Goodbye and thank you

Divorce doesn’t have to be acrimonious. Lisa Jenkins decided to take a different path, and remembers her relationship with gratitude

Some months ago, I did an interview on national TV related to my work. My mother watched and told me that it never failed to amaze her how her shy, tongue-tied child had turned into someone who could stand up and speak in front of large audiences.

‘I wonder where your self-confidence comes from…’ she mused, and was surprised when I said a lot of it came from Anthony, my ex-husband.

Surprised because the narrative of the past few years, as our marriage had begun to unravel, had been largely negative. On the frequent occasions that I wept in my mother’s kitchen, I had given the impression that nothing good had come out of the 25 years Anthony and I had been together but, of course, there were many things. It just took me a while to acknowledge them.

So much of the language connected with the ending of relationships is negative. We talk of them as broken or failed. Until recently, you had to find fault to get divorced and, when Gwyneth Paltrow tried to put a positive spin on her spent relationship with Chris Martin by describing their break-up as a ‘conscious uncoupling’, she was ridiculed.

Many relationships end. Some don’t make it past the first few heady months, while others result in marriage – and divorce. A few go the full course from childhood sweetheart to till death do us part – but these are rare.

One wonders why any of us would enter into a relationship in the first place if, knowing the chances of it ending were high, we weren’t going to get anything positive from it. And yet, when they do finish, we tend to focus on the negatives, write off our exes and aspire to move on without too much backward glancing.

‘Negative emotions have a positive function,’ says Max Blumberg, a consultant psychologist who specialises in what makes couples happy. ‘In evolutionary terms, we are hardwired to feel anger if someone we have invested in leaves. Not dwelling on the positives helps you get over a broken relationship more quickly.’

I certainly went with the evolutionary hardwiring. My split from my husband was about as amicable as they come and yet I still felt a lot of crossness and resentment towards him, even though I wanted to ‘do a Gwyneth’.