Divorce as a Moral Act
HERBERT GOLD
I DIVORCE you for ever and ever, and even death shall not break it.”
Divorce is perhaps the extremest moral event which we can consummate on earth. It may be an evil act or it may be a good one, but it is moral all the way down — we reach it only with a rope woven of a thousand difficult decisions. Marriage, with which divorce might be compared under some of its aspects, has an older, premoral character. It usually seems to be a good thing, but it is a good act called into being without a clear sense of consequences by individuals who are led by hope, trust, and desire. Forgive them, Lord, they know not what they do. If it is good, when it is good, it begins as natural virtue, not moral virtue. It is good as growing plants are good — out of the impulse of life itself. It is good as sleep is good (sleep is a natural virtue which the divorced sacrifice) or as waking in the morning refreshed is good. Of course, the preservation of marriage depends on more than natural virtue, usually to the surprise of the married, but these later moral decisions have come unanticipated in the flesh. They are initiated after the natural act of marriage.
Natural virtue — doing what is right by instinct, habit, tradition, or in obedience to some great faith — is mostly past for man as a species. We are long out of the garden of innocence. The angel sent down to expel Adam and Eve was the first Reno judge, but we are conservative; despite all thunder, trouble, and waste of spirit, we failed to recognize him. Now the day of natural virtue, when divorce was almost inconceivable, is over. Decisions, decisions! To shore up a marriage, despite suffering, sinking, a reign of destruction, may be a good or an evil act — it is a moral decision; the same to enter upon this always new and strange compact, within the clutter of bitterness and mistake, among the broken furniture of intentions, in the abrupt dead silence, after much thrashing noise, of eternal acquiescence in misunderstanding — in hushed piety now: “I do divorce you and cherish you, through age and new marriages, all the way past death’s vain effort to part us.”
For the pulse of marriage is not broken by divorce’s hemp. With children we cannot even conceive of breaking it — that eternal physical presence of the new and unending family we have created, children having children having children, long after we have died. Our being in them is never dead. (“When, now you tell me when are you coming to live at home again, Daddy?” “Never. But I’ll come to see you every day, unless, unless —” “Will I have to get a new daddy?” “I’m your daddy and you’re my daughter, and we won’t change that.”) The state of being father and child, having children, having a parent, never changes, although the manner of that being is hurtfully altered.
Even without children, we have become ourselves only together and in our marriage and we go toward what we are becoming only together and in our divorce. Divorce is not a dissolving fluid, although it may be a corroding acid. It is like marriage but extremer: it is to marriage as an explosion is to rust. Under certain circumstances an oily cloth may smolder and decay under slow oxidation; in a tight closet it bursts into fiery life. But all that is metaphor; marriage and divorce are kin in that we have formed ourselves together within them. We do not become innocent now. Your face is mirrored on mine; my body is written on yours. Even if we love again — and of course we will — our old marriage grows in the new love. In fact, we may only reveal the meaning of our marriage through the new love. If we are lucky and good, we will have a new marriage which is continuous with the old one. The more truly we are loved for ourselves, the more true this is. The new lover loves what we can bring; a large part of what we can bring comes from the old marriage which we created together; the old love is now a vitally changing element in our flesh and memory, fantasy and intention.
If the new love is happy, the old marriage is vindicated: Through me you have learned to love. Or if not so much, at least this: I left you with the strength to be happy, an ambition to know love, the suspicion that it is possible. Perhaps I have even left you with a belief and a brilliant need. Together we have put an end to the monstrous expectations of first marriage, and without cynicism we may now go on to what is possible.
How does a divorce grow into being? Or rather how is it decided into being?
