STEP 5
create your happily-even-after life
It’s understandable to fight for a bigger slice of the pie, but it’s admirable to fight for a bigger pie.
GLENNON DOYLE MELTON
In this fifth and final step of your Conscious Uncoupling program, you will be supported to make wise, healthy, and life-affirming decisions as you take on the essential tasks of reinventing your life and setting up vital new structures that will allow you and all involved to thrive after this transition.
Having been consumed with the many crises brought about by the loss of love, you may not yet be fully aware of the beautiful life that is waiting for you on the other side of grief. And while your new life may look little like the one you left behind, your goal is not to try to create a better version of what you once had, but to expand what’s now possible to include fresh new horizons, friends, and interests—and the exploration of forgotten, yet promising possibilities.
All leading you, and those you love, safely home to your happily-even-after life.
In Step 5, Create Your Happily-Even-After Life, you will:
• Complete the old agreements your relationship was founded upon and generate new ones more appropriate to the form it’s now taking.
• Create cohesion and alignment with your community at large to ensure a supportive and nourishing environment in which to reinvent your life.
• Learn how you can engage a heartwarming and meaningful Conscious Uncoupling ceremony that liberates and empowers you, your former partner, and all involved to move on with loving and conscious completion.
• Discover wholesome, healthy, and cooperative ways to care for the kids, divide your property, and navigate the legal process that will ensure all involved are set up to win moving forward.
In his dialogue the Symposium, the great philosopher Plato referred to love as the child of fullness and of emptiness. While we’d all love to spend the majority of our days reveling in the fullness of love, we will each have our time of entering emptiness as well, for none of us can escape the cyclical nature of life and of love. Though this breakup is not what you had hoped for, it is what you’ve been given. And if you are wise, at some point you’ll know to cease your battle against the inevitable, lay down the sword of your discontent, and soften your heart into a state of simple surrender and accept life on its own terms.
As resistant as we are to move into emptiness, once there we may find it a rather peaceful place to be. In letting go, you become not only empty of the life you once lived and the person you once were in your relationship, but also empty of petty, mean thoughts, reactive and hurtful impulses, the torturous chatter of disempowering and only-partially-true stories, and festering toxic emotions such as shame, destructive guilt, or self-hatred. While many fear entering the abyss of this hollowed (or perhaps hallowed?) terrain, this particular emptiness is, of course, a pregnant void, one that is filled with creative potential. As the Sufi poet Rumi once said, “It looks like the end, it seems like a sunset, but in reality it is a dawn.”
How do these geese know when to fly to the sun? Who tells them the seasons? How do we, humans, know when it is time to move on? As with the migrant birds, so surely with us, there is a voice within…that tells us when to go forth into the unknown.
ELISABETH KÜBLER-ROSS
The best part of the worst thing in the world actually happening is that it liberates you to reimagine. Though you may have fought against this moment with all of your might, you could find that surrendering into the sheer spaciousness of it offers surprising relief. Who you are, what you love, and how you spend your time are suddenly up for reinvention. You might even wake up to the delightful fact that you’re now free to re-create your life in ways that are true to your deeper longings, core values, authentic interests, and higher callings. Bettering your life significantly by assimilating all you’ve gained and learned in your former relationship, as you stretch to find a future that’s worthy of all you’ve endured.
Agreements 2.0
At the heart of each bond lies a series of agreements, some consciously consented to and some simply assumed. In fact, it could be said that the very definition of a relationship is to enter into a complex set of pacts and promises that inform how much of our hearts and souls we will invest in one another, and the level of expectations we should have of ourselves and each other. Promises of devotion such as “You will be my one and only love in this lifetime,” “I will always be there for you,” or “I will be faithful to you all the days of my life” serve as intentions that take on a life of their own, setting in motion habits and relational dynamics that make it easier to live day-in, day-out inside of the confines of that partnership. Yet, these agreements, often made in earnest and with great emotion, can pull on us long after the relationship has ended, leaving us ambivalent, divided, and somewhat handicapped moving forward.
Your present circumstances don’t determine where you can go; they merely determine where you start.
NIDO QUBEIN
Emily, an attractive and intelligent forty-eight-year-old entrepreneur, had been divorced from her husband for over ten years. Though he had long ago remarried and started a new family, she had not dated in all that time. She came to me to try to figure out why. As we sat and spoke about her life—her hopes, dreams, history, and hardships—it occurred to me to explore the vows she’d made to her former husband on their wedding day. Midway through sharing memories of their ceremony, she suddenly gasped. “Oh, no,” she exclaimed, eyes wide. “I’ve been keeping my vow of fidelity to him! All these years, I’ve been loyal to the promises I made to him at the altar.” Having been raised Catholic, she’d been taught that marriage was for life. While on a conscious level she had different ideals, deep down she was steadfastly faithful to the vow she took before God, her husband, and their family and friends. Though they’d not spoken for nearly a decade, she decided to call him later that day. Surprised to hear from her, he was fortunately gracious and kind as she shared that she would no longer keep her vow of fidelity to him. Though obvious, the opportunity to say it directly and receive his blessing in return liberated her to finally start dating again.
To truly be free, you’ll want to carefully consider the agreements upon which your old relationship was founded, and adjust the expectations you have of yourself and your former partner to be more appropriate to the decision you’ve made to go your separate ways. Expectations that he will always be your rock, that she will never love anyone like she loves you, that he is your source for financial well-being, that she is the one who takes care of you when you’re sick, that he is your safe space, that she will always put your needs before everyone else’s—these must be brought to light and consciously evolved to fit the new future you are now each required to create.
There’s a trick to the graceful exit….It means leaving what’s over without denying its validity or its past importance to our lives. It involves a sense of the future, a belief that every exit is an entry, that we are moving up, rather than out.
ELLEN GOODMAN
In his book Your Brain at Work, Dr. David Rock asserts that maintaining the right expectations is central to living a happy, healthy life. It feels good when our expectations are met. In fact, when what we anticipate should happen does, the dopamine in our brains lights up circuitry just as surely as if we’d injected a dose of morphine into our veins. We feel as though we are on track in life and that all is well in our world. On the other hand, unmet expectations generate a large drop in dopamine levels, instigating a threat response in our brains. This accounts for some of the torment of a bad breakup, where the shock of failed expectations can expose us to painful and perpetual little losses as we hope in vain for the restoration of the solid ground of the old agreements, and we are met with disappointment again and again.
In light of this (and this is likely to be one of the few times you’ll ever hear me say as much), it’s important you lower your expectations, adjusting them to be much more appropriate to your current circumstances. Let yourself off the hook for the agreements your relationship was once based upon, so that you might consciously create new, more suitable ones. Generating new contracts that can safely passage you both to your new lives, whether you’re transitioning to a new form of the relationship such as cooperative co-parents, lifelong friends, or thriving business partners, or simply moving toward a kind goodbye.
When you get stranded, the way to start moving again is not to search for an answer, but to find a new question to which your life can be the answer.
JENNIFER KRAUSE
ASK YOURSELF:
“What agreements did I make to my former partner that are no longer appropriate for me to keep?”
For example: “I will wait for you for as long as it takes,” “I will never love anyone like I love you,” “You are my one and only soul mate.” “What agreements did my former partner make to me that are no longer appropriate for me to expect him or her to fulfill?”
For example: “I will be responsible for your happiness in life,” “I will always take care of you emotionally,” “I will bail you out whenever you get into trouble.”
