Death of a Marriage: Divorce Grief
Introduction
Divorce is no longer taboo or socially unacceptable. In fact, it seems almost a way of life. Statistically, in the United States one out of every two marriages ends in divorce, with one-half of divorces occurring within the first seven years of marriage (Cherlin, 1981). Today, midlife adults comprise the group most likely to be divorced (Amato, 2010) because many baby boomers have experienced divorces in their early 20s and 30s, and now in their 50s and 60s they continue to have high divorce rates.1 Incidentally, baby boomer women are the group most likely to have been raised in traditional households and assumed traditional roles in all or a good part of their marriage(s) (most likely past marriages, but perhaps also present marriages).
Emotional Impacts of Divorce
Divorce is a complex social phenomenon that can have traumatic effects on a woman. Psychological changes can include depression, anxiety, bouts of crying, self-doubt, and a lack of self-confidence. Physical changes can include weight loss, lack of appetite and sleep, and an apathetic outlook on life. Social changes occur when, for example, the divorcee becomes excluded from social gatherings once enjoyed with her husband (or partner). These physical, psychological, and social impacts of divorce make the initial experience of divorced life difficult (Bohannon, 1970), and although divorce is devastating for everyone involved, it often has the most detrimental impact on women.
Divorce represents a major loss (Deits, 2009), which influences relationships, roles, routines, and self-concept (Lloyd, Sailor, and Carney, 2014). Loss through divorce can be compared to the death of a loved one because the same grief process occurs. In some cases, divorce can be even more painful than death in that in death the loss is final and there is no hope of bringing the person back. In divorce, however, there may be some hope (however false) that one is able to recover the relationship and unite with the partner.
Emotional impacts of divorce, then, are many and can include anger, destabilization in wondering whether you did the right thing, worry about what family and friends will say and whether sides will be taken, and how one will fare as a single woman (Lloyd et al., 2014). If the woman initiated the divorce, she is likely to experience lower levels of anxiety, loneliness, and depression than if her husband initiates divorce action (Sakraida, 2005), but in either case divorced individuals tend to have lowered immune systems (Sakraida, 2005), making them susceptible to illness and disease.
Women who divorce in midlife typically not only experience the loss of a partner and a sense of family but also changes in their living situation and an uncertain sense of self (Baum, 2003). Due to traditional gender-role socialization patterns, women often experience financial instability and a lower standard of living following divorce (compounded by the irregularity of child support payments because women are also more likely to gain custody of the children). In addition, women who were socialized to believe that it was their duty in life to get married and have a family before all else often lack the skills necessary to be competitive in the labor market. These women also worry about what impact the divorce will have on the children. This decision is especially difficult for midlife women “at the confluence of menopause and empty nest” (McCoyd and Walter, 2016), as they may have decided to wait to divorce until the children were out of school and perhaps out of the family home. Little wonder then that divorce causes considerable upheaval in a woman’s life—the pain of which leads to mourning (Maata, 2011). Paul Bohannen (1970) writes that “emotional divorce results in the loss of a loved one just as fully as does the death of a spouse.” The “natural” reaction to this loss is grief, as human beings mourn the loss of every meaningful relationship. And although outdated and criticized earlier in this text, Kübler-Ross’s five-stage model can be applied to the loss experienced in divorce (Herman, 1974).
Denial, the first stage, sees the newly divorced person not fully comprehending the emotional investments he or she made and then lost in a marriage shared over a period of 5, 10, even 20 or more years. Even though the marriage may have been difficult, there was at one time a meaningful relationship for those involved. Denial functions as a temporary defense against the shock of separation or divorce and the losses associated with it. Denial in the grief process is necessary to help collect oneself and to mobilize other defenses. The time it takes to pass through this stage of grief is determined by the history of the marriage and the degree of positive memories held therein.
The next stage in the grief process is anger. Most often anger or hostility is projected at the ex-spouse, who is blamed for the failure of the marriage, the unhappiness, the confusion, the hurt, the fears, and the loneliness. At times anger is expressed inwardly, which usually leads to depression. For a traditionally socialized woman who has not worked and is not independently wealthy, there is often little or no money readily available immediately following divorce. Besides financial problems, the decision to go to work, move, or assume full responsibility for the care of the children places additional stress on the divorced woman. Lacking money and direction, and sometimes alienated by parents and friends, the traditional woman may find it especially difficult to put her life back together.
