After decades of managing to pull through in their marriages, why are more and more couples divorcing once they’ve hit middle age?

I

t was the morning after the last sheva brachos for their youngest child. Miriam and Zev shuffled into the kitchen, sat down with their respective mugs of coffee, and cleared their throats.

“It should have been the sweetest time for us,” remembers Miriam, “but instead we both knew what was coming. I looked at Zev and thought to myself, Now that the kids are settled, are we supposed to suffer through the rest of our life together in a marriage that has just caused pain and heartache for the last 30 years?”

It seems like wherever you turn today, you hear of couples or spouses who have struggled for years or even decades to keep their family unit intact, until the challenge becomes too daunting, the effort too unrewarding, the investment too exhausting, the danger too great, or the pain too overwhelming. Yet on the outside, some of these couples even look happy and stable, with no outward signs of struggles or challenges at all. What went awry after all those years, leading them to throw in the towel on several decades of wedded bliss?

From Brooklyn to Jerusalem, divorce patterns in the Orthodox Jewish world seem to be following the national trend: While the total divorce rate in the US has actually leveled off, in the 50-plus age bracket it’s taken a leap. Twenty years ago, one in ten divorces occurred in the middle-age population; today it’s climbed to four in ten.

Whether the evidence is statistical or anecdotal, the stories abound. One Boro Park couple who had been married for 25 years got divorced during the period of their daughter’s engagement, and the angry wife made sure her ex would be barred from the wedding. Less than a month later, surprised wedding guests scratched their heads in wonder: If the couple stuck it out for 25 years already, couldn’t they have waited another three weeks?

Aliza C. remembers how her Flatbush in-laws called a family meeting during her sheva brachos and announced their imminent divorce. Her very proper parents were livid — Aliza’s husband really was a great guy, but they would have never considered a shidduch with a boy from a divorced home.

Hinda R. called it quits after her youngest daughter got married. “We had actually been separated several years before, but, with intensive therapy, decided to get back together to give a stable structure to the children,” she says. “But the situation soon reverted back to its old dysfunctional patterns and I knew it would be over once the kids were out. By that point, we had nothing to do with each other. We’d literally pass each other in the hall. I was 60 years old. I couldn’t imagine going through the next 60 years living in an emotional igloo.”

Three a Week

“Epidemic” might be an overly hysterical, sensationalized, and innacurate term in describing the midlife divorce phenomenon, but the rising numbers are indisputable.

“I used to see a get once every three months. Now it can be three in one week,” says Rav Moishe Blum, the Siksa Rav in Monsey and head of a busy New York beis din that deals with all types of arbitration. “The middle-agers are just reflecting the general pattern.”

Rav Blum, who’s been dealing with gittin for the last 23 years, says that the root causes of midlife divorces aren’t really much different from those earlier on. “It’s really the same across the board. People don’t want to work at learning what it is to live with each other, to give in, to struggle, to be patient. Today people prefer to run from their problems rather than deal with them,” says the Dayan, who has in the last two decades counseled hundreds of couples and has sent hundreds more for professional therapy.

“The reason we see so many midlife divorces today is that although many couples are not ready to work on their marriage, they are willing to push through, to keep the act going, until the kids are out of the house. In fact, we always guide couples to try and push it until then, so the children shouldn’t have to deal with the huge trauma of divorce and all its ensuing fallout before they have stable homes of their own. So even if the couple refuses to work on bettering their relationship, we can guide them on how to live in the same house peacefully so at least on the outside everything looks normal. Sadly, this ‘waiting it out’ policy, as opposed to really investing in work and change, is very prevalent in the frum community. Just because they didn’t become a divorce statistic yet doesn’t mean they ever had a thriving marriage.”

Rav Blum mentions another new phenomenon fueling the divorce rate: It used to be that, for the most part, people knew where their spouse fit in on the religious spectrum. “Today, people are swinging on a pendulum. They go from right to left, from left to right — one spouse becomes too modern, another becomes chassidish. People don’t know who their spouse is anymore.”