“What new agreements can I make instead that are aligned with the new future I am committed to creating?”
For example: “I will always honor you as the father of my children and support your relationship with them,” “I will always treasure our precious time spent together as intimate partners,” “You will always be a part of my extended family, and I will encourage all of my family to continue having a good and loving relationship with you.”
Note: In cases where you are doing the Conscious Uncoupling process alone and are unable to share directly with your former partner, you can communicate these changes with him or her in a Soul-to-Soul Communication (see Step 3), imagining yourself having a heart-to-heart conversation where you complete your old agreements and create new ones that match the future you are now committed to creating.
Creating Community Cohesion
Sophie and her partner, Mary, had been together for nearly a decade when it became apparent to them both that it was time to go their separate ways. Like many couples, their social networks were intricately tied to one another, and they found themselves reticent to cause a cold war by pulling on their friends to take sides. One Sunday, when Mary was out of town visiting a family member, Sophie found herself having brunch with a handful of their mutual friends. None of them knew that the couple was breaking up, largely because Sophie and Mary had kept their process private up to this point. Yet, Sophie felt it was time to “come out of the closet,” so to speak, and took the opportunity to confide in them what was going on. Shocked and upset by the startling news, several of her friends began to take barbs at the absent Mary, covertly criticizing her to demonstrate their support and loyalty to Sophie. Yet, Sophie wisely stopped and redirected them, reminding them that there are two sides to every story, and that Mary was hurting as much as she. Rather than take sides, she admonished them to pray for both of them, reiterating that they’d both need their friends to be there for them each step of the way.
In their fervent desire to help minimize your pain, your family and friends may quickly turn against your former partner, revealing all sorts of negative opinions and feelings you had no idea they harbored. Their impulse to do so is usually well meaning, motivated solely by the instinct to offer emotional support. You may have even trained them to disparage your former partner in the months leading up to your separation, pulling on people to collude with your victimized perspective. While at first this display of social solidarity may cushion you from the blow of the breakup, ostracizing your former partner by fanning the flames of blame, such condemnation can easily have the far-reaching and negative consequence of making it virtually impossible to transition the union successfully to a healthy new form. While your primitive nature might want to boot someone out of your shared social circle as punishment for the crime of not loving you in the ways you’ve needed to be loved, doing damage to someone’s overall sense of belonging in the world by getting others to reject that person is just as harmful as if you broke her arm or bashed her head with a frying pan. Truly, it’s a form of violence.
Dr. Naomi Eisenberger from UCLA studied the effects of social rejection on our brains. To do this, she designed an experiment where participants’ brains were hooked up to a scanning machine while they played a computer game called Cyberball. Cyberball is a simple ball-tossing game supposedly played by three people on the Internet—the virtual equivalent of an elementary school playground game. Participants can see their own avatar as well as two others for the “people” they believed they were playing with. At some point, the two playmates begin tossing the ball only to each other, completely ignoring the subject. “This experiment generates intense emotions for most people,” Dr. Eisenberger reports. “What we found is that when people [are] excluded, you see activity in…the neural regions [of the brain] that are also involved in the distressing component of pain, or what sometimes people call the ‘suffering component’ of pain.” Social rejection—or the feeling of not belonging, of being less than others, unwanted, and an outcast—activates the same brain regions as physical pain. In fact, not just one but five different brain regions that signal physical pain light up as a result of being left out of a simple ball-tossing game, indicating that social pain can be truly agonizing.
Many of your friends and family members will just assume they’ll need to now turn against your former partner to demonstrate their loyalty to you, and you may need to train them in much the same way Sophie did. When I first told my mother that Mark and I had decided to divorce, she did what any loving mother would do—she began to covertly devalue him and our relationship as a way of showing her faithful support of me. Yet, the moment she slipped into that hole, I pulled her out of it. I thanked her for her love and support. But I explained that I wanted to do this differently from most folks. I wanted us to remember that Mark was the only father her granddaughter would ever have, and as such, I wanted us to always speak well of him and support him in his life. While he was not a perfect man, I confessed that I myself was a pretty imperfect woman. I explained that we were more interested in creating a healthy future for our changing family than we were in laying blame. I let her know that the division of our assets was not going to be a fight, and that we would both come into the conversation wanting to do the right thing for the right reasons, looking out for the well-being of everyone involved, and not just ourselves. Then I asked her to join me in this conscious, kind way of ending our marriage. While she may have been a bit confused at what seemed to her a radically new way to conclude a marriage, I believe she was also relieved. She didn’t have to lose her son-in-law. She just had to get used to the fact that he was no longer going to be married to her daughter.
Relationships have two distinct faces. One is obviously the very private connection that two people share—the secret language of love that most reveals itself between the lines and between the sheets. Yet the other face is the public aspect of love: who a couple is for those who have grown with them over the years, those who stood for them when they took their vows, those who’ve broken bread with them on Thanksgiving, or those who’ve come to rely on them as pillars of the community. Relationships don’t just belong to the two people who are in them. They belong to an entire network of others who may now have a lot of feelings about the dismantling of that partnership. Part of the wreckage of a “broken home” are the investments others have made in that union, who may feel bereft, betrayed, or unglued by its loss.
Conscious Uncoupling is about mindfully generating well-being for all who may be impacted by your breakup, carefully creating cohesion and alignment in your extended network of family and friends, and helping everyone to adjust to the new status of your relationship. One couple who had been together for three years, Dr. Sheri Meyers and Jonathon Aslay, both highly regarded relationship experts, announced their breakup on Facebook with the following post:
Dear Friends and Beloved Community,
It is with deep sadness that we announce a change in our relationship status. While we are soulmates and still love each other dearly, we both recognize that walking down the romantic path together is not our lifelong destiny. Sometimes, even with great love, getting all the relationship pieces to fall into place doesn’t always work out. Thus, with deep sorrow, we have decided to end the romantic leg of our journey.
We are parting with gentleness and respect…celebrating the profound and rich lessons learned, and with gratitude for the amazing love and blessings shared too numerous to count. We’re dedicated to learning how to uncouple with dignity and grace that honors our time together and the love we’ve shared.
Currently, we are each navigating how much space we need to fully return to our “I” after being so strongly identified with our “we.” We’re also aware there are some potentially uncomfortable emotional hurdles to navigate ahead as we both enter single life. But we are in communication and committed to parting with love. While we are both sad, we are also hopeful that we can and will continue to consciously uncouple with great love and re-create our relationship in a form that will last a lifetime.
We ask our dear friends and community to respect our privacy and allow us the time and space to heal and process this big change in our lives.
With great love,
Sheri & Jonathon
In the weeks following, both of them made sure to respond to one another’s posts with encouraging words, demonstrating their high regard, respect, and mutual support of one another publicly. Today, they are both in new relationships, recently posting a picture of them both joined by their respective new partners. While not everyone is going to be able to transition their union so graciously, Sheri and Jonathon’s modeling of this possibility is admirable.
To help create well-being and cohesion in your social circles when telling people about your breakup, I offer the following suggestions:
1. MAINTAIN YOUR DIGNITY
Remember that inside the happily-ever-after myth that was created roughly three hundred years ago, most people simply assume that relationships are supposed to last “till death do us part.” When a couple ends their relationship for any reason other than one or both of you die, many will automatically relate to it as a “failure of love.”