The third stage of the grieving process involves bargaining. A divorced woman may second-guess her decision. Could she have done more? If she changes, will her ex-husband return to the marriage? If she continues to feel good about herself, will she be able to make it on her own? As the bargaining continues, the woman becomes less apprehensive about new ways of life and new responsibilities and begins to form more productive relationships.
In the fourth stage of grief, depression, the divorced woman senses a great loss. She now realizes that the full emotional investment she made in the failed marriage, and whatever that marriage meant at one time, is now gone. Her role in relation to the marriage is gone, and with it the old structure, clearing the path for new, more enabling structures to support her future.
The final stage is one of acceptance. The divorced woman has probably been living alone and is more aware of who she is, what she wants, and what she can do. It is now possible for the divorced woman to tell others that she is divorced, without going into details or feeling great remorse. At this point, the woman is able to look back at the marriage realistically, seeing both its good points and its negative ones.
The time it takes to move through these stages is indeterminate. Also, depression does not always occur. Sometimes euphoria is a primary reaction to divorce. For many couples who divorce by mutual consent, divorce provides welcomed and sustained emotional relief. Euphoria arises from the realization that the attachment figure is no longer needed and that one can do very well alone. This is another way to manage the loss; the woman rearranges her emotions so that the loss is much less significant. She no longer needs the spouse, and this realization makes available new opportunities for self-realization (Weiss, 1975).
An Alternate View
However, comparing divorce to death is not a view held by all researchers. Susan Gettleman and Janet Markowitz (1974), authors of Courage to Divorce, do not compare divorce with death. They do not feel that mourning rituals are necessary in divorce, although there is, even in welcomed divorce, a sense of loss. They recognize that a person who is abandoned or divorced against her will is likely to feel a profound sense of regret and anger, but that in many cases divorce is, for the woman, a welcomed solution.
In Gettleman’s view, mourning rituals only enhance feelings of despair and loneliness, and symbolize love and respect for the deceased person. In the case of divorce, why should people mourn the “loss” of someone they prefer to be rid of or have outgrown? How can one think of the spouse as dead when he is around to demand visiting privileges to the children? Mourning is needed to establish the fact that a loved one is gone and is never coming back. Divorce means that two people no longer share their lives, not that they will never see each other again. Gettleman and Markowitz suggest that divorce is not proof of the moral decay of American society, but rather part of the “passing of patriarchies and feminism in America, and of the revolt of women.” Divorce can be loss, but it can also be a transitional point from which to start a life that is more self-realized and conscious than the passive acceptance of dated institutional norms that governed assumptions about sex roles, marriage, and families. As early as the 1970s, Gettleman contended that we were living in a world in which patriarchies and the sex-role ethic that says men work and women clean and care for children, and the countless implications of inequality that accompany such a situation, were “passing.” Authors such as Betty Friedan (The Feminine Mystique, 1963/1997) and a host of other feminists would wholeheartedly agree.
Psychological and Physical Impacts of Divorce
Along with the emotional aspects of divorce, a person will often develop psychological and physical symptoms. In Cabot and Wanderer’s book Letting Go (1987), the authors discuss obsessive, compulsive, depressive, phobic, hysterical, anxious, and psychosomatic symptoms, which a person going through a divorce may develop. Under obsessive symptoms, the lack of ability to concentrate places one’s whole concern on the ex-spouse, wondering whether there is another woman or man involved, guilt over wrong-doings in the marriage, lack of ability to make decisions, and other issues. Compulsive symptoms may include questioning mutual friends about the ex–husband or wife; constantly talking about the lost relationship; suddenly turning very spiritual; drinking, eating, or smoking excessively or relying on drugs; or making preparations for when the spouse will return. Depressive symptoms may include intense fatigue, crying, neglect of duties, feelings of failure and rejection, and basic loss of interest in most activities. Phobic symptoms may include feelings of being closed in, panicking at the thought of meeting new people, needing to be with someone constantly, leaving lights on and doors open, and a generalized fear of many ordinary events. Some hysterical symptoms are irritability; minor concerns causing panic; forgetfulness; carelessness and frequent accidents; and emotional outbursts. Anxiety symptoms may become manifest through difficulty sleeping, eating, and breathing; gritting of teeth; excessive perspiration; and excessive nervousness. All of these problems that may accompany divorce or loss of a meaningful relationship can lead to many actual physical problems that have underlying psychosomatic causes.
