The true agony of divorce for men
As a film about a collapsing marriage becomes a surprise hit, SIMON MILLS gives a searingly personal account of...
AT The beginning of Noah Baumbach’s heartwrenching Marriage Story, the acclaimed portrayal of a bitter custody battle, you are asked to choose sides.
Charlie ( Adam Driver) and Nicole (Scarlett Johansson) are in the mediatory stage of a protracted, painful, emotional and geographically complex break-up and, for balance — just so it’s not all blame, raw accusations and screaming arguments — they are sitting with a professional and reeling off a list of each other’s attributes.
Depending on whether you are happily married (or yet to be married) or divorced, this scene will play out either like a montage of a perfect, kooky, knockabout New York couple or a bitterly loaded game of marital Top Trumps.
Who is the good spouse here? Who will get the house? Who will get to keep the kid? Who will you root for? It’s a moment that will resonate with every divorced man — a photo album of memories, but also the opening of a wound.
But it is the film’s following scene that really got to this seven-years-divorced man. Charlie standing up as he rides the clattering subway back to the family home in Brooklyn. Nicole, brittle and exhausted, sitting in silence several feet away.
With any residual intimacy or tenderness obliterated by the cold process of divorce, Charlie knows that his situation is utterly hopeless. he lays a duvet on the living room couch when they get back. We will get to see more of his side of the story.
Just like in Marriage Story, my leaving happened not in one big cinematic door slam and car-tyre screech, but in slow and incremental, painfully awkward moments of isolating disjunction.
First a move from the marital bed onto the familial sofa, then to a spare room. Nights in cheap hotels and self-elected extended business trips would follow. During the earlier stage of the break-up, I was invited to stay over at my old home for the odd night, have dinner with the children, hang out. Gradually, however, doors closed on me.
One day I was suddenly not welcome upstairs. Bedrooms became off limits and relatives estranged. (‘Charlie and I are getting a divorce, Mum,’ says Nicole in the film. ‘ You can’t be friends with him any more.’) Soon, waiting outside in the car seemed best for everyone concerned.
eventually, just as Charlie experienced in the movie, new and laughably spartan accommodation will be found. (Tip for men into interiordesign, paintwork and chic soft furnishings: for God’s sake work at your marriage, because divorce is a series of rooms that look as if they’ve been art-directed by the people from Dignitas.)
When I moved out of our threebedroom home I found a shared flat, only a mile or so away from my old house. My roomie was a man ten years younger and ten times happier than me, the digs small and my double bed compact and ‘queen’-sized.
My daughters coming to stay for the first time was, of course, a big moment. I did my hamfisted best, inflating an Argos-bought air mattress for me on the floor and giving up the bed for them.
But I fell asleep too quickly and snored loudly. They stayed up late watching a movie, turned up the thermostat to a saunalike temperature, trod on me when they got up to go to the loo and then hogged the bathroom when I needed to get off to work in the morning. They didn’t come again.
And who can blame them? Divorce muted and sidelined me. My voice felt unheard and my opinions invalid. Writing myself as a bit player in my own marriage story narrative, life was viewed through morose-tinted spectacles.
I’d become an introverted, miserable, hermetic bore. I saw no one. I worked. I drank. I did nothing interesting or entertaining.
In the movie, Laura Dern’s Nora Fanshaw, divorce lawyer to Nicole, reveals a small triumph.
‘I got you 55/45 per cent,’ she beams. ‘You deserve it.’
MY
ex and I had tried to be even more civilised when it came to divvying up ‘access’, agreeing on a gracious, non-legally binding 50/50 split.
As teenagers, the girls could decide for themselves, we figured, when, how and with whom they wanted to spend their time. But after factoring in the logistics of their busy social life, my work and the girls’ school timetables and, not least, my party- pooping bleakness, the parental split was roughly, heartbreakingly 95/5.
Grudgingly, tearfully, I accepted that it was much more fun, more stable, comfortable and familiar for the girls to be at home with their mum.
As the divorce progressed, my status as a partner and father fell into a kind of blunted inertia and irrelevance. I grieved because I couldn’t be my children’s confidant or comfort; because I simply wasn’t there with them. I missed out on moments of crisis and joy. My help and advice, my love (and anger) were just not in the room.
In helpless, desperate increments, I became peripheral and distant, a father by appointment only. I was still the girls’ ‘parent’; just not their dad any more.
In Baumbach’s film, Charlie’s avuncular lawyer, Bert Spitz (Alan Alda), warns his hapless client that for a man, getting divorced when kids are involved is ‘ one of the hardest things to do’. ‘It’s like a death without a body,’ he adds cheerfully. It is true.
While losing a friend is painful, divorce is like a death with the added value of a personal attack. You are alone, unloved and unwanted, beginning various stages of separation grief that will probably last for the rest of your life.
Yes, eventually you will learn not to miss her. You will move on and, if you are lucky, find love again. But you will always miss it.
This kind of thinking, this darkness and despair, I found, is normal. U.S. medical research has backed up the notion of divorce hitting men harder than it does women. Divorced men are prone to deeper depressions and more likely to drink excessively and take drugs. They are most at risk for suicide, more so even than those whose spouses have died, according to the Office for National Statistics, and in 2015 were almost three times more likely to end their lives than men who were married or in a civil partnership. Not a cheery forecast, but for a long time I couldn’t see a way out.
The only advice I got from my male counterparts was clueless and basic.
(‘You need to move on,’ followed by a matey punch on the upper arm.) I went to a bloodthirsty divorce lawyer who looked like a ravenous lion and used the charming phrase, ‘Kill or be killed’.
I couldn’t talk to my parents as they were both dead. I tried confiding in a few people every now and then, but soon gave up — no one ever tells you this, but your divorce is really boring.
Instead, I holed myself up in my remote and newly purchased cottage and, steadily, miraculously, found myself trying to be better. A more emotionally intelligent, selfaware, capable, reliable and less volatile version of myself.
A financially poorer dad, yes, but an improved, matured and finessed one. Possible second marriage material, even.
As Nicole says towards the end of Marriage Story, ‘Turns out the dead part wasn’t dead, It was just in a coma.’