My Particular Case | A Story of divorce

• Posted: April 11, 2010
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• Author: adminadam
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• Filed under: Divorce Stories
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• Tags: No tags set for this entry.

I have not posted in quite a while, this recent entry to the site prompted me to begin again. Below is a story of divorce, from a more traditional space. Much the same of many of our stories, this end brings a new life. This story was sent in by a reader of Adam's Wedding Dress.

Divorce was never part of my vocabulary. According to my world-view marriage was forever.
In the traditional South African Jewish society from which I originated divorce was almost unheard of. That is not to say that relationships between husbands and wives were always good back in the fifties. I am sure they weren’t, but for cultural and economic reasons couples tended to stay together, although there were some exceptions.

So, despite the slightly faltering start to my relationship with my future wife, I thought my marriage was going to last forever. After all, we were from similar backgrounds and we had willingly agreed to marry after conducting a relationship for a few years and living together happily before the wedding day. We both viewed matrimony as a sacred institution that you did not enter into lightly, nor did you leave it.

In fact, for many years it seemed we were going to live out my vision of marriage and family life in much the way I had grown up to believe and expect. We lived pretty harmoniously, enjoyed doing things together, shared similar values and had a congenial circle of friends. We happily invested time and energy in our three children because their welfare was our primary concern. Overall the atmosphere in the house was convivial and relaxed.

This familial bliss continued for about fifteen years before cracks began to appear. For numerous reasons my relationship with my wife gradually deteriorated until we reached a stage where we were hardly touching each other and resentments began to build up. It was a dark period for me generally.

My solution to my mid-life crisis was to seek therapy for myself. By contrast, my wife’s response to our predicament was to get into bed with a work colleague. When I found out, about two months later, it hit me like a thunderbolt. I felt like I had been slit down my middle with a knife; opened like a tin can. The pain just seared through me. What I felt was an agonizing mix of betrayal, abandonment, hopelessness and impotence. It was as if my world had collapsed. My life partner, my wife of nearly twenty years, mother of my three children was saying, “It’s over. You are not good enough. I want a new man.” In the early stages I was completely swamped by a sense of my own inadequacy, as a man, and as a husband. Later these feeling turned into anger and rage.

Fortunately I had already started therapy. It did not take long for the therapist to point out the connection between what I was feeling then, aged forty-six, and what I had experienced but didn’t allow myself to feel at the age of ten, when my mother died – abandonment. My wife’s betrayal had opened up an old wound, touching a very deep vein in my makeup.

Betrayal in the form of adultery is always painful. In my case, its exceptional power lay in the fact that it reawakened my deepest emotions: my wife was rejecting me in much the same way I felt my mother had “rejected” me by dying. In effect the situation that resulted was similar, only now it touched the core of my being.

My therapy helped me enormously to deal with what I was experiencing. Firstly, to cope with the crisis and, secondly, to begin to understand the dynamic I had established in relation to my mother. It also helped me go through the mourning I had not gone through at the time of my mother’s death, playing the tough boy instead. For the next five years I was in weekly therapy, at first in a one-to-one format and then as part of a group. Throughout this period, which paralleled the disintegration of my marriage and eventual divorce, I delved into the nature of my relationship with my mother and the effect her dying had on me. Naturally the therapy covered other aspects of my life as well.

Over time I came to realize that what initially felt like a double blow – my wife’s betrayal coupled with my memory of my mother’s abandonment – eventually became a transformative experience for me. The insight I gained into my emotional patterns allowed me to turn the saga into an opportunity. Somehow I managed to lay most of my demons to rest and virtually begin life afresh. I emerged a new man, in charge of my own life, able to be my own good father and mother, and lover if necessary. I got the whiff of freedom in my nostrils and became aware of myself as a sexually attractive man. Inadvertently, my breakup launched me into my present, and best, phase of my life.

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