When you bump into the brick wall of this bias, both in yourself and others, try not to take it personally. Instead, see it as a programmed collective ideal of love that made sense in its time, but that is not necessarily appropriate to your lives now. Hold your head high, and recognize that breakups are hard enough without holding others and ourselves accountable to a standard that may no longer be aligned with your true values and callings in life. Recognize yourself as part of a growing movement of like-minded individuals who also are midwifing this new, more enlightened way of ending a romantic union, and stand strong in your resolve to relate to your changing relationship as valuable and worthy of respect.
2. SHOW RESTRAINT IN HOW YOU RELAY YOUR STORY
In the aftermath of a traumatic event such as a breakup, most of us will have the need to tell our stories to help us integrate and come to terms with what just happened. Yet in sharing your story with others, you may be tempted to tell it from a victimized perspective by pointing your finger at everything your former partner did wrong. It’s easy to fall into this trap, because most likely he or she did some hurtful, irritating, and destructive things. Yet, please remember that it’s in taking personal responsibility for the many ways you unconsciously conspired with your partner and co-created what happened that you’ll access the power you will need to create a different experience in the future.
The way to make a mountain out of a mole hill is to add dirt.
ANONYMOUS
When you speak disrespectfully of your former partner, you not only diminish that person but you diminish yourself as well. Whenever you share from a victimized and reactive place, you risk losing the respect of others. They will likely begin feeling sorry for you rather than admire you for the gracious and deeply wise human being that you are. In a subtle way, you may actually cause others to be less invested in supporting you because you are using them as a dumping ground, and they feel that. They may be sympathetic at first, but eventually they may not be able to help and will just watch the clock, wondering how much “supportive friend time” they’re on the hook for.
If you can’t say anything nice, at least have the decency to be vague.
SUSAN ANDERSEN
On the other hand, if you can speak from a nonreactive and responsible place, without pulling on them to have to suddenly begin disliking your former partner to prove their loyalty to you, you will not only gain the respect of others but may also inspire them to have better endings themselves by the good modeling you provide.
My mother, who’d had a pretty nasty divorce from my stepfather some twenty-five years before witnessing the kind and conscious way that Mark and I uncoupled, was so moved by the experience that she was inspired to offer an olive branch to her former husband in spite of the cold war that had festered for decades. Out of the blue, she called him up one cold and frosty morning and invited him, along with my brother Scott, to visit her in her Florida home during a particularly harsh winter. Shocked by her kindness, he accepted the invitation and he and Scott joined her for a fun family holiday together, melting away years of animosity between them. Proving that it’s never too late to have a Conscious Uncoupling.
3. OFFER CLEAR GUIDANCE TO OTHERS ON HOW THEY SHOULD BEHAVE
To defuse a potential division in your community, make sure to take the lead in letting others know that they need not take sides. Give people permission to maintain their relationships with both of you regardless of how tempted you may be to split your friends and family down the middle. Because once that happens, it could take years, even decades, to repair the damage, if at all.
My mother and father divorced when I was only two years old, and like most divorcing couples of their day, they disliked each other with a vengeance. Their enmity didn’t end until forty years later when I was visiting my mother and my father stopped by to take me to lunch. I suddenly found myself in the rare position of having them both in the same room at the same time. So excited was I to finally be in this unusual position that I forced them to stand on either side of me and smile for the camera, producing the one and only photograph I have to this day of the three of us together.
For me, the worst part of this story was not just the loss of cohesion I felt as a child, but also the loss of my extended family that was caught in the crossfire. I spent the better part of my early adult life trying to rekindle lost connections with grandparents, uncles, and cousins. Relationships that, frankly, would have been a great asset to me while growing up. Today, while my parents have never become friends, I’m glad to say that there is more civility between them. Yet the years when war raged between them are forever lost between us.
Given the history of antagonistic separations in my family, it was no surprise that when Mark and I chose to end our marriage, some assumed he was now moving into enemy territory. It took time to make it clear this was not the case and to train people on how they needed to behave. In the first couple of years, some were deeply confused by the holidays that Mark and I continued to spend together with our daughter, Alexandria. And when I invited Mark to join us on a weekend trip to visit Grandma and Grandpa so our daughter could enjoy a day when all of her family was together, people were downright dismayed.
Yet the kindness and civility of this new approach intrigued them, and as a result, they all eventually opened up and allowed Mark back into their hearts. Today we are one happy, healthy “expanded family,” and Mark gets invited to family gatherings and Christmas Eve dinners along with everyone else. And his family, too, has taken his lead by inviting me to join them in their family activities.
Let’s Just Be Friends
Melissa, a thirty-four-year-old soft-spoken, thoughtful, and intelligent woman from New York, was struggling to come to terms with the fact that her boyfriend of three years had recently told her he wanted to demote their relationship to a mere friendship, rather than take things to the next level, as she’d hoped. The vision board that hung fading on the wall of her walk-in closet, with its images of laughing flower girls, a silhouette of a bride and her adoring groom, and a bright, brilliant diamond ring seemed to mock her each time she changed clothes. Deflated, and with only the hope that he would change his mind to keep her company at night, she desperately tried to figure out how to accommodate his desire. Yet being relegated to the status of friend felt like being asked to move into the small basement apartment of a beautiful house she once lived in and loved. Caught between the choice of losing him completely or “just being friends,” she was paralyzed to do much beyond reluctantly agreeing to the latter. When I asked her, however, what authentic gestures of friendship he’d extended her way, she admitted that he basically wanted the same sexual privileges he’d always had, yet without the responsibilities of fidelity or offering any hope for a shared future. “And how is that being your friend?” I asked—a question to which she had no good answer.
Let us forget, with generosity, those who cannot love us.
PABLO NERUDA
True friendship is earned, one kind and selfless gesture at a time, until trust builds a home in one another’s hearts. While Conscious Uncoupling promotes a friendly parting of the ways, it is not to be confused with advocating for a transition to true friendship, which some might consider a promotion, rather than demotion, from erotic love. Aristotle believed friendship to be the purest form of love, far elevated beyond sexual love, and he described it as wishing and doing well to another for his own sake, relating to someone as though he were a second self. He called this kind of love philia: where one loves another for the person that he is, and not because he is useful to him in some way. As a breakup is often the emotional equivalent of being banished, accompanied by the desperate, frantic need to hold on at all costs, the impulse then toward “friendship” may not necessarily be the desire to extend authentic care to another, as much as the impetus to avoid the existential annihilation that comes with the death of intimate love. One’s motives for this sudden large-hearted gesture of lifelong devotion are often questionable, as they are easily mingled with the self-serving agenda of self-preservation, making the desire to remain “friends” the antithesis of true friendship. Authentic friendship is the willingness to sacrifice oneself in meaningful ways for the benefit of another, and not simply a flippant alternative to being lovers. Clearly, Melissa’s former love was not seeking to extend himself in any real way to care for her true needs, as much as he was cushioning himself against the blow of having to bear the consequences of the choice he was making to end the relationship.
