You Still have to Talk to them

by | Mar 9, 2016 | Divorce and Separation

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You’ll Still Have to Talk to Them

From my very unofficial polling of people I meet, money and parenting issues are the two biggest causes of divorce. I had a slightly funny, slightly tragic conversation with a friend recently. We were commiserating over both having separated from our spouses because we couldn’t get on the same page about money or parenting. Then we looked at each other and said, at almost the same time: yup, and we still have to deal with our exes on exactly those two things, even now that we’re divorced.

For anyone newly separated, I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this.

That’s the irony. Getting divorced doesn’t get you out of discussing parenting and money with your ex. If anything, it requires more communication, not less, since you’re now doing it across two households instead of one, usually with someone you’re not especially motivated to talk to in the first place. You’ll likely hire lawyers and counsellors and spend real money figuring out how to communicate at all during the process. Then, once you finally have a separation agreement, you’ll spend a couple more years figuring out how actually to implement it. Because even when something is written down clearly, you and your ex will probably interpret it differently anyway.

When we signed our agreement, I felt such relief. I thought we finally had a map, something clear enough to settle every future parenting and money question. I was wrong. It was naive to think we’d suddenly interpret things the same way, when we’d never managed to before. We kept fighting over what individual sentences meant. Our kids kept getting caught in the middle.

The agreement itself never solved anything. The only thing that actually helped was learning to communicate with each other based on our individual communication quirks, needs, and values, something I resisted for a long time before finally adopting it, after a full year of being repeatedly blindsided by how differently my ex read the same words I’d read.

Eventually, you’re going to have to learn to actually communicate with your partner about the big things, parenting and money chief among them. The only real choice is timing: do it after things have already gone sideways, or do it proactively, before you build a life and a family with someone, to find out whether you actually can communicate with them at all.

Divorcing Better

by | Nov 5, 2015 | Advocacy, Divorce and Separation

Divorcing Better

When I was freshly separated, I was under terrible stress and in extreme emotional pain. My days were consumed with anger and sadness, and I remember wondering if anything could be worse than going through a divorce.

According to the Holmes and Rahe Stress Scale, death of a spouse tops the list as the most stressful known event, followed closely by divorce. Reading further, you can build a stress score by adding up all the significant events that have happened to you within a year. If you’re going through or recently went through a divorce, here’s what adds up:

Divorce, 73. Separation, 65. Change in financial state, 38. Change to a different line of work, which often comes bundled with divorce, 36. Trouble with in-laws, 29. Change in living conditions, 25. Change in social activities, 18. Change in sleeping habits, 16.

And that’s before counting all the other stressors that tend to show up alongside divorce. By this point your total score is already around 300. That puts you at real risk of illness. I’d never actually added mine up before writing this, but that number speaks for itself.

Everyone told me I’d get through it eventually, and life would get better, and they were right. It did get better. But it took real time, two to three years of living with above-average stress. And being a mom, I passed some of that stress along to my kids. I know their dad, dealing with his own stress, did the same. Nobody wins in that situation.

So how could it be better?

I’ve been trying to figure that out. My first idea was that marriage should just be a lot harder to enter into, maybe banned outright. That’s obviously not happening, and I decided I didn’t want to be everyone’s dream-killer. These days when someone tells me they’re getting engaged, I just smile and say congratulations.

Instead, I decided to put my energy into helping people divorce better. If enough people start divorcing better, maybe the stress that comes bundled with divorce starts to drop across the board too.

So what does divorcing better actually look like?

Learn how to do conflict properly. Doing conflict badly is probably what got you to divorce in the first place, and continuing to do it badly is exactly what makes the divorce itself so brutal.

This isn’t a quick fix. We’ve spent our whole lives learning our own particular way of handling conflict, and deciding to change doesn’t undo that overnight. It takes real work and real practice.

You’ll likely need a support system built specifically to help you do conflict the right way. Don’t hire pitbull lawyers who thrive on court and war. Hire people who will support both you and your ex as you each figure out a more positive path forward, now that you’ve decided to part ways. Hire people who will help you build the tools you’ll actually need to thrive afterward.

Spend your divorce dollars and energy wisely. Don’t put them toward support that pulls you further from a better life. Put them toward whatever actually moves you closer to living with hope.