Where’s My Medal for Being Once-Married?

I recently wrote a piece on the difference between dating someone divorced and someone never-married, and it spurred some fascinating comments. Leonora Watkins told me that before reading this piece, she’d always been in the camp of thought that people never-married don’t carry as much baggage as those who are divorced, but
Lee Bidoski is more aligned with my perception that by the time someone reaches their later 30s (or older) and has never been married, it reads as commitment-phobic. Lee made a hilarious comment that being divorced says someone tried, at least minimally, and that they should give us all participation trophies. I laughed — a lot — and then started thinking more about this.

I’m divorced. So where’s my medal?

A divorce means, “I tried.” It means, “I am so capable of love and hope that I once pledged to adore and commit to another person and all their plans and dreams.” It means, “I thought I was capable of compromise and moments of selflessness and putting someone else and their disparate values first.”

Any breakup has the potential to be devastating, and this is compounded when you live together, have commingled finances and belongings, and everyone around you assumes that you’re in it together for the long haul. When you exit from this deep commitment that you (perhaps naively) thought was going to happily last forever, you ought to get more than heartbreak and social stigma and financial loss, and complete upheaval of your life.

You ought to get a damn medal.

Or, no, let me retract that. The trophy should come after therapy and processing what happened, once you begin to feel hopeful again. Because that’s the really impressive part: You can feel utterly cracked open by your experiences with another person, and heal from that to the point where you one day think you might want to try again; Where you think that love is worth the risk.

And I guess that that is the real trophy.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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