Consistent, small, and considerate gestures of thoughtfulness are required to truly transition to friendship. Recently, I was fortunate to share a meal with Chris Attwood and his former wife, Janet Attwood, at a local restaurant. As we waited for the valet to retrieve our cars, someone offered to take our picture. In that moment, we all stopped talking, looked at the camera, and smiled. Yet, just before the shot was taken, Janet suddenly stepped away from Chris and ran over to stand on my left, putting me between the two of them. She leaned in and whispered in my ear, “I never stand next to Chris when our picture is taken, as I wouldn’t want his wife to be uncomfortable. I always want her to feel respected by me.” The friendship these two have maintained after their divorce did not happen just by chance. Theirs is a bond built one thoughtful gesture at a time over the many years they’ve remained friends. I was deeply moved when a former partner of mine, someone whom I’d disappointed quite a bit by ending our relationship, came to my aid upon hearing that I’d taken ill some months after our separation. Putting aside his own feelings, he showed up consistently to care for me over the months that I was sick, demonstrating true friendship in a time of need. Because of this, he remains a good and cherished friend to this day. In the wise and immortal words of Julia Roberts, “You know it’s love when all you want is that person to be happy, even if you’re not part of their happiness.”
While you might hope with all your heart to transition your sexual relationship to a platonic one, I will warn you that biology will work against you. For nature has designed it that, for weeks or months to come, the scent of his cologne, the touch of her hand, the sound of his laugh, or the sight of her smile can change your body’s chemistry in a heartbeat, flooding you with chemicals that instigate that state of euphoria that comes with falling in love. Because of this, most experts advise a clean break of at least a few months, and possibly more whenever possible, in order to detox from the chemically addictive aspects of love.
Be prepared to give the relationship some much-needed breathing room by taking time apart to reorient yourself to the changes between you. Granted, this may be easier said than done, particularly if you share children. Yet, if you must see one another, please remember that touch of any kind can be confusing. For this reason, I usually recommend no kissing or handholding. Even the running of flirtatious energy can keep the hormones flowing, so do your best to keep your emotional and sexual boundaries clean. Rather than run to your former partner for comfort when you’re down, find new confidants. Don’t confide in him or her about the troubles you’re now having in your love life. Make sure your communication is clear of any mixed messages or motives. Keep your conversations simple and focused on the tasks at hand, remembering to cultivate a more formal position with one another until such time as you both feel ready to dip your toes in the waters of potential platonic friendship.
For the Sake of the Kids
Many of us grew up during the seventies and eighties when the divorce rate more than doubled in America, and we ourselves lived through the nasty and contentious breakup of our parents. In the late 1960s, no-fault divorce opened the floodgates for the dissolution of marriages without having to prove abuse, abandonment, or infidelity. All hell broke loose as angry couples began raising their kids in a courtroom, rather than a community. Study after study showed the negative effects that divorce had upon children from broken homes, reporting on those who were sandwiched between the constant animosity and enmity of their warring parents, who often used them as weapons against each other. Those studies were accurate. I can personally attest to it. I was one of those kids, and we were plenty messed up. We were partying into the wee hours of the morning long before we even knew what wisdom teeth were, and we were having sex before we knew what a condom looked like. We were sneaking out at night, running away from home, clipping our classes, stealing money from our parents’ wallets, and smoking Marlboro cigarettes in dark, dank basements. Many of us were depressed, anxious, aggressive, and failing at school. We developed eating disorders. And we later went on to have unstable, troubled relationships. It’s assumed, of course, that it was the divorce that did us in. Yet, truthfully, any time kids find themselves in the middle of two highly contentious parents who pull on them to take sides and model morally questionable behaviors, they’re going to wind up in deep doo-doo.
Well-known author of The Seven Principles of Making Marriage Work, Dr. John Gottman, most known for his pioneering work in creating healthy marriages, did an interesting study with sixty-three preschool children who were living in intact homes with high levels of conflict and strife. He found that these children had chronically elevated levels of stress hormones not found in other kids. Following them through the age of fifteen, he also discovered they had the kinds of problems I describe above, such as chronic truancy, peer rejection, flunking out of school, and lower achievement than those kids whose home life was harmonious and peaceful. In other words, whenever children live in a war zone, they suffer, whether their parents are married or not.
I wish the days of parents’ acting like kindergarteners fighting in a sandbox were long gone, but unfortunately they are not. Recently, a survey was done in England by Resolution, an organization that supports a nonconfrontational approach to divorce; it showed that roughly one-third of the teens and young adults questioned had experienced one parent’s trying to turn them against the other. Over a quarter said their parents directly involved them in their divorce dispute, and almost as many discovered that their mom or dad had a new partner from social media. Perhaps most heartbreaking of all was the discovery that nearly one in five said they’d completely lost contact with one or more of their grandparents. If this is how we’re behaving at the end of love, then the term “broken family” certainly applies.
I’d like to impress you by telling you that I never behaved as poorly as these other parents did. Yet, I must confess that creating my happily-even-after family has been more of a process than an event. When Mark and I first married, I embraced his daughter, Sarah, who was just entering her teen years and lived several hours away with her mom, Mark’s former wife, Anne. One Thanksgiving, when our daughter, Alex, was just a toddler, we invited Sarah to join us for dinner, as we knew that she and her mother were coming to town. At first she agreed, but as the day grew closer and she saw that her mom would be alone on Thanksgiving, she called her father and asked if we could invite her, too. While Mark liked the idea, I did not and I said a firm and not-to-be-argued-with “no.” That Thanksgiving we did not see Sarah. She’d chosen instead to go for pizza with her mom rather than dine with us.
In many ways, this episode was the start of the ideas I share in this book. I was rightly ashamed of my behavior, and I reflected deeply upon my stinginess. Because of it, Sarah and Alex had missed an important holiday together. And why? Because I felt threatened? Competitive? Anne wasn’t trying to get my husband back. While I wasn’t a big enough person at the time to pick up the phone and apologize to Anne directly, I changed my tune. From then on, Anne was always invited to our home for holiday celebrations along with Sarah.
Life always waits for some crisis to occur before revealing itself at its most brilliant.
PAULO COELHO
For the past several years, it’s become traditional that we all spend Christmas together. Sarah’s now grown and lives in another state, but each year she flies home and she and Anne make the five-hour road trip to our home. It’s something we all look forward to, and our girls have had the opportunity to build a sweet relationship over the years. Anne and I have become friends as well. Several years ago, as we all sat around the living room on Christmas Eve, enjoying the soft glow of the decorated tree, my daughter curled up next to me and whispered in my ear. “Mommy,” she said, “can I ask Anne to be my godmother? I want to have the same mommy that my sister has,” to which I replied a heartfelt and wholehearted “yes,” solidifying Anne’s place further in our eccentric and ever-expanding happily-even-after family.
While we may be able to undo a marriage, we can never undo a family without leaving the children in that family emotionally homeless. With all we’re now learning about attachment theory and our critical need for secure and stable bonds throughout our lives in order to be happy, healthy people, we have to seriously rethink how we behave at the end of long-term love. Two decades ago, Dr. Constance Ahrons, author of the pioneering bestseller The Good Divorce, demonstrated that it’s not so much the divorce itself, but the profoundly barbaric and decidedly uncreative ways that we’ve been going about it that have been hurting our kids. Even so-called amicable divorces may be getting it wrong. While they’re certainly an improvement over un-amicable divorces, any time we create two separate families where once there was one, we’re setting our children up to suffer. Expecting them to go from family to family is essentially asking them to be in a perpetual state of longing and loss, always having to say goodbye to one family in order to rejoin the other. No wonder children pine for their parents to get back together. They’re yearning for wholeness in their constantly fragmenting little worlds. In a Conscious Uncoupling, there is only one family that endures a recalibration and expansion, and it demands that the parents accomplish the necessary growth and emotional maturation to elegantly execute such a transition, rather than expecting the children to do so.
