Literature

In an extract from The 52 Week Project, explains the impact of separating from her husband.

I’d always wanted to get married. Of all the parts of the script, getting married was the scene I wanted the most. Of all life’s variables, it was also the one thing that I assumed would definitely happen. It wasn’t a case of ‘‘if’’, it was amatter of ‘‘who’’ and ‘‘when’’.

When I was a little girl, my sisters and I used to play ‘‘weddings’’. We took turns to prance around in Mum’s old wedding dress, while the others swayed, doe-eyed, to terrible music.

At the age of 10, I askedmumwhat the happiest day of her life was. She said she didn’t know. I was confused. How could the answer be anything other than her wedding?

At 13, I wrote in my diary what I wanted my future husband to be like. He had to be handsome, I said. He had to be musical. Most importantly, I wrote, he had to have ‘‘done IT’’ before, for I would most certainly be a virgin, and wouldn’t know what to do on my wedding night. Not ‘‘it’’; 13-year-old me was clear on that point. IT. My 13-year-old self would have been shocked at the version of me that got married ... Let’s just say Alan isn’t musical and leave it at that.

I loved movies with happy endings: romantic comedies and sweeping love stories. The part in Titanic that made me cry the hardest was the touching scene with the elderly couple cuddling in bed. When I was single at 24, someone at work was playing with a Magic 8-Ball. ‘‘Will Lauren be married in the next two years?’’ she asked, shaking the ball. ‘‘Yes,’’ the ball said, and I wished uponwish that it would be true.

There were a few frogs to be kissed first but I was always sure I’d find my prince and havemy happily ever after. That was the way things worked, after all. It was implicit in all the self-help breakup manuals my friends and I quoted at each other. It was explicit in our favourite such book, the single girl’s Bible, He’s Just Not That Into You. We shouldn’twaste time on the loserswho aren’t that into us, the book says, for ‘‘there’s a guy out there who wants to marry you’’. Thosewords brought me comfort after a date went badly, or when someone I felt a spark with turned out to be a bit off.

Indeed, I was sure that I’d meet my soulmate. It was just amatter of time.

[But] even though separation and divorce is a statistical reality for so many who get married, there’s no script for when you do. Advice on getting married is everywhere. There are magazines you can buy and online forums to read.

On the subject of weddings and marriage (for, to many people, they are one and the same), it seems everyone has something to say: who should pay for a hen’s night; whether guests can wear white to the wedding; the etiquette for inviting children; who should pay for the alcohol; whether or not a bridesmaid ought to be sacked for dying her hair bright blue.

Not so with separation. People don’t know how to react. Especially if nothing bad has happened.

When Alan and I first separated, I was asked if he had ever hit me. No. Someone asked whether one of us had been ‘‘sleazy’’. Again, no.