Divorce — it’s hard but often necessary
Marriage is the leading cause of divorce in most countries. But, seriously, divorce can be a daunting prospect and a rough journey that takes considerable adjustment. And it doesn’t help when you’re embarking on that road and read that 54 per cent of divorcees regret ending their marriages and 40 per cent regret it in the first week.
Sarah Quigley knows this all too well and has chronicled her own experience in her latest book The Divorce Diaries. While living in her adopted city of Berlin, where she mixes with cosmopolitan artists, authors and musicians, she first meets the Swedish artist who was to become her husband. He seems perfect: to her, to her friends and to her family. But, when inebriated, he becomes someone she barely recognises. We ask Quigley some questions.
I began to feel increasingly unsafe in the marriage, due to alcoholrelated outbursts that were becoming more frequent. Around the time when I felt my physical safety was no longer secure, I knew I had to leave.
It’s very hard to give up on a longterm relationship that has many good points to it, not just the bad. As strange as it may sound, there were many reasons to stay! — strong love and steady friendship were at the heart of my marriage for years — but in the end there were more reasons to leave. And these became unignorable.
After I’d moved out of our shared apartment in Berlin, and was in a small safe place of my own, I had a whole lot of emotions to work through. The strongest, I guess, were grief, disappointment, and quite a lot of anger. I wanted to write about the process partly for my own sake, but also because I was thinking of all the other women out there in similar situations. I wanted to reach out to them, to let them know they weren’t alone. I waited until I’d worked through my anger — I didn’t want to write from a sense of grievance, and I wanted to write with humour — and then I began writing The Divorce Diaries as a monthly column, which eventually morphed into a book.
I reached out to friends as much as I could, even when I didn’t feel like doing anything except pulling the duvet over my head and crying. I tried to start a few new things — like enrolling in a language school — to move myself away from the person I’d been. All the same, time passing was the thing that helped the most. In a way, you have to go through the pain. There’s no way of avoiding that. You have to hang onto the belief that the pain is part of eventually becoming an even happier and stronger person than you were before.
Luckily, no. In the book I describe the lightning-bolt moment when I knew a line had been crossed and I would leave. I wrote down the time and the date, so that I wouldn’t ever forget that moment of clarity. And I kept it close, as a reminder to myself that I’d made the right decision.
I think that writing about something helps to get closure. Any book is a lot of work, but this one came with its own particular set of difficulties — not least because it stirred up a lot of difficult emotions again. But it’s definitely been a cathartic process.
I’ll always believe in love! But if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s to set stronger boundaries — not to drown in someone else’s problems. Put on your own oxygen mask first!