I admit it is growth by gunpoint, but welcome to parenthood.
Dr. Ahrons even gave us a name for this new family structure: binuclear families. Rather than a nuclear family that revolves around one physical location, you now have a binuclear family that revolves around two. When you think about it, it’s not that new a concept. When Aunt Sue finally gets her own apartment and leaves her parents’ home after living there for over two decades, she doesn’t stop being part of the family, even if her continual fighting with her mother instigated her move. She simply moves into a new home and everyone remains one family. Her mother may have to adjust to Aunt Sue’s rebellious insistence that she now run her own life, but adjust she will, for it is the nature of families to accommodate the growth and life changes of its members.
It’s never easy to disappoint our children. Yet, the opportunity to develop wisdom and depth begins when we’re young. Children can’t be shielded from the inevitable losses of life; instead, they need to be offered a tremendous amount of love and support as they go through them, as well as wise guidance to help make empowered meaning of what’s happening, lest they blame themselves. Another dear friend and colleague, parenting expert and author of Parenting with Presence, marriage and family therapist Susan Stiffelman, offers this sane advice:
One of the most difficult things about being a parent is allowing for the fact that our children may have different experiences than we want them to have. When they’re angry or hurt, we want to help them feel better. When they’re blaming us for their sadness (“If you had been nicer to Mommy, we’d all still be together in the same house!”), we want to defend ourselves. When they withdraw, we may desperately want to cheer them up. We may be tempted to help them numb their sadness with special treats. We might even try to convince them that things are going to be better in this new family configuration.
The fact is, what children need most from us in these challenging moments is for us to be a steady pair of loving, comforting arms they can fall into when their hearts are heavy with sadness. This is not easy to do when we ourselves are struggling with grief and loss, but if we’re to help our children know that they will be okay, then Mommy and Daddy have to be present for the times when things aren’t so okay. Only then can they trust us with their emotional truth so that we can help them heal.
In times of stress, the best thing we can do for each other is to listen with our ears and our hearts and to be assured that our questions are just as important as our answers.
FRED ROGERS
Rather than try to minimize your child’s loss, help her to name it by mirroring what you sense she might be feeling. “I can see that you’re sad.” Be sad with her, but let your sorrow be contained. We never want our children to have to parent us, and so it will be important for you to have places to go where you can get the emotional support you’ll need in order to be this deeply present and available to them. Reassure your kids and help them understand what’s happening by clearly stating that it’s not their fault, that you’re still a family, they’re not going to lose either one of you, you both still love them, and you’re all going to be okay.
I know I’m making it all sound so cool, calm, and collected. It’s not. It’s awkward and disappointing and painful and hard and heart-wrenching. Some days you may just want to scream and other days you’ll wish you could run away. But I promise you this: in the long run, it’ll all be worth it. At the end of the day, what we all want most are kids who grow up to be well-adjusted, healthy, resilient, good-hearted adults. People who feel fundamentally safe in their own skin, who know they’re loved without having to think too much about it, who feel confident that they belong in this beautiful world of ours, and who, when it’s time, are fully equipped to bond with others and form loving, stable families of their own.
And that, my friend, is possible with a Conscious Uncoupling.
Dividing Hearth and Home
I used to live in a beautiful four-bedroom house with a sunroom where I would sit and read the morning paper, an elegant fireplace in the living room where I’d curl up to read my mountains of books, and a Zen-like garden out back where I enjoyed watching the clouds go by. Currently, I live in a lovely, yet moderate two-bedroom apartment in a tall building that overlooks a park. In the center of the park is a huge fountain that is a magnet for playing children, who love to chase each other around its contours and throw pennies in to make a wish. All day long I hear the sound of running water along with shrieks of delight through my open windows, which stream bright light into my spacious and handsome living room. Five stories below, Mark and Alexandria live in an apartment that mirrors my own, making it easy for our daughter to go up and down the elevator to see us both as often as she likes, and affording Mark and me ample opportunity to collaborate on her upbringing. While I miss my big house and look forward to the day when I can buy a new one, I happily let it go in favor of our current more user-friendly and wholesome structure for raising a happy, healthy child whose challenges in life have little to do with the fact that Mark and I are no longer married to one another. I realize it’s almost anti-American to suggest that downsizing might be a good thing, yet I firmly believe that quality of life over quantity of possessions should determine how we live, particularly when our children’s developing psyches are at stake.
The happiest people don’t have the best of everything. They just make the best of everything.
ANONYMOUS
Much of the shock of losing a long-term partnership is the hope it held for a better life—specifically, for a financially better life. The happily-ever-after myth includes the expectation of upward, not downward, mobility. Yet when a couple dissolves their union, the harsh reality is that the same amount of money that once supported one home now needs to support two. In fact, studies show that a drop in economic status is the norm for most divorcing families, lasting on average five years. Few prospects frighten us more. Or cause us to behave in sociopathic ways, such as insisting the kids spend more time with us than their other parent in order to qualify for a bigger piece of the financial pie, hiding important assets, stealing from joint accounts, or bending the numbers to try to get more than our fair share. It’s easy to lose sight of the forest for the trees when we’re frightened.
Smoldering hatred and rage can also become deeply intertwined in the process of divvying up the assets, and instigate malicious moves generated by a vindictive soon-to-be-former spouse who may have completely lost perspective. Divorce-reform advocate Joseph Sorge relays a horror story in his book Divorce Corp., told to him by Judge Thomas Zampino from a New Jersey family court. During a particularly contentious divorce, an expert witness testified to the value of a marital asset that he estimated to be $60,000. The judge was surprised, for he had been informed that the witness was being paid $70,000 for his testimony. “Why on earth would you charge $70,000,” he asked from the bench, “when you know that the most your client could possibly get from this asset is half of $60,000—less than half your fee?” The witness shrugged and looked at the resentful wife who’d hired him. “Because she wanted me to,” he replied.
It seems ludicrous that anyone should behave in such a self-destructive way. Yet scientist David Rand from Harvard University spearheaded an interesting experiment called the Ultimatum Game that gives us a clue as to what might motivate someone to burn through their child’s college fund as though it were pocket change in an effort to retaliate against a former spouse. The game involves two players who bargain over a pot of money. Player One makes a proposal to Player Two on how she wants to split the money. If Player Two agrees, they both receive the split as suggested. If the offer is declined, neither player receives anything. It’s only logical, then, that Player One should offer Player Two the least amount possible and that Player Two should accept that offer, as any money is better than no money at all. Yet, roughly half of those offered an unfair split will reject it. Many of us would rather pay to get even with our former partner for offering an unfair split—even if it is to our own detriment—than settle for less than what we think is fair. Another study conducted by Golnaz Tabibnia and Matthew D. Lieberman at UCLA further demonstrates that perceived fairness is more vital to resolution than the amount one actually receives. Monitoring the brains of their subjects, the researchers were able to verify that receiving 50 cents of a dollar created more of a reward response in the brain than receiving $10 of $50.