It is always a question of character, not incident; personality, not anecdote. Legal briefs are notorious liars, although such phrases as “Incompatibility” or “Mental Cruelty” seem to be pathetic efforts to tell a general truth. Divorce appears as almost the absolutely free act because almost uncaused — that is, caused by anything, by any constellation of accidents. It is always caused by something but the something is never the same. Each divorce is unique. Let us dispose of some common simplisms:
The free personality married to the dependent may divorce. The dependent personality married to the dependent may divorce. And the free married to the free may divorce. In the first case, the liberal, hard-loving personality feels imprisoned by a partner who feels more and more afloat, uncared for. In the second case, the two needful, lonely ones lean off balance against each other until they topple helplessly in a strident crescendo of demand for reassurance; they can no longer hear or feel each other — they have been too close. At last, in their desperation, the pain of clawing each other blindly in the dark seems less than the pain of bleeding quietly and alone in the dust. In the third and strangest case — the free and the free — it is because they are free away from, not toward each other.
In each case, the origin of divorce is character. The dynamics — or rather the tactics, since this becomes that worst war, civil war — are expressed in a series of incidents. However, these do not evolve in a straight line. They circle each other; they grow upon and nourish each other; is not any marriage, as Aristophanes suggests, a body? Divorce grows as the pearl grows, as the cancer grows — as the pearl in some ways, as the cancer in others. The pearl of divorce may be ejected by a powerful oyster. The malignancy, once started, is generally irreversible and proliferates with rapid fibrous insistence while the rest of the body wastes and rots.
Again: A grit of disagreement becomes, by accretion, an intolerable burden when it is not a cause of trouble but a symptom. The body of marriage is working against itself. Like the seed of the pearl, the grit torments this oyster, which increasingly busies itself with it, and so it grows; like the cancer, it steals the strength needed for health, thus mysteriously nourished through novel conduits; and like the goiter on a neck, it is soon all that you can see. This sort of grit may take years to mature within the life of its host: the marriage resists, resists, and its struggles leave sores, scars, and crippled healing.
When they can no longer bear the agonies of distrust and the weariness of effort, the couple parts, in longing and sorrow, with great staring tenderness. This false revival of the old moody courting is like the pertness of the last moments of a wasting illness. Dissolution follows fast; no longer virgin to divorce, they fly apart in a sensual rage — quarreling about money, property, those things which never troubled them before, bitter about her use of make-up and his clumsy slouch, spinning off into contempt in order to sear and so seal the wound.
True remissions sometimes occur — and false remissions. A springtime, a miraculously tender evening when desire and expectation meet — but these are reminders, depending on sentimentality, and the foreboding returns first and then the disease. The true remission of any disease, in the face of destruction, seems an almost divine intervention. With death plucking at your sleeve, the body writhes in anger and joy, “something clicks,” and the course and pattern become what they have not been. Sometimes; rarely. In the face of the death of divorce — I am speaking here of people who have loved each other — at the worst and darkest moment — when they feel spiders in their ears and mice at their hearts — they may reject their monstrous denial of the past. Does it really happen? It can; at least we can imagine it, and that is enough to make it possible.
ON THE other hand, the healthy divorce may be the necessary radical cure of character. It is not merely surgical, although it aches as much as surgery: the divorce disentangles living flesh which has entwined and even grown together. It is systemic; and with all its pain, it may be the sign of a cure.
For example, her father was an alcoholic, say, and she never could fight him through about it. Her mother failed, naturally, but she ... So she marries an alcoholic, finds it impossible, and is freed of her father for the next marriage. Here is another trivial, overschematic example. His mother was a manager; he could not disengage himself; he crawled into another manager’s pen. But lo, under threat of extinction as a man, he is not a child and he can free himself. Now having practiced successfully against his mother, he no longer needs to defeat her. He can even find, next, the yielding, giving, and responsible woman whom the glare off his mother’s rage hid from him.
All examples are radically falsifying. Divorce is a fragile snowflake in the December sun. Who breathes on it decides for himself about it.