And this, he says, is torture for the kids, especially if it ends in divorce. “Imagine a kid living with the dynamic of ‘In this house you’re allowed to have a DVD, in this house you’re not. In this house you go on a vacation, in this house you don’t’ — so we try our best to help the couple keep it stable while the kids are growing up.” Rav Blum qualifies this approach with one condition: If the situation remains intolerable at home, better for the children to live through the divorce — even if it means “this week we’ll be like Tatty” and “next week we’ll be like Mommy” — because living with warring parents creates a dysfunction in the child that stays with him forever.

“If they can’t push through without the kids seeing all the fighting, we don’t try to hold it together,” Rav Blum admits.

All his years of successful mediation notwithstanding, Rav Blum says there are two areas out of his control: mental health issues (“Twenty years ago I didn’t know about OCD, anxiety, or depression, and today I know all the pharmaceuticals”), and Internet.

Although deep-rooted problems might not start with the Internet, Rav Blum says they often end there. “About 40 percent of the gittin in my beis din are Internet-related, and it’s not only about men’s addictions. The last three gittin I did involved women who developed outside relationships through social media.”

Centuries ago there was no Internet and mental health issues had no names, but if you’re thinking that the divorce situation is something new,  just go back to the Russian shtetl. There is a tendency to idolize Eastern European life as a paradigm of spirituality, genius-level scholarship, and pristine virtue, but the Jews of the 1800s seem to have been as human as those of 2014. ChaeRan Freeze, a Korean-born Judeophile and professor of Jewish history at Brandeis University, researched family trends in the shtetl for a book, and was able to access long-untouched archives from Moscow and St. Petersburg containing records of Jewish marriage and divorce in imperial Russia. She discovered that Jewish divorce rates in 19th-century Russia took up a startlingly substantial section in those archives.

You Deserve It

Although it might seem like there is an unchecked flow of dissolving marriages, not everyone would call it an epidemic. Rabbi Yaakov Salomon, a Brooklyn-based marital and family therapist, popular kiruv video personality, and social commentator with Aish HaTorah and Project Discovery, says he’s not sure he’d even call midlife divorce a trend. “I think it’s always a little less than what people make it out to be, and I don’t think there are any screaming headlines here, although the numbers are definitely more than what we would want and should be happy with,” he says. Trend or not, what makes a couple, after raising a family together for two dozen years, decide to finally divorce?

Perhaps it’s because couples spend all their years focused on their kids instead of on their marriage, and then once the children are out they discover they have no relationship. Perhaps a marriage crumbles under the financial pressure of marrying off the children. Perhaps a “midlife crisis” hits and one spouse feels a need for redirection. Perhaps after years of both spouses being occupied with their separate, time-consuming tasks of running the family and making a living, they slow down their busy lives and find themselves thrown together for many more hours a day, an adjustment they might find difficult or even distasteful.

But the most likely scenario is that there were major problems all along.

“Marriages don’t usually turn sour all of a sudden, and you won’t see later-life divorces when there was a good marriage,” says Rabbi Salomon, who has spent his mornings in Torah Vodaath kollel for the past 29 years and has been a psychotherapist in private practice since 1982 — and who gets many referrals from rabbanim for couples contemplating divorce. “But today people feel empowered when they’re 40, 50, 60 — they see that they have a lot left of their lives and they don’t want to put up with a controlling, difficult, or abusive spouse anymore. I think 50 years ago, a 50- or 60-year-old would say, ‘Okay, I’ve lived with it this long, I might as well die with it.’ But people don’t see it like that anymore. Today 50 is just starting a new chapter in life, so a person thinks, why stay stuck in a bad situation?”

But as much as people feel they deserve to be happy — and no one deserves to be in an abusive relationship — Rabbi Salomon admits that in our times, a certain feeling of iz kumt mir creeps into the mix and unrealistically raises expectation levels. And it doesn’t start with marriage. It starts, he believes, with spoiled children who believe they are entitled to everything.