Let’s hope you’ve calmed down by now and can enter this critical negotiation with a sane mind and with the intent of leaving it with a clear conscience. Because untying the knot is not nearly as simple as tying it was, you want to carefully consider the relationship you desire on the other side of this setback, and doggedly work to protect that possibility by making the effort to keep things fair. One couple I know, Lizzie and Phil, had been married for nearly thirty years when they joined the ranks of the fastest-growing segment of the divorcing population in America—those over fifty. They were quite supportive and generous to one another throughout the sale of their home and possessions, splitting everything down the middle without thinking much about it. Occasionally, they would argue, but only because one of them felt the other deserved to keep more than 50 percent of an asset for one reason or another—an argument that was usually lost. One day, after they were no longer living together, Phil called Lizzie, uncharacteristically huffing and puffing. He informed her in no uncertain terms that he was keeping the bulk of the passive income generated from the network marketing company they’d built together. Lizzie was so stunned by this sudden bullying behavior that she quietly replied, “Okay, if that’s what you really want,” and quickly got off the phone. Yet minutes later, Phil called to apologize. He wanted to take back what he’d said, mumbling something about losing perspective and becoming temporarily confused. “What happened?” Lizzie asked. “You talk to an attorney?”
“Yep,” he replied sheepishly. “Sorry about that.”
It’s important to get good legal advice so you understand what you’re legally entitled to. But please don’t give your power away to anyone to determine who you’re going to be in this negotiation, even if that “expert” has fancy credentials after his or her name. At the end of the day, you want to behave in ways that are going to shepherd your relationship to a healthy new form, without the burden of the nasty emotional residue that can come from taking ungenerous actions that may be hard to recover from. Because we human beings have biology that can so quickly move us into attack mode, you’ll want to be conscious of what your actions are generating in yourself and in your former partner, and keep in mind the high cost of unfair, stingy behaviors.
Years ago, I lived with a lover for a couple of years. During that time, we invested in a few pieces of furniture and, when we broke up, we split those possessions down the middle, each of us taking one of two matching dressers we’d bought for the bedroom. Months later, he asked for the dresser back. Frankly, it was fair of him to do so, given that he’d actually paid for it. But I was using it in a spare bedroom at the time and I didn’t want to let it go. I liked how it looked in the room and I’d become attached to it. I told him he couldn’t have it, and without giving it much thought, I kept the dresser for myself. In hindsight, I see that moment as a missed opportunity for generosity that may have preserved our friendship. That choice came with a price; for though I saw him intermittently for years after our breakup, we were never friends. There was always a chasm that lay awkwardly between us that was too wide to cross. It would have been so easy to generate the goodwill that might have made evolving into authentic friendship possible. Yet, I chose the dresser instead. A few years later I sold that dresser for $25 in a yard sale. It was a lesson I’ve not forgotten.
Too many people today know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
ANN LANDERS
Just because you can get something doesn’t mean you should. Many divorce laws in America are just plain stupid and unfair. Consider the bizarre New York law that makes a professional degree or license earned while married community property. Tanya Finch and Kenneth Quarty were married in the year 2000, just as Tanya began her nursing training. They divorced in 2009, by which time she’d completed her degree. As part of their divorce settlement, Kenneth insisted he was entitled to receive up front a percentage of the monies Tanya could potentially earn as a result of the degree she now possessed. Whether or not she ever actually secured employment as a nurse was irrelevant to his case. Never mind that Kenneth did not work the entire time they were married and hadn’t contributed anything financially to her education. It was Tanya who worked multiple jobs to support them both while she earned her degree. Yet, because he’d babysat her daughter on those evenings when she was in school, the courts thought it fair that he receive 25 percent of her projected lifetime earnings as part of their divorce settlement, requiring her to turn over $155,372 to Kenneth in order to obtain a divorce. This, from the now-single mother of two whose earning capacity as a registered nurse was roughly $70,000 a year.
With horror stories like this, it’s no mystery why fewer and fewer Americans are choosing to marry; they make marriage seem more like tying a noose than tying the knot. While many of us look to the courts to help us divide our assets fairly, fairness can’t always be legislated. For the law is absolute, and not contextual. What’s right in one case may not be right in another. The case that instigated the New York courts to adopt the above-mentioned law was a situation in which a wife had financially supported her husband through medical school, only to be left by him soon after he graduated and was about to cash in on all of her hard work.
Fairness is a mindset and it demonstrates that, when push comes to shove, one values people over profits—a key principle for those whose relationships remain stable and healthy over time. Just how selfless you should be in the dissolution of your marriage will be organic to the nuances of your unique situation. Yet, wrestling with the many complex decisions that must now be made from an ethic of fairness, rather than the emotion of fear, will go a long way toward setting you up for the next healthy stage of your relationship.
Fairness is also fluid, meaning that what may seem fair in one moment may over time reveal itself to be not fair at all. When Mark and I were negotiating the division of our property, the ongoing royalties of my first book, Calling in “The One,” came into question. While our mediator informed Mark of his right to a portion of those royalties, Mark wanted none of it, as he felt it only fair that these royalties belong completely to me, given that I was the creator of that work. At the time, I was genuinely moved by his generosity. Two years later, however, I found myself uneasy each time a check came in. While Mark had never mentioned it again, I began to feel that we’d made an unfair decision. Surely he had invested his energy in the book’s creation by painstakingly reading and critiquing each section as I wrote it, and by financially doing more than his fair share at a time when I was bringing less income into the family in order to write the book. One afternoon, several years after our divorce was final, I called our mediator and asked him what amount Mark might have gotten had he asked for what was rightfully his. I then called Mark and explained to him why I was reversing the decision we’d made, and repaid him the monies due him dating back to our divorce, and granting him his rightful percentage moving forward.
Live so that when your children think of fairness, caring, and integrity, they think of you.
H. JACKSON BROWN JR.
Did I have a devil on my shoulder screaming in my ear about how foolish I was to do this? Of course I did. But I’ve come to understand that integrity feels a whole lot better than a trip to Italy or a new Infiniti ever could. A clean conscience is worth more than money can ever buy.
Legalizing the Loss of Love
In 1969, Ronald Reagan, then governor of California, made what he would later call one of the greatest mistakes of his political career. He signed into law America’s first no-fault divorce bill. Historians speculate that he may have done so because his first wife, Jane Wyman, had accused him of “mental cruelty” to obtain their divorce in 1948. No-fault divorce allowed couples to end their marriage for any cause, without having to prove to a judge they’d been cheated on, abused, or abandoned to obtain permission to separate. In the decade that followed, every state in the Union followed suit and adopted a no-fault divorce law of its own, paving the way for the divorce revolution that swept the country like wildfire.
Divorce is now big business in America. According to Joseph Sorge, author of Divorce Corp., we spend roughly $50 billion a year on a vast and decentralized network of judges, lawyers, psychologists, consultants, expert witnesses, private investigators, and others who make their living in the family court system. In fact, more money passes through family court than all other courts in America combined. It’s a system that encourages war, fosters acrimony, and is designed to drag out the process of divorce often far longer than the marriages being dissolved even lasted.
An absurdly complex system, America’s family court was created roughly four decades ago in an attempt to expedite the tens of thousands of divorces flooding the courts as the result of the divorce boom. Originally meant to be a kinder, gentler court, family law has since ballooned from a few pages of basic code into a two-thousand-page volume of fine print, demanding the participation of counsel who often charge as much as $700 per hour. It’s not hard to see why divorce is now listed as the third cause of bankruptcy in America.
