Suggested Books

[june72]

From Helen87:

From MEN ON DIVORCE, The Other Side of the Story, ed. by Penny Kaganoff and Susan Spano. 15 stories from male writers.

Excerpts from "Getting the Point" by Ted Sototaroff:

Most marriages do not separate equally.

I've been through three separations, and each time I appeared to have the long end of the stick. My wife was left in the dismembered household with the troubled child or children, while I went forth to my new flat and free time. She had a new and difficult life to put together, while I went on, more or less, with the one I had been leading when I was away at my office or working in my study, which was most of the time. She had to make do on a reduced income, while I had only to provide my share and could moonlight more easily than before. She had to deal with the isolation of the single woman while I had only to pick up the phone to become an available man. Each breakup was a shattering experience, but the evening after I moved out, there I was, forlorn but high and dry, arranging my books the way I wanted them, cooking a favorite dish, an evening of undistracted contemplation of the irrevocable before me. It's as though after a serious car crash, my wife remained inside to extricate herself and the kids from the wreckage, while I opened the only working door and went off to recuperate, promising to send money, phone the kids, and stop by on the weekend to take them off her hands.

Along with typically having easier circumstances to contend with, the husband of a failed marriage is likely to suffer the failure less intensely. Traditionally, the man provides for the family while the woman maintains it, and though these roles are no longer as clear-cut, they haven't been canceled. The woman generally puts more of herself into the marriage and sacrifices more of herself in holding it together. The chances are that the man is the one who has been straying, or if both are unfaithful, he is the one who started it, his biology as well as his buddies prompting him to do so, society winking at his roving moves and saying that's the way the cookie crumbles. So, while the wife still has two feet on the platform, he already has one foot on the train and the breakup places him on his own two feet and on the move, feeling ten years younger--except when the kids visit: Fathering after divorce is a whole other subject that I don't want to go into here.

There is also his work. Most men do better at work than they do at home because they have to be more grown-up there---more temperate, responsible, dedicated, focused, sensible. The blowups and sulks that the man of the house visits upon his wife and kids he spares his colleague and assistant. If he listens carefully when he loses his head, he can usually hear the voice of his own dominant parent that he is parroting. Also his work habits are built on a later, less vulnerable stage of the self than his family ones...

Getting on with it, putting the problem behind you, is what men are trained to do....Comebacks are the heroic form of competitiveness, and competitiveness is what masculinity is supposed to be about.

All of which painfully comes back to mind when I think of my behavior in the aftermath of each separation, and all of it adds up to a great big error of good sense and feeling. When a marriage that is meaningful ends, it is not like a lost tennis match or business setback; it is more like the death of someone once loved whom you have been a party to doing in through betrayal, negligence, selfishness, stupidity, or whatever mode or modes of malfeasance and malpractice you committed your share of. What is needed is not to just do something but to sit there with the guilt and grief--to mourn and learn and begin to atone...