Kerry’s Experience of Divorce
The following case study shows the danger of others’ expectations and the traditional expectation that the woman in a marriage is supposed to live to support and fulfill the man’s dreams and not have any dreams of her own. This points toward a probable cause for the frequent incidence of contemporary divorce: the idea people have that others live to fulfill their dreams. The case study looks at this problem from a personal point of view, which is more realistic than theoretical in its analysis. This is Kerry’s story.
I found the statistics on the rising divorce rate interesting, but the figures never really meant much to me. Interesting, yes, but not my problem.
Today, they say approximately every one out of two marriages ends in divorce, and after 21 years our marriage became one of those statistics. This one-out-of-two ratio does have meaning to me now. It’s my reality.
With marriage came a celebration—the birth and bonding of a growing relationship filled with love. With divorce comes grief. Mourning tends to avoid or forget the bad times.
The weather was turning when we reached the decision to divorce. The air was crisp already, and as I sat in the kitchen, gazing out the window, I noticed that the aspens were beginning to change color, and soon the mountain peaks would be splashed with the vibrant colors of fall. I chuckled as I heard the hum of chainsaws in the forest. The woodcutters had arrived again to cut firewood before snow blanketed the forest floor and capped the mountain peaks. And I remembered the wise old Navajo medicine man who also did interpreting where I worked as an emergency room nurse on the Navajo Reservation. He said he always knew when fall was coming. I asked how he could tell (I was sure he had some mystical explanation). And he would say, “Because many white men leave the forest with their U-Haul trailers filled with wood.” This always made me laugh.
There was a chill in the air, though, which brought back the reality of the emptiness around me, and I wondered how I could laugh at a time like this. For a moment, it was as if I had been frozen in my chair. I couldn’t look at or do anything without being reminded of an incident or time in my husband’s and my life. Everything I looked at in our home brought back memories.
It was cold in the house, and I found myself mechanically walking to the bedroom for a sweater. Without thinking, I automatically picked up my favorite one. It was cold like the air around it. Mike had bought it for me when we were in England. It was in the window of the little store next door to the fishing shop where he first discovered fly fishing. I remembered the afternoon he’d given me it. He had gone into town with Ian (one of the British tutors) on the student van that morning to get the fly rod he had admired for some time. While he was there, he stopped by the wool shop and bought me the sweater.
It rained often while we were in England, and I was always chilled during our walks up the long drive of the college to the pub at the end of the road. The sweater felt good back then. Wearing it always brought back pleasant memories, but as I stood in the bedroom doorway now, starting to put on the sweater, the flood of happy memories—and now their loss—really hit me. I took it off the sweater in a hurry and put it in the box I had set out to collect things that I no longer wanted. I suppose I felt that if I discarded the sweater, I could also cast off those old memories. Good memories were too painful now.
So I found an old sweatshirt, put it on instead, and went back to the kitchen for a cup of tea. It seemed to help if each time I thought of a bad memory I tried to think of a pleasant one. Maybe it helped me understand why we had slowly grown apart over the years.
As I sipped some tea, my thoughts shifted back to the college in England. Mike had been a visiting professor at the British campus of the Midwestern University where he taught. One afternoon I was touring Lincoln Cathedral with the American Visiting Professor in Nursing, and she told me of her success arranging a day at St. Christopher’s Hospice and invited me to join her and her six other students. Being a nurse, I was thrilled at this prospect. I had read a little about the hospice concept of care and its beginning at St Christopher’s, but to actually spend a day there was a great opportunity for me to see what was being done for the terminally ill and their families.
That evening I anxiously told my husband of the planned trip, and he reminded me of a tea that had been arranged on the same day by the bursar’s wife for all visiting faculty wives, and I was expected to attend.
I didn’t go with the nursing group to St. Christopher’s.
That was the first time I remember feeling like a possession instead of a partner. Faculty wife teas? Strange how everyone looks so prim and proper and bored to tears, no matter which side of the ocean you are on.
I smiled as I looked at the box of Earl Grey tea sitting in front of me now. At least I had finally developed a taste for good tea, though 10 years had done nothing to improve my interest in faculty wife gatherings.