According to Judge Michele Lowrance, author of The Good Karma Divorce, you and I might expect to pay about $30,000 for a litigated divorce—or $50,000, if it’s contested, which for many Americans is an entire year’s salary. Yet, in some civilized parts of our world, people manage to dissolve their unions for the cost of a mere postage stamp. Joseph Sorge tells of meeting with Alexandra Borg, a twenty-something divorced Swedish citizen. When he asked her how much her divorce cost, she seemed genuinely confused by the question, before finally remembering that she spent five kronor on the stamp for the envelope. Like all those she knew who’d gotten divorced, she did not need an attorney. Nor had she paid exorbitant fees for psychological evaluations to determine who would keep custody of their son. Instead, Borg simply went on the Internet, found the court website, downloaded a simple form, and sent it in. Six months later, she and her husband were divorced. What made it so easy? First, there is no such thing as alimony in Sweden. Divorce effectively ends all economic obligations between two people, except for the potential $150 per month one might receive to care for the child of that union (which is what the government stipulates to be the cost of a child’s food and clothing). One telling practice of the Scandinavian government’s life-affirming policies concerning divorce is their procedure for collecting child-support payments directly from the parent who is ordered to pay, and sending it to the recipient parent. In this way, the children never know if the money was sent late, or if it has even gone unpaid. It spares the children the agony of watching their mother wait for the check to arrive, so she can buy them schoolbooks or take them shopping for clothes.
Talk about conscious.
I’m not about to enter the hornet’s nest of alimony debate in America, recognizing it as a huge issue for women’s right advocates, who want to provide economic protection for those tens of thousands of stay-at-home mothers who may have spent decades not working while caring for the kids. The biggest thing that impresses me about the Scandinavian system is the utter absence of rancor between separating spouses, as well as concern for the well-being of the children. I mean, with nothing to fight over, why bother waging war? While Iceland boasts one of the highest divorce rates in the world, the people there are also reported to be some of the happiest on earth. As well as some of the smartest and most productive, with Iceland’s kids outperforming American kids in standardized math and science tests, as well as ranking sixth in the world’s per-capita GDP (gross domestic product), one of the main indicators of financial vitality in any society.
I share all this not to convince you to move to Scandinavia, as tempting as that may be, but to awaken you from the trance that divorce is inherently hateful. That you must fight with your boxing gloves firmly in place and your fists held high. The vindictiveness to which we’ve become accustomed may have as much to do with the gnarly knot of our legal system as it does with our biology. Interestingly enough, however, it’s not just therapists who are coming to the rescue. It’s also lawyers themselves. For while attorneys bear the brunt of a thousand jokes that assume they’ll do anything to win a case, ethical or not, many are actually dedicated advocates of divorce reform and are actively creating better and less hostile ways to transition our families.
Wevorce founder Michelle Crosby is one such holistically inclined attorney who, in response to her parents’ devastating divorce when she was nine, when she was put on the stand and forced to choose between her mother and father, is devoted to transforming the landscape of divorce in America. Recently, she was named a “Legal Rebel” by the American Bar Association in their national ABA Journal, which recognizes those attorneys who “are strivers, pushing change and rejecting the rule book to…serve clients and improve access to justice.” Ms. Crosby has spent the past decade of her life developing an empowering process that is a hybrid of mediation and collaborative divorce practices, and currently has offices in twenty states.
Ms. Crosby is just one of the thousands of legal professionals in America who are working hard to improve things both emotionally and financially, as they seek to create less expensive alternatives to litigation. Another is collaborative divorce attorney Lisa Forberg, founder of the Forberg Law Office in New Hampshire, who is an advocate for an all-inclusive approach to divorce that takes into account each family’s unique needs. Recently, Ms. Forberg shared with me about “Paul and Jesse,” a gay couple who’d been married for several years when they decided to divorce. Because they’d adopted two sons, they were motivated to have an amicable end to their union. Jesse feared, however, that coming to a legal agreement would not be easy. Paul had been the main earner while Jesse stayed home to raise the children. He anticipated that Paul would not want to pay alimony or divide their assets equally. He had not wanted the breakup and felt betrayed by Jesse, a response that was impacting their ability to end things on good terms. In a collaborative divorce, a separating couple is given a team of professionals to work with. Each party gets his or her own attorney, as well as shares a financial adviser and divorce coach to help realize an outcome that everyone can live with. The divorce coach helped the couple to align on shared values as parents, supporting Paul to move beyond his anger and begin to appreciate how much money Jesse would need to provide a good home for the children. Jesse understood that financial status was more important to Paul than to him, believing that Paul would be a better co-parent if he were able to retain more of the assets. As long as he was adequately provided for, Jesse did not feel the need to split their assets down the middle. All he really wanted was an acknowledgment from Paul that his contributions had been appreciated and valued. Once he received that, they were able to begin negotiating a settlement that felt fair to both. To help them reach this resolution, their financial adviser was able to demonstrate to Paul, using objective charts and graphs, how much support Jesse was going to need to avoid running at a deficit each month. The expert also worked with Jesse’s projected monthly expenses to make sure they were realistic and reasonable, and could be justified based on the shared goals of cooperative co-parenting. By having these numbers in front of him, Paul was able to be less emotionally reactive and think more rationally about what was the right thing to do.
I do not at all understand the mystery of grace—only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us.
ANNE LAMOTT
The most important reason to avoid litigation is the potential loss of control that can happen once the courts get involved. Which is particularly alarming if you’re a parent and the custody of your children is at stake. You, along with your co-parent, want to be the ones making decisions about how your children will be raised, not some larger-than-life judge wearing an intimidating black robe, who doesn’t even know you or your family but who will lay down the law you’ll all need to live with for years to come. You and your co-parent understand the needs of your kids better than any judge or custody adviser ever could.
If you give in to a fantasy that somehow taking your former partner to court will bring about the justice you crave, you risk making a grave mistake. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of parents who have to live with the consequences of unfair court edicts who wish with all their hearts that they had never stepped foot in a courtroom. Countless people leave the system feeling violated and cheated, in terms of both the process they endured and the outcome they received. Even if you and your former partner don’t share children, by litigating the loss of love you’re likely to fatten the retirement accounts of high-priced attorneys while depleting your own.
Please remember that, though you’re sure you’re right, and though you’re adamant that you have rights, when all is said and done, what will be most essential is that everything is actually right. Alternatives to litigation such as mediation, collaborative divorce, or some peace-building variation on that theme are what will help you come to agreements that will set everyone up to win moving forward.
Note: If you suspect your husband or wife of lying and hiding significant assets and income; if he or she has a history of threatening you or your children with physical violence; if you have been dominated and bullied throughout your relationship or if there is active drug or alcohol addiction involved, then you may wish to consider hiring an attorney to advocate on your behalf. A more collaborative approach requires at least some authentic interest in doing the right thing for the right reasons by both parties.
Every end is a new beginning.
PROVERB
Conscious Uncoupling Rituals
When performance artists Marina Abramovic and Ulay (Uwe Laysiepen) ended their twelve years spent as lovers and artistic partners, they honored the event by painstakingly walking the Great Wall of China, she starting at one end and he at the other to meet in the middle, embrace, and go their separate ways—an event that lasted ninety days and covered 2,000 miles.
