To avoid arguments, a friend wise but never married suggested at a wedding shower: “Whoever cares about it most should get his or her way.”  What could be wrong with that?  This may seem like a logical way to keep the peace when controversy or differences arise, one which would require a minimum of effort.  It may start out this way, but I have field experience to suggest that isn’t the end of the story.  The rule can quickly turn one party, perhaps unintentionally, into a bully who quickly realizes, perhaps unmindfully, that all it takes to get what he/she wants is insistence.  And it turns the other party, who is likely the less confrontational by nature, into a seething mass of unspoken resentment.  He/she may never be able to match the intensity the other brings to the issue and the decisions will quickly start to seem wrongly one-sided.   You’ll be following a rule you both agreed upon and changing the rule is likely neither a battle the pacifist will want to pick nor one the bully will want to lose.  Best if you reason through decisions big and small until a pattern emerges that comfortably creates equity.

If you think divorce ended a bad relationship, think again.  Divorce with children starts a wholly different relationship.  In most cases, worse.  Especially if you weren’t sympatico in your parenting styles.  If you argued before divorce, you will argue twice as much after.  If you disagreed before, get ready for full-on opposition.  If he/she was passive-aggressive, you’ll see record-setting deviousness.  I’m not going to write about the logistics of post-divorce:  the reduction in lifestyle, loss of friends, middle-aged dating, etc.  This post is about the pure painful loss in the wholly different relationship you now have with your children.  If you want to be a parent, if you like the job, I’m talking a far more refined kind of pain.  I’m talking about the day the art project goes home to the step-mom/dad.  The brownie/cub scouts troop the step-mom/dad heads up.  The toenails painted for the first-time by the step-mom/dad. The outfits your daughter wears home that you didn’t buy and wouldn’t have.  The lighter the step-dad/mom gave your son.  (What was he/she thinking?  Give a 12-year old a lighter??)  The homecoming pictures taken at the other house. Watching your children cart their stuff from one house to the next, especially in the teenage years when a kid, hormones and social chaos abounding, needs that one comfy place to come home to, not another night to unpack or repack.  The day you accidentally get called some other name.   The day dad and step-dad walk “their” daughter down the aisle…in a wedding dress dress picked out by the step-mom.  All this with the step-mom/dad might be sorta friendly too, it might not be all wariness or petty jealousy.  And the more you support and accept the step-parent, the better it is and the less the hurt.  But loss, the losses happen every day.  Some days loss sneaks in, barely a whisper, and some days it’s a surprising confounding blinding pain, like a G-5 tornado out of a clear sky.  Loss is the new factor in your relationship with your children.   Staying married – with children – might be less painful than you think.

How fun is it to throw away pictures? Maybe there are some photos that still work with a head cut out, but for the most part these beacons of failure have to go. Tell your mom to take the wedding pictures out of the family albums. Ponder how you’ll fill the empty frames on the wall and your desk. And the real fun is getting rid of the memories, editing that big hard drive you’ve got. You say “no”, there are some memories that can cheerfully survive the bludgeon of divorce.  I’ve never seen one. Just like him/her and the pictures thereof, the memories have to go. If they were good memories, they hurt now. If they were bad memories, they hurt now. If you still live in the same town, you get to be pinged by all the memories you used to cherish like fine jewels: places where you had a great time/a funny argument/the final straw/the proposal/the crazy sex behind the statue or in the park. Do this enough times and the gaps in your timeline will look like a ten-year-old’s smile. If memories matter to you, divorce is your enemy.

Love is not so much a feeling as an act of will.  Sure, it starts as some sort of gushy heart beating madness.  But there will come a time you find yourself yelling at this person you are in love with.  You’ll either yell out loud or you’ll yell to yourself and stuff your feelings (not a method I recommend.) After you’ve yelled a critical number of times, the gushy heart beating madness morphs into a different set of feelings.  And after you have a kid your feelings will morph again, most disappearing into the exhaustion.  For a while.  Quite a while.  Maybe months, maybe years.  And then you’ll wonder where the “love” went.  And then, if you’re aware, if you’re lucky,  a two-by-four will smack you across the forehead and you’ll recognize that love is an act of will, a will to love the person you’ve yelled at and who hasn’t done his/her share of the bills/laundry/kiss-initiating etc for a while. And who doesn’t help with the kids. And who has different priorities.  And who maybe you don’t feel you know all that well after all.  But you will love that person, not because of some gushy madness, but because you decide to love him/her.  You decide.

Next up: the fun of divorce