I thought of the last faculty wife tea I had attended. This one was truly a saccharin society of polyester politeness whose members’ main goal was to get one’s secret recipe published (next to the dean’s wife’s recipe) in the Faculty of G Club Cookbook. Picture nine months of teatime deciding which chocolate cake recipe of the 35 chocolate cake recipes submitted would be published. Who cares which one was the best? Each was best to someone. Was this to be my purpose in life?
Not long after I decided not to attend the faculty wives tea, I began to make my own choices. I just stopped going to teas and started attending emergency care conferences to obtain my emergency room nurse certification. Maybe that’s what I’d done wrong. Someone asked me, when they found out we were getting divorced, “What happened? We thought you two were the perfect couple!”
What happened? How dare they ask that question? That question assumes there’s a short, simple reason to the end a 20-year relationship. What do they want me to say? “Mike didn’t take out the garbage,” or “I didn’t cook chili the way he liked.”
When a relationship dies, it is a slow process and usually a complicated one. The decay in our relationship was both. Sometimes I wish there was an easy answer. Perhaps we could have recognized it sooner and saved ourselves a lot of grief. We both said things that hurt. One of the most sobering things he said to me was “How are you not interested in my dream?” When I first heard his words, I was devastated and I couldn’t do anything but walk away. I was tired of arguing, and the only release that seemed to help was to jump in the car and drive away. I had no idea where I was going, but I just had to leave. I kept on driving until I saw a road sign saying Cottage Grove Lake. It was an exhausting drive, and I was glad I was tired, because I fell asleep as soon as I got to the hotel room. I guess I saw driving away as an escape.
I awoke at 5:00 a.m. and looked out on the lake. It was still and peaceful, and I kept replaying his comment. Didn’t he understand that I was denying myself dreams of my own, and I just could not do that anymore?
Medical problems and other life events were all given as reasons for our problems at one time or another, but as I look back, these were only crises that brought out the real problems between us.
Everyone hugs you when your husband dies. Very few hug you when you get a divorce. I never realized how much that meant until my father came from San Francisco to help me close up the house. When I picked him up at the airport, he didn’t say anything. It was so nice not to feel like I had to defend myself. People were busy rushing here and there, and Dad just stood there in the middle of the airport and hugged me for a long time. It felt so comforting.
The day I returned home from a relative’s funeral was the day my husband chose to discuss our divorce. At the airport. It wasn’t the only bad memory I had. I remember a day he came home angry from work because a female colleague was fighting his idea for making some changes. I asked him how he was going to convince her that it was really a good idea and he said, “I’m going to intimidate the hell out of her!” He said she was crying in someone’s office a few days later, and now she had moved on. That happened to me too. The intimidation always came when we were alone. No one else saw it, and no one will ever know.
After I moved away, waking up in the middle of the night to new surroundings, I was confused and frightened. For a few months after the divorce, I kept having dreams of how things used to be. One dream is especially vivid to me. We were cross-country skiing past the pine trees by our home. I fell (as usual) and my husband collided with me. We tried in vain to get our skis untangled (our athletic teenagers called us Laurel and Hardy), and we lay there in the snow, exhausted and laughing. I awoke from the dream laughing. I didn’t know where I was. Then I realized that it was a dream, and I started crying.
I guess that dream was my way of trying to hold onto the good times. Maybe it was also my way of denying that the good times were now gone.
Sometime later I had another dream. I had moved away and started back to work. The dream was so strange. My ex-husband, Mike, was lying in a bed dying. His every feature was clear. I was looking through a window in a door, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t open the door. He was just lying there. He was alive, but I couldn’t reach him.
I don’t dream much anymore except when we have to communicate about our children or business matters. Then there seems to be a period of about a week or two when I seem to experience the entire process of the loss, the grief, and the letting go again. The last significant dream occurred just a few weeks ago, and it was a nightmare.
Something had happened to one of our children, and I called to let Mike know. I didn’t feel like I was speaking to a person. It felt as though I was leaving a message on an answering machine. For the first time, talking with him made me feel cold and empty. That night I had another nightmare. I was looking down at Mike’s face and arms, and I was screaming because his face was decaying—just rotting away before my eyes.
The next day I called Roger, an old friend back East. I told him about the dream I’d had the night before. First he went on to explain his own divorce grief and how he had handled it. “Treat grief like the weather, Kerry,” he said. “When the weather is extreme and harsh, you must do things to protect yourself, like putting on a jacket or rain hat. But when the weather eases, enjoy the comfortable feeling. You’ll notice that these comfortable times will slowly be more frequent and last longer, like the unpredictability of spring weather as it passes into summer.”