They did not see one another again for twenty-three years when, as a surprise, Ulay showed up at a performance that Marina was giving at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, called The Artist Is Present. For six days a week, seven hours a day, Marina would sit stoic and still under hot lights at an empty wooden table and stare across into the eyes of a stranger. One after another, those who were willing to wait on line, sometimes for hours, would finally get their privileged few moments to be with her. Between each guest, Marina would close her eyes to wait for the next person to be seated. When Ulay slipped into the chair across from her, you could hear a pin drop as the audience waited for her to open her eyes and see who sat before her. When she did, her eyes lit up first, then a slight smile crept across her face. And then silent tears began streaming down her cheeks before she finally broke her pose and reached across the table to take his hands in hers. The audience went wild, shouting and applauding with vigor—and more than a few tears were shed. Few things move us more than the affirmation of love that survives separation and estrangement.
Rituals that mark the end of love are often quite emotional. Yet, we do not cry because we are sad; we cry because we are moved. We are touched by the recognition that love can survive even when the form of a relationship changes. You might think the term “divorce celebration” to be an oxymoron, yet more and more people are finding ways to say goodbye that honor the relationship that was shared. For we are enriched by the opportunity to witness two people soberly acknowledging an end, while humbly asking for forgiveness, validating the beauty of their time spent together, and offering a sincere blessing of happiness to the person who has disappointed them the most. There are few more tender or poignant experiences.
While some may think that a divorce party means a trip to Vegas with friends, getting plastered, and dancing on tabletops singing “I Will Survive” till the wee hours of the morning, most people who are forward-thinking enough to mark the end of their long-term union with some sort of ceremony usually create a deeply personal and soulful experience that helps everyone heal and move forward with love.
As ceremonies and customs mark the beginning of our relationships—from Valentine’s Day rituals, to the marriage proposal, to engagement festivities, to the bachelor and bachelorette parties, to the wedding ceremony, and to the honeymoon—why not honor the end of our most important unions with a ceremony as well? Doing so symbolizes the end of an era and paves the way for healthy closure to occur.
One couple who’d been together for forty years created a simple ceremony held in a labyrinth close to an apartment they once shared. With several close family members and friends there to witness the undoing of their vows, they walked together into the center, shared some good memories of their life together, wished one another well, and hugged goodbye, before walking out separately to signify the coming apart of their union.
Divorce becomes a holy moment when you choose to use it as a catalyst for having an extraordinary life.
DEBBIE FORD
Another young couple invited their close circle of friends to the spot on the beach where they’d been married some five years before, to witness their bringing closure to their relationship. Sharing from their hearts, the couple acknowledged each other and the goodness and growth their relationship had provided. They exchanged rings, each of them taking the ring from the finger of their partner and placing it tenderly in a box they’d brought for the occasion. Their plan was to donate the rings to a charity they both cared about. They then invited their friends to speak words of encouragement, inspiration, and hope from their hearts, giving them the opportunity to express their love for the couple, and to bless their decision to part ways. And when it was over, they all went to a local restaurant to share a meal and drink to the future.
Not everyone will feel comfortable with an actual ceremony such as these, and some won’t have partners who are willing participants. However, there are many simple, more common rituals that can help create completion for the two of you, as well as for the community of people who have been invested in your relationship. Such as hosting a dinner party to which you invite your former partner and those close to you both to gather together to share a meal. As you sit down to dinner, you begin with a toast to all the good memories you share, and invite others to toast to your new lives moving forward. If you are in a religious community, you might invite some friends over to pray with you both, to bless you as you go your separate ways. Or you might create a moving party when one of you moves from the home you’ve shared, inviting some friends to help, and offering housewarming gifts to bless his or her new home, such as food, plants, or bottles of wine.
Getting over a painful experience is much like crossing monkey bars. You have to let go at some point in order to move forward.
C. S. LEWIS
For those who were not married to the ones they loved and lost, my good friend, relationship expert Lauren Frances, recommends staging a relationship funeral. The death of love for singles is often an unbearably lonely experience, particularly if you were having an affair or were in an unhealthy relationship that your family and friends did not support. Lauren suggests inviting some friends to your home while you reminisce about what the relationship meant to you, showing and burning old photos of the two of you together, giving away reminders of your romance, and toasting to happier days moving forward.
While all of the above-mentioned rituals include family and friends, it’s just as meaningful to have a private ceremony between the two of you. Or even one you can do on your own, such as a Soul-to-Soul Communication (see Step 3), if it is not possible or desirable for you to be in direct contact with your former partner.
For free written and/or audio downloads of several Conscious Uncoupling rituals to choose from, please go to www.ConsciousUncoupling.com/StepFiveRituals.
Onward and Upward
One of my favorite passages in the Bible was written by the Psalmist: “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.” For all the tears you’ve shed, you’re long overdue for a heaping portion of joy. While it may not be the joy that comes from having those things you’d hoped for in life, it is the lightness of heart that comes from living closely to your truth, and leaning in, on the edge of your seat, to listen for the possibilities calling you from the future that is seeking to emerge.
At the height of laughter, the universe is flung into a kaleidoscope of new possibilities.
JEAN HOUSTON
As you prepare to close this book, dear reader, may you also close this chapter of your life, leaving loss behind and reaching toward the new life, and new love, that await you on the other side of sorrow. The great actor and film director Orson Welles put it this way: “If you want a happy ending, that depends of course on where you stop your story.” While one part of your story may have ended, a new part has only just begun. May you continue to live your own wondrous and unique adventure with resilience, creativity, and courage, as well as with an unshakable faith in the overall goodness of your life.
STEP 5 SELF-CARE SUGGESTIONS
(Take at least 2 each day)
1. Take concrete steps to fulfill a lifelong dream, such as taking an acting class, booking a trip to Italy, or starting work on that novel you’ve always dreamed of writing.
2. Begin participating in social groups and attending events, such as joining a book club, going to a wine tasting, signing up for a Sierra Club hike, or attending a local lecture on a subject that interests you.
3. Attend a meditation retreat, or enroll yourself in a spiritual class to develop and explore the deeper dimensions of who you are.
4. Take on your physical health, up-leveling your daily well-being and self-care practices like never before. Join a gym, begin working with a holistic nutritionist, go raw, or start training for a 5K or maybe even a marathon.
5. Thank all those who helped get you through this experience. Write thank-you notes, send flowers, buy thoughtful gifts, or just send an e-mail to offer a heartfelt acknowledgment of what it has meant to you to have their love and support.
6. Make a list of the many ways you are a wiser, more mature, and more loving human being because of this experience and determine to show up as this more evolved version of yourself from here on.
NOTE TO COUPLES DOING THE PROGRAM TOGETHER
In this fifth and final step of your Conscious Uncoupling program, I suggest you look for ways to become less and less dependent upon one another, with each of you consciously striving to develop new support systems that can assist you in managing those details of life that you used to turn to each other for handling. Yet, for those areas where you may continually need to engage with one another, strive to be fair and honorable in ways that communicate respect and generate a formal friendliness between you. Listen to one another, try to see things from each other’s perspectives, and learn to think holistically about the needs of all involved. Put into practice all that you’ve learned by behaving in ways that are responsible and mature, and strive to use the new skills you’ve been learning that have the potential to generate greater levels of health and well-being between you, such as boundary setting and courteous communication.
At the end of the day, you want to part ways with a blessing in your heart, rather than a curse. Do your best to express your appreciation and cultivate a growing sense of well-being between you by choosing to engage in self-responsible ways and making an effort not to repeat the hurtful and destructive behaviors of the past. Strive to keep your conscience clear, your mind open, and your heart soft so that you can leave one another enriched, expanded, and enhanced for having known each other.