The Divorce Surgery

The Art of Untying the Knot

Samantha Woodham, Harry Gates

• Publisher: Thorsons
• Year: 2022
• Topic: Psychology
• eBook ISBN:
  9780008505523
• Subtopic: Family Law
• Index: Psychology

The good divorce guide.

Separating, or contemplating divorce, can feel like the weight of the world is on your shoulders. But know this: it is going to be OK. In fact, it is going to be better than OK, and sooner than you think.

Through our 10-Step Divorce Plan, we will take you through everything we know about divorce – from setting goals to agreeing a course of action, from working out a plan for co-parenting to reaching a financial agreement – cutting out the jargon, so you can not only survive separation, but thrive.

The time has come for a fresh look at our approach to divorce and separation, and this book is an invaluable resource for anyone going through the process, and for the family and friends affected along the way. It is an essential, accessible blueprint for separating well, and a powerful critique of where we've gone wrong before.

STEP 1

SETTING OUR GOALS

‘How do we start this right?’

The first step is all about framing the narrative for your divorce and setting your goals.

Framing the narrative

The story of your divorce is crucial. It will impact how you approach every aspect of our 10-Step Divorce Plan. The way you tell your friends, family and colleagues that you are getting divorced will dictate how they will view this life change you are about to embark upon, and what kind of support they will provide. It will also frame how you view yourself.

There’s nothing intrinsically bad about divorce

That sounds so counter-intuitive, doesn’t it? And shows how programmed we all are to view divorce as something unappealing and to be avoided. Can you imagine listing divorce as a life goal? And yet we’ll accept other life transitions without this heavy overlay of emotional stigma.

So the first thing to know is that your mindset will be warped and you’ll need to question your own instinctive reactions to divorce and what it means, as well as those that the outside world will impose upon you.

We call this negative conditioning the ‘divorce lens’. Let’s look at other significant life changes you may have made, but through the divorce lens.

Decided you want to move from the city to the country?

‘Ooooh, how exciting! Can I come to stay?’

vs divorce lens:

‘But you committed to the city at the age of 23 and I never thought you were the kind of person at age 45 who would abandon those urban ideals.’

Moving jobs?

‘Oh, wow, that sounds like a great career move!’

vs divorce lens:

‘But how has that made your employer feel? I know absolutely nothing about your employment relationship or what you do day to day, but from my position of complete ignorance on these issues I really feel you should try a bit harder and hold out in this job that’s making you deeply unhappy.’

Similarly, everyone will have an opinion, often ill-founded, on your marriage, and your divorce. So the first thing you both need to do is buttress yourselves against the in-built and often deeply unhelpful reactions of those around you. And know that they are wrong. You will set the narrative.

Why get married anyway?

To start at the very beginning, why do any of us get married in the first place? If you do an internet search with that question, you’ll get a ream of academic studies about why marriage is good: you’ll live longer, you’ll earn more money, your children will live longer, you’ll be less depressed, more loved and have more sex (yes, apparently); and just as many studies about why marriage is bad: you’ll have weaker relationships with your friends and family, be less politically engaged and more isolated.

Or, take these two quotes:

Marriage responds to the universal fear that a lonely person might call out only to find no one there. It offers the hope of companionship and understanding and assurance that while both still live there will be someone to care for the other.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, a former associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, his majority opinion in Obergefell v Hodges

vs

If you’re afraid of loneliness, don’t marry.

Chekhov

But who sits down and makes a pros and cons list when contemplating a marriage proposal? For the vast majority of couples, it’s an instinct. A study in 2013 found1 that 88 per cent of the general public surveyed gave the top reason for getting married as love.

So, what is love?

If we marry for love, all things being equal, shouldn’t we stay married for love? But most of us would admit that love is something well beyond our control. There is some scientific research2 to tell us that, at its core, love is the result of a basic evolutionary mechanism that emerged millennia ago, enabling us to focus our attentions on one partner to aid procreation and the stability of the family unit.

