keep my eighty dollars. (That used to be a funny story.)
Days passed, and I haunted the house like a reverse-Havisham, wandering aimlessly from room to room. As I looked around our silent, empty home—half empty, anyway—I realized my husband (“ex-husband”) had paid for the TV and the art on the walls and the kitchen chairs and the thing we put our feet up on when we sat on our appalling couch. Most of the stuff in our apartment was by definition his. Though I’d encouraged him to take everything he’d purchased, he’d left some of it behind, so the place was technically functional but felt wrong: a too-spacious bedroom closet with no shoe storage, a cutlery drawer without any big knives, a kitchen table you could not sit at. I dropped onto the terrible hardness of our couch, set my drink on the floor where our bar cart had been, and sobbed my little eyes out.
I didn’t know where to look, what to think about, or how to spend my time. Every item in the house was dripping with significance. The toaster was a wedding present, so I ate bread at room temperature. The fridge door ephemera—receipts, grocery lists, notes about bananas and eggs and plans to buy a bike lock—was too painful to look at, so I took my coffee without milk. I taped a piece of paper over a framed photo in the bathroom, not quite ready to take it down but not ready to face it yet either. A banner left over from our engagement party glittered on a wall above the space where some of Jon’s art had hung. c o n g r a t u l a t i o n shone in gold calligraphy. The S had fallen off at some point but we’d kept it up, liked it better that way, thought it was kind of fun. Looking at it now was unbelievably depressing.
There were positive discoveries too: without any pressure to blend our two styles, I realized I had disliked almost every decorative item my husband had brought into our home. Anything I’d ever looked at and thought, we’ll have to replace that eventually, had been his—or something we had settled on, defining compromise as “an object we both hate equally.” Now most of these objects were gone. The sparseness of my possessions gave the house a slightly threadbare quality, and I hadn’t kept any of the big towels, but there were no band posters on the walls, no novelty shot glasses in the kitchen, no lightly moldering wooden bath mat he’d gotten high and ordered on eBay. Now there was space to display my little knickknacks, to light the candle Jon thought “smelled weird,” to play the nineties pop music he found boring and generic. Of course, it did not feel better to burn a tobacco and juniper candle and listen to the Backstreet Boys than it had felt to be loved.
Every article and forum I’d found through grim googling (tips for divorce; marriage breakdown young; first time alone how) had told me to prepare for sleeplessness, but I had not realized how long the nights would feel. Another surprise was that I could still stomach food. I’d been led to believe that heartbreak spoiled the appetite. As a teenager I had heavily anticipated the breakup—inevitable, teen soaps about handsome vampires and their underage lovers had taught me—that would leave me unable to eat, wasting beautifully away, so thin and wronged and absolutely thrilled to hell about it. To have had a boyfriend, then lose that boyfriend and several dress sizes, perhaps enough to fit into one of the cursed polo shirts Abercrombie sold in its dank, perfumed mall caves? I could not imagine anything better.
Tragically, I was the victim of a supportive home life, which had led to an alarmingly robust self-esteem, and went to an arts-friendly high school that channeled most of my latent sexual energy into overwrought plays about middle-aged women with oral fixations. And so I did not date, and remained chubby and happy, until roughly twelfth grade, when not having been laid was enough heartbreak to make me lose, rapidly and with no real effort except abstention from solid food and constant monitoring and recording of my caloric intake, fifty-five pounds. Everyone was very happy for me until I fainted in math class after having a popsicle for lunch.
The truth is, if you start your eating disorder even slightly overweight, no one will notice until things are very much at the “what if two meals a day were soup” stage. There was some tutting and discussion about nutrition and balance, then I went to a hypnotist who told me to imagine being beautiful in a bathing suit and I was cured, just kidding. Really what happened was I fell in love and I forgot about it for a bit. These days I was comfortably soft-bodied, the kind of woman people condescendingly referred to as “shapely” or “curvy” or, more often, “confident,” the word practically buckling under its euphemistic load. Sometimes, during periods of stress or after reading too many magazines or listening to a much-thinner friend complain about the size of her legs, I could feel myself tiptoe back toward counting, consuming an egg and thinking: seventy. But, I reasoned, no one has a completely healthy relationship to food and exercise, at least not anybody who came of age during the period when the cover story of every supermarket tabloid was some variation on “This Beach Hag Has Cellulite.” As long as I wasn’t writing out the daily caloric inventories of my teenage years, I considered myself more or less healthy.
However, the temptation in this moment to dust off the ol’ ED—to become one of those heroines in novels whose bones begin to jut concerningly, frightening their friends and rendering them absolutely gorgeous with grief—was strong. “Her big eyes somehow more blue for the dark smudges beneath them, Maggie was too sad to eat, because too many people wanted to have sex with her,” or whatever. I was not about to be the first woman alive to experience emotional devastation without the sudden, dramatic emergence of my collarbones.