And there is something still more subtle, clever, and diseased: we may make our wife or husband into the image of the unconquered parent, just in order, later, to destroy it. This is pathetic and comic. You were chosen, but you did not know for what, and pressed into service against your will, but slowly, gradually, so that you did not know what you were doing, and then — at the moment of ripeness, when you are perfectly what your partner needs you to be — the knife! Perhaps the squealing cattle should organize against the slaughter, but they did not see the end, only the busy chain of events in the yard. And you were, very likely, too busy making your own effigy. This is painful. These are the very bad divorces, where there was no thou-saying ever, where human beings were used as tools. We should warm ourselves by the good divorces, rare though they are.
“Will you go to dinner with me?” he asks.
“No,” she says, “I have a jealous husband.” And the smile of complicity: he might find out, but if he doesn’t . . . The husband is used, rearranged, scrambled, an image formed totally of her uses for him. She does not think: I love him. Instead, she refuses the invitation with smug, mouth-narrowing thoughts of possessions: he is jealous. This woman is unfaithful even if she never enters another’s bed. Her husband feels her infidelity in their own bed — in her passivity, in her absent devouring of his substance. She needs him, true; he may take that for love. She wants him perhaps. She cannot do without him.
But even in his arms she is unfaithful. She cannot love anyone but her incomplete, uncompletable self. She yearns to exist, but her yearning is a bottomless pit down which her husband and children careen.
I keep promising myself not to use examples. There are too many individual members of divorce. As to incident, all marriages suggest them — money, infidelity, boredom, should we go out or should we read, in what manner shall we love, how many children do we want. Ways of being parents and friends, Taking and giving ways. These matters are all symptoms of character. True, they also change character. But when they attack the marriage, it is in their role as symptoms. All married people can supply their own instances. Every marriage is a potential divorce.
So we are practical, “The children — think!” Those who for so many reasons need too much of love can do nothing to preserve a form of marriage for the sake of the children. They perpetuate their own suffering in their children, of course, but they can do nothing else.
Back for another moment to the knotty question of infidelity. Imagine this: a woman who feels wronged tells her husband of infidelities with a man now living abroad. They struggle — tears, beatings, desperate lovemaking as the husband strives to possess her for himself. At last he forgives her. When does she leave him? When does the marriage fly apart for all to see?
When the husband discovers that it is a lie, that she had been helplessly true to him, that she had fought in this hysterical way to gain ascendancy over him. Now she feels judged utterly, and with no strength to give and take from him, she gives up. She finds that last creative strength of character necessary to tear herself from him. Either that or suicide.
Rare? Mythological? Yes, but it tells how much we need infidelity, and it tells how much we can bear to suffer, and it tells what we finally cannot bear. We can suffer the hurt of strength — even the unsure, petty strength of a three-week stand, fragile and self-denying; we cannot suffer the wound administered by weakness — by weakness aware of its weakness and being nothing but weak.
It is said that the widow who was truly devoted to her husband is the one who has faith in marriage, believes in love, marries again. The unhappily married, unfulfilled man or woman, having his problem fantastically solved by a death he only dreamed of, must mourn forever — guiltily. regretfully, guiltily. He must even invent a justificatory bliss in the past. Gray-faced, always in mourning, his life is over.
No! cries the grief-stricken true lover when the time of sharpest bite is finished. This no is a yes to life. No, no, love is too important to pass out of my life by this accident. My dead lover tells me this: he wants me to have the best part of his legacy, and this is the power to give and take love. This widow or widower inspires love, deep and sensual love, at any age; and gives and takes it. A new sharing occurs on earth — the best gift which earth offers everyone in the democracy of blood.
May it not be, in the same way, that only the divorced couple who sometimes were truly happy and loving have the chance to find love again? The good divorce is that between two who have once loved each other. Justly they may pity the bad divorce — that of beings who have merely made mistakes, merely rectified mistakes, merely repeated old errors bred in the family. The bad divorce is the one of diminished decision: submission to a painful pattern, a deathly cure by living through the sins of the fathers. The good divorce dares to love again — as only the widow who was happy can dare to give up her fabricated memories.
Good luck! Let us divorce tenderly, and believe in each other forever.