Love can be shown on brain scans, in particular as activity in the ventral tegmental area, a region of the brain which makes the stimulant dopamine and sends it to other areas. So, at a biological level, love is a function of brain chemistry, which is changing all the time. Both falling in love and falling out of love are functions of our subconscious.

This is important for your narrative as a divorcing couple. You didn’t choose to fall out of love. And you can’t force yourself to love again. Acknowledging that relieves you both of a significant burden.

And what is life all about?

I assure you we’ll get back to the practicalities of divorce soon, but these gargantuan life questions matter when you’re aiming to approach divorce with the right mindset.

At the heart of our life experience is the pursuit of happiness. But, in the same way that we can’t control love, happiness can be elusive. As Benjamin Franklin said:

The [US] Constitution only gives people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself.

As a society, we live in an individualistic age. We are far less likely than our grandparents to stay in situations that make us uncomfortable or unhappy. Fortunately, we are more tolerant of divorce in general (although there is still a great deal of progress to be made) and we are more inclined to weigh the temporary unhappiness of a divorce against the permanent horrors of staying put. As Joan Rivers put it, ‘Half of all marriages end in divorce – and then there are the really unhappy ones.’ In 1960, as we stood on the cusp of a revolution in social freedom, there were fewer than 24,000 divorces in England and Wales. In 2019 there were 108,000, a fourfold increase, despite the fact that the number of marriages had fallen by a third in the same period3 (the law was changed to make divorce easier in 1971, contributing to the increased pace of divorce throughout the Seventies and Eighties). Joan would be encouraged.

Basically, we are less inclined to settle for ‘good enough’ when ‘perfect’ is just out there, waiting for us if only we’re bold enough to grab it. Compromise can be seen as something of a dirty word across all walks of life – in politics, in art, in business, and of course in personal relationships. And it is true that you can compromise too much. You may already both be exhausted by the daily micro-concessions your marriage has required of you, from the food you eat, to the TV you watch, to the friends you see, to the Christmas Day routine you have endured ‘even though everyone knows that’s not the way you do it’, all the way through to the much bigger issues, such as the career you ‘sacrificed’ to bring up your children or from the long hours you ‘endured’ in a job you hated because the bills needed paying.

One rationale for marriage which has always resonated with people is that you get married because you are happier together than apart. Of course, none of us is happy every day. Life is full of both light and shade. But when the unhappy days heavily outweigh the happy ones, it is right to reflect on why. We set out on a journey to make ourselves and each other happy. But over time, for some couples, this becomes impossible. Their relationship, once a source of great joy, becomes the root of their unhappiness.

There is no one to blame

Approached in this way, that it is the relationship that has failed, not the individuals, forms the backbone to a blame-free divorce.

There will be potential (and highly attractive) scapegoats all around you: long working hours, an affair, emotional disengagement, undesirable friends, hostile extended family members, financial mismanagement. Don’t fall down those rabbit holes. These are symptoms, not causes.

If your happiness and your former partner’s happiness are now mutually exclusive, you have a problem which neither of you can overcome. All you can pursue is your own happiness. If that road causes the other to be unhappy, don’t force them to travel with you. Equally, you cannot spend your precious time on this planet making someone else happy without regard to your own needs.

‘So why are we getting divorced?’

Big, expansive ideas about the pursuit of happiness are fine, but for many couples that doesn’t quite cut it. They need a more specific narrative. Why, when it was so great at the start, is it so bad now? Was it even that good at the start, or was this divorce a seed there from the get-go, just waiting to emerge at the most inopportune time?

It is so difficult to remember emotions. When you look at photos, you can see the smiling faces, and no doubt remember the great meal or the funny anecdote that brought forth those smiles. But can you remember how you felt then? Probably not. Why? Well, largely because you are a different person now.