Roger and I talked about grief and the passing of time. Then he asked me to think about the three dreams that I had discussed with him. He said the last dream was a good sign, and I snapped at him and said he had a sick sense of humor. He didn’t laugh. He just said no, that I had acknowledged the bad times and was finally letting go of the good times.
It has been a year and a half since my divorce, and I find difficulty trusting all relationships now. That really bothers me because in the past I found it extremely easy to trust. I asked myself why trust is so difficult now. To have faith in someone leaves you vulnerable to pain. But to never trust leaves you empty. I want to have faith again, but it takes time. Building or rebuilding relationships with friends and family are necessary for all of us in life, but right now, for me, relationships are like roses. You want to get close enough to enjoy their beauty, but you are afraid of the thorns.
Kerry’s experience shows some of the problems associated with a woman’s traditional role and her husband’s expectation regarding his wife being there to fulfill his dreams. This points to the unrealistic portrait of romantic love that the mass media has perpetuated. Simply put, it is unreasonable to expect anyone to fulfill one’s dreams—except one’s self. We must take care of ourselves first, become whole in ourselves first.
The expectation of a traditional role for Kerry, which she seemed to fulfill for a time in the marriage, failed when she transitioned into a more modern role of making her own decisions and choices to fulfill her own needs for education and career. At midlife, this transition for women as their children leave or have left home is not uncommon.
Divorce2 can mark a transition to renewal and a process of reassessing goals and priorities, from which growth occurs. One doesn’t really ever “get over” divorce. The former spouse remains part of one’s personal history (Deits, 2009). Releasing your attachment to the former spouse does not mean that you forget or deny the importance he or she has had (and may continue to have) in your life. Deits suggests that it is not unusual to need a year or more to begin recovering a healthy self-image. And it takes a strong sense of purpose and direction to get through divorce in a healthy manner.
“To ‘go through’ grief is to ‘grow through’ grief” (Deits, 2009, p. 92). Deits reminds us that reaching for a new life means giving yourself permission to reorient your interests and activities in new directions—congruent with Attig’s (2011) concept of reweaving the tapestry of one’s life as an essential part of relearning one’s world after loss.
Research indicates that the divorce rate in the United States is highest in the world at 54.8 percent (Nugman, 2002).3 Forty-three percent of marriages end up in separation or divorce within 15 years, 33 percent within 10 years of marriage, and 20 percent within five years of marriage. Bramlett et al (2001) indicate that the duration of marriage is influenced by age at the time of marriage. The older the woman is at the time of her first marriage, the longer the marriage is likely to last.4 However, an article in the New York Times (December 2014), presenting research conducted by economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, tells a somewhat different story.5 Trends indicate that the high divorce rates of the late 1970s and 1980 are falling for couples wed in the 2000s. Some factors attributed to that trend include women marrying later and entering the workforce later.
Notes
1. “Gray” divorce, labeled in the United States in 2004, is initiated by females in 66 percent of cases. Older adults account for the overall increase in divorces in the United Kingdom. Reasons offered for the increase include infidelity of older husbands due to the availability of anti-impotence drugs, human longevity, cultural values of the baby boomers, and women’s increasing financial independence (Brown, 2015).
2. Statistics Canada indicates that divorce rates in Canada continue to decline (a decrease by 8 percent from 2006 to 2011, dropping steadily each year). Report author Mary Bess Kelly pointed to several factors: “The proportion of married couples has been steadily decreasing over the past 20 years while common-law unions are becoming more numerous,” as are lone-parent families, which have proliferated since the mid-1960s (Kelly, 2012).
3. G. Nugman (2002), “World Divorce Rate,” Nugman, Gulnar of the Heritage Foundation, 2002, http://www.divorcereform.org/gul.html.
4. M. Bramlett and W. Mosher (2001), First Marriage Dissolution, Divorce, and Remarriage: United States. Advance Data 323, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, May 31, https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/ad/ad323.pdf.
5. Claire Cain Miller (2014), “The Divorce Surge Is Over, but the Myth Lives On,” Upshot, New York Times data blog, December 2, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/02/upshot/the-divorce-surge-is-over-but-the-myth-lives-on.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur&bicmp=AD&bicmlukp=WT.mc_id&bicmst=1409232722000&bicmet=1419773522000&_r=4&abt=0002&abg=0.