But I had recovered too well in that area, was annoyingly committed to nourishing myself, and so my soft butt and I stayed fed. Meals were the only thing that broke up the long, slow hours of that first week without Jon. I worked my way through our cupboards, unearthing long-forgotten curry pastes and the instant noodles we stockpiled “for emergencies.” Every time I tucked into a comforting stir-fry or cut open an oozing homemade quesadilla, I’d imagine David Attenborough’s tranquil narration: even in the darkest times, life . . . goes on. Eventually, I knew, I would run out of food, which was stressful, because I could not imagine leaving the house to acquire more.
Not sleeping was less concerning; no one sleeps well anymore. The world is falling apart, and our phones are just there, glowing in our faces, full of news about what the president has said and which of our exes have recently gotten haircuts. If I really craved rest, I could always drink or take sleeping pills. Jon had told me he was taking them before he left, though I thought maybe this was because the couch was so uncomfortable. He offered me one when he was moving out. I wanted to say yes but felt like it was some kind of statement about How I Was Doing to say no, and so I stayed up most nights watching British murder television on Netflix.
Previously I had found these shows too scary—we (I) lived in a ground floor apartment with very suspect window fixtures, and we (I) slept lightly and frightened easily. Now I found them soothing. There was a pattern to them, a clear hierarchy of right and wrong. Maybe the troubled detective inspector drank too much and cheated on his wife, but he was not a murderer-pedophile living in some kind of pervert’s bunker in Swansea. The murderer-pedophile was always caught eventually, and the beleaguered partner always had to admit the detective inspector was bloody good at his job. It was nice to feel that the difference between guilty and not guilty could be so clear. It was nice to hear David Tennant swearing. Also, a lot of the tension had been drained from these dramas when I realized the murderer is always whoever speaks slowest.
When I did manage to sleep, I would wake up in the middle of the night, groggy and confused. I’d reach across the now-enormous bed, my hands searching for the warm, familiar lump of Jon’s body . . . and feel nothing. Fear would course through me and my eyes would spring open, struggling to adjust in the dark. I’d break into a sweat, confused and scared and a little irked. Had I missed a text? We were supposed to communicate about this stuff! Telling one another when you were going to be home late was one of the main Things of marriage! Then, of course, I would remember.
When this happened, I felt, in order: stupid; sad; disappointed; vindicated when I remembered something similar had happened to Joan Didion in The Year of Magical Thinking; embarrassed again that I’d grasped at this connection to Joan Didion; quietly proud, like maybe there were some similarities; then more sad; and, eventually, tired. But I was not an incredibly chic voice of a generation who had lost her life’s love. I could not even figure out the new pant shape, and my greatest work was an incomplete PhD dissertation about the “lived history of objects” in early modern theater. Even when it was finished, no one would read it. I hadn’t lost my husband, I had left him. Or, rather, I had suggested he leave, and he had taken me up on this incredibly quickly. In many ways it was the last thing we agreed on.
And so our marriage was over, six hundred and eight days after it began. One day we were in love, and the next it had curdled. Suddenly we only had two settings: quiet and exasperated. When we weren’t making light, self-consciously upbeat small talk, we were having hundreds, thousands of arguments, rolling our eyes and sighing and sniping at each other about:
An underwhelming breakup. No affair; no big, blowout moment. Just a series of small fires that we let burn out around us, clutching our coffees like the dog from the internet: this is fine.
And now I was alone on a hot June evening, eating bread and butter in my wedding lingerie because the rest of my underwear was dirty. I sprinkled some salt on a hunk of baguette and said, “divorce,” out loud, to see how it felt or maybe just to be dramatic. I picked at an expensive, lacy wedgie and wondered, as I had almost hourly for the past week or so, if maybe it had all been a huge mistake. It was so easy to move through the world as a pair—splitting the cost of things and sharing big sweaters and having someone to stand in line with at the bank.
Jon and I had recently started to make Couple Friends, going to dinner in groups of four or six to lightly tease each other over small plates, then going home and having pointed sex after deciding that Ben and Esther probably never did it. The couples were all slightly older married people Jon knew from work; he’d keep them like he’d kept our tea towels, and I would never be invited to a casual dinner party again. Right when brussels sprouts were finally having their moment in the sun! I chuckled thinking this, and wished I could text the joke to Jon. I’d already used my daily check-in, but there was nothing more satisfying than making him laugh.
This whole situation had the air of a joke, like any moment now one or both of us would call each other, tears streaming down our cheeks: oh my god, you should have seen your face. Although I hated pranks, Jon loved them. After we got engaged he started doing this thing where he would pretend to die if I left the room. I’d come back to find him sprawled on the couch or slumped over the kitchen table, his dark eyes vacant and lifeless. I told him it creeped me out. He said the outcome of marriage, best case scenario, was one of you finding the other’s corpse. Since women usually outlived their husbands and he took significantly worse care of his body (his words), it would certainly be me finding him and not the other way around. This way, he reasoned, his death—ostensibly one of the worst moments of my life—would be something funny and shared, an inside joke. No one I told about this ever agreed, but I thought it was sweet.
It is horrible to be sad in the summer.