Our personalities were long thought to be fixed by the time we reached our thirties, but the latest research suggests they continue to change throughout our lives.4 Our traits are ever shifting, and by the time we’re in our seventies and eighties we’ve undergone a significant transformation. ‘The conclusion is exactly this: that we are not the same person for the whole of our life,’ says René Mõttus, a psychologist from the University of Edinburgh.5 Psychologists call the process of change that occurs as we age ‘personality maturation’. It’s a gradual, imperceptible change that begins in our teenage years and continues into at least our eighth decade on the planet.

So, ‘growing apart’ is precisely that. You were probably extremely compatible when you met and fell in love. But you’ve both changed. And now you aren’t any more. You may well have said and done unkind things to each other as you fought against the personality mismatch that developed. Why is the person who used to make you so happy now making you so sad? But if you can stand back and acknowledge that you’re both facing this same (seemingly) unresolvable dilemma, you’ll soon realize the solution is staring you both in the face. You need to free each other from this relationship that was meeting your needs but isn’t any more. And that isn’t anyone’s fault. You’re just different people now. And you both deserve to be happy.

You can’t control love. You can’t make somebody else happy. That’s OK. That’s life.

‘What is our divorce story?’

Your divorce story is going to become a narrative which you fall back on when times get tough. So it’s important to take some time before you commit to that narrative, even to yourself. Whether you were the one to instigate the divorce conversation or not, you need to invest time in rationalizing in your own mind what has happened, and why, before you let the world in.

A case study example:

Mary and Geoff

Mary and Geoff were married for 37 years. When they first met both were working professionals on track for good careers. Geoff’s career took him all over the world. He had some successes, but the gruelling hours meant he was rarely at home during the working week. So the family commitments fell squarely on Mary’s shoulders. After the birth of their first child, she gave up work, and at the time was happy to do so. She could see that the combined demands of their jobs were incompatible with the all-consuming nature of caring for young children. Something had to give. And whilst she had at times enjoyed her career, she had also found it stressful. She was still relatively junior. A baby felt like a greater life purpose she was happy to pursue.

Fast-forward 30 years. The children are grown, independent and happy (on the whole). Geoff is still working as hard as ever. Mary’s life is full and largely independent of her husband’s. One Saturday morning Geoff leaves his mobile on the kitchen table whilst having a shower. He hasn’t selected the privacy settings on WhatsApp, meaning that when messages arrive they flash up on the screen. Which is how Mary discovers Geoff’s affair with Fiona, a work colleague who is 30 years younger than Geoff (and in fact younger than their youngest child).

There is so much to unpack about Mary and Geoff, and we will return to their story at various stages in the book. But focusing now just on their divorce story, Mary has been completely blindsided and she has a ready-made narrative: she is the wronged wife of an adulterous monster who is having an affair with a younger woman. It’s an old story. But is this really their story? If you were to ask Geoff, would he talk of years of deep-rooted unhappiness, growing apart, trying and failing to reconnect? Was Mary really still ‘in’ the marriage emotionally? Were they both, in fact, already in some ways living separate lives?

Furthermore, does it help or hinder Mary to be cast as the victim? Her first instinct was to start divorce proceedings. Luckily, her sister held her back. If she hadn’t done so, Mary’s wronged wife story could have spread like wildfire – a...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Note to Readers
• Dedication
• Contents
• Prologue: Golden Rules
• The 10-Step Divorce Plan
• STEP 1: Setting Our Goals
• STEP 2: Agreeing Our Plan of Action
• STEP 3: Deciding What Professional Support We Need
• STEP 4: Making Short-Term Plans
• STEP 5: Starting to Talk about the Children
• STEP 6: Building Our Financial Picture
• STEP 7: Reaching a Co-Parenting Agreement
• STEP 8: Reaching a Financial Agreement
• STEP 9: Managing Our Friends and Family
• STEP 10: Making Our Reshaped Family a Lifelong Reality
• Notes and References
• Afterword and Thanks
• Index
• About the Publisher