“This is the core of our ills,” he says. “I once asked a rav what he thinks is the biggest problem we face. He said, ‘Internet.’ I don’t think so. I think it’s that we’ve been raised to get what we want, without tolerance for imperfection, without patience for allowing something to evolve, to change, and to work hard for it. You’re allowed to want to be happy, but a lot of people take it too far. I’m not happy unless — and here comes the laundry list — my husband gives me this, my boss gives me that… and most of life is just not like that. Yet we haven’t taught that to our kids, so they don’t get it when they’re adults.”

That’s not to say that people are obligated — or even that it’s praiseworthy or a sign of great middos — to stay in bad marriages. “It’s true that a person can live and even find a level of happiness in a challenging marriage, and many people make that conscious choice, but some people stay in abusive marriages that are dangerous, caustic, or intolerable, not because they’re on such a great madreigah, but because of codependency issues and other unhealthy interrelationships.”

Just Try Harder While some seemingly incompatible couples make a rational, conscious decision to maintain a doomed marriage at least until the kids grow up, not all these delayed divorces are motivated by cold logic. Some tormented spouses stay in a relationship because of their personal hesitations to face the alternative, or because they keep clinging to hope despite their suffering.

Atara M. left her husband after 22 years and nine children, amid messy litigation, stall tactics, and child support sabotage.

“The problems were there from the beginning, but for the first 11 years life was good. My ex suffers from addictions and an underlying personality disorder, but it was benign at the beginning, and whatever I saw, I kept telling myself, ‘This is my nisayon, it will get better.’ Of course it didn’t get better. It got worse, intolerable, with psychotic episodes, violence, danger for me and the children. Yet I was constantly living with this tension: We’re taught that a wife can bring out the best in her husband, if we would just try harder, learn the right techniques, connect to his good side and fan the flames of his goodness so that he can reach his potential.

“This is all true, but I think it needs to be said with a caveat: If there is illness, the system works differently. But I never knew what the boundaries were. I would tell him, ‘These are hard times. Let’s get through them so that we’ll have something good after the kids are married. We can have a great future.’ I just couldn’t imagine I’d be one of those divorced women. I never considered it an option. Afterwards, I was so broken I went to a therapist. She told me, ‘You’re not mourning him. You’re mourning the dream of a healthy marriage.’ ”

Hinda R. would agree. Although she initiated the divorce in a relationship that had been festering with toxic communication and emotional withdrawal, she was never 100 percent sure that ending it was the answer. This man was the father of her children, and although there was no love lost, she sensed the soul connection. “In the Kabbalistic literature we learn that in the world of souls, your connection is to your first husband — it doesn’t matter if you are divorced, widowed, or remarried. Your first husband is your bashert. Your second is what you deserve, or what’s related to your inner will.”

And there was another hesitation. “A husband, no matter who he is, gives a woman a sense of security and frames your life in a way that keeps you accepted by society.” Although she finally felt liberated, her new divorced status was both humiliating and disorienting. “Truthfully, after the divorce I was totally lost. No matter how horrible you think your husband is, he’s an anchor, even if it’s a rusty piece of iron.” Hinda was broke, had to give up their apartment, and moved into a studio. “Can you imagine, at my age having to schnorr Shabbos invitations?”

Role Reversal

As confusing as the new divorced status is for the former couple, the tension of suddenly having divorced parents isn’t lost on their adult children. How do they negotiate family gatherings, simchahs, and other occasions? How do they navigate Shabbos and Yom Tov loyalties?

Rivka, whose parents divorced three years ago — shortly after her first baby was born — says she’s basically had to adopt her parents, neither of whom remarried. As the oldest of seven siblings and the only one married at the time of the divorce, both her younger siblings’ and her parents’ emotional fallout landed on her shoulders.

“The one thing that kept me sane was that we’re living in the Midwest while my parents are in Los Angeles. Otherwise I would have become totally enmeshed,” Rivka admits. “Even today when I go back to L.A., it’s not like I’m going ‘back home’ to be pampered in the security of my old home. Today it’s about taking care of their needs — because as hard as it was for them living together, without each other they’ve become needy and dependent on us kids. It’s a total role reversal.”

Dividing up the Yamim Tovim is still a juggling act. Her mother comes for the first half of Yom Tov, her father for the second.

“When they first got divorced, my husband said that we weren’t going to either of them for Pesach, that my children should see a complete family unit. For him to run the Seder at my mother’s house, or for me to make Pesach and have my father run our Seder — it was just too uncomfortable for him.

“My father does come to our city quite often, but if we’re ever in L.A. for a Shabbos or Yom Tov with my father, I have to prepare everything. I’m no longer going ‘back home.’ I’m going into this weird parenting role with my own parents. They’re not elderly yet, but I’ve had to adopt them. My father will call me from the supermarket because he’s confused about what to buy for supper. My mother will try to suck me in to the drama of her divorce.”

As difficult as her current dynamic is, Rivka says she’s relieved and grateful that her parents didn’t break up when she was a child.

“Divorce was a much bigger stigma when I was growing up. I remember whenever there was an argument, the worst thing was the dread that they would get divorced. Now when I think about it, I realize I was happy that I grew up in a stable family situation, a complete house. It was definitely for my benefit.”

Being the only married child when her parents’ marriage broke up created other tensions as well. “My siblings definitely resented that I was already safely through shidduchim,” Rivka says. “It was as if I got off scot-free and they were left with the blemish.”

Are You Happy?

As the divorce rate of midlifers increases, focus on the stresses associated with the changes in their marital status has caught the attention of researchers, and prompted the American Association of Retired People (AARP) to commission a far-reaching survey of middle-age divorcés, with some surprising results. According to the survey, the biggest stressors for both men and women after midlife divorce are loneliness and depression, feelings of desertion and betrayal, sense of failure, not having a caring partner, feelings of inadequacy, and loss of self-esteem and self-confidence. Women also fear for their finances, while men suffer more from the loss of connection with their children.

In fact, the decline in financial stability often affects the divorced woman’s health, and she is statistically more prone to doctors’ visits and incurs other health expenses.

All these stress models notwithstanding, are couples actually happier once they’ve divorced?

“When marriage has been abusive, people are certainly happier to be free of that kind of torture,” says psychologist, author, and relationships expert Sarah Chana Radcliffe. “But in more ordinary, conflict-ridden, difficult, and challenging relationships — that is, normal marriage — many people discover that being permanently single is not more pleasant or easy, and that being in a family full of stepparents, stepsiblings, and half relatives is very complicated, difficult, and burdensome — often even harder than the first, troubled marriage with one’s own original spouse and children.”

Mordechai Yaakov, Baltimore-based best-selling author of multiple marriage books and creator of “ShalomBayis911” — a free online course aimed at reducing the divorce rate in the Orthodox community — has connected with thousands of couples married for many years who’ve reached a crisis stage in their relationship. If they do divorce in the end, he says, they often come around to realize that maybe they could have done more to save the marriage, that maybe “it wasn’t all her fault. Maybe I bore more responsibility than I thought I did.”

Often, says Mordechai, they come to this realization once they get into another relationship and discover similar stressors and challenges they thought they’d escaped. “If they are very open, they might realize, ‘The one thing both relationships have in common is me.’

“One might assume that the second time around, since the couple has been married before and have experienced what a botched marriage is all about, they would have more success the next time, but the statistics say differently,” he explains. “While 50 percent of first marriages in the US end in divorce, it’s 70 percent for second marriages and close to 80 percent for third marriages. The partner might assume, ‘Now I know how to get it right,’ but it doesn’t work that way. You have two people who have failed in a marriage and now they’re combined in a second marriage, and unless they go about taking responsibility and fixing what was wrong the first time around, it’s just going to happen all over again.”

Mordechai, a frequent guest on radio talk shows whose breakthrough marriage program has been featured in national print and electronic media, believes that there is another way to healing marriages as an alternative to standard marriage counseling centered around conflict resolution and effective communication. His approach evolved from his own pain after he and his wife lost a son and then twin daughters, both times within days of being born.

“My wife became very depressed, and I immersed myself in my work,” he explains, “but we’d already lost enough, and we didn’t want to lose each other.” Yet standard therapy — digging up the past and working on communication techniques — just helped them tell each other how miserable each was.

“We needed a new way of thinking about marriage,” says Mordechai, today the happy father of four (including triplets).

“I like to compare marriage to golf. How come people can play for years and years and never improve their game? It’s because practice doesn’t make perfect if what you’re practicing is flawed. So yes, these couples might care more, are more hesitant to divorce and more dedicated to make it work, but it will only work if they learn tools for change and real relationship-building.”

Rabbi Yaakov Salomon, for his part, contends that he never hears about regrets. “I have never met anyone who says they grieve over their divorce.”

He qualifies: “Actually, I’m sure there are lots of people out there who have regrets, but they don’t admit it, at least not to me. No one ever tells me, ‘I made a mistake, I should have stayed married.’ So if you ask them, they’ll say they’re happier. And sometimes it’s true, but often it’s a question of perception. Do they do better the second time around? I would say yes, because they might have learned better marriage skills, and because they are determined to show that they were right. You make it work because you have to, because you’ve learned from your mistakes, and because you just make it work. The raw material isn’t necessarily better, but if you run your car into the ground the first time, the second time you’ll take better care of it. It’s not necessarily a better car. Maybe it’s a jalopy. But this time you’ll protect it.”

Surprises?

According to the AARP survey, women are more prone to initiate divorce than men, even if some men go through a “midlife crisis.” Most men would prefer to stay married, and many admitted that they were caught off guard by their divorce; 26 percent said they “never saw it coming.”

Is that true for the Torah-oriented community as well?

“I don’t believe it,” says Mrs. Radcliffe. “Their wives have been complaining for a long time. But although they may not be that surprised when the wife demands a divorce, these husbands are often unbelievably devastated.”

“The women are the initiators, two to one,” says Rabbi Salomon. “In general, the men really don’t want to get divorced. The women are often unhappy for many years, but stay together for the children. After the kids are married, they feel freer, they may have become stronger over the years with more self-awareness, and realize that they ‘deserve’ a more fulfilling life.”

Emotionally injured women might be the main initiators of divorce, but one of society’s best-kept secrets is that in troubled marriages, men too can be victims of abuse. They’re just harder to identify.

Morris was in such a marriage for over four decades, trying his best to be generous and loving to a wife who, due to emotional abuse in her own childhood, was incapable of receiving warmth or giving empathy. “We were married for 45 years. For 42 of them, we were in counseling, but although today I can say I suffered severe psychological torture, I’m a softie. A gadol I was close to said I have a first-class ticket to Olam Haba for sticking it out. I didn’t want to hurt her and I would have never asked for a divorce.” What happened? After 45 years, she beat him to it. “You know, she was a witch, but I still miss her. Isn’t that odd?”

“Pathological behavior goes both ways,” says Jerusalem divorce attorney Jeremy Stern, who, as a litigator in custody and child support battles, gets the messiest, meanest cases on his table. “Men who are mentally ill, controllers, or abusers are easier to spot, but I see a lot of men married to women with severe psychiatric problems, with personality disorders, or just really bad middos. We tend to cut women more emotional slack and expect the man to ‘be a man.’ ”

But these high-conflict personalities don’t only make married life intolerable: If the situation finally comes to divorce, their endless disputes and motions waste a lot of money and energy. And while in the US withholding a get can be an abusive spouse’s power base, under Israeli law a woman can refuse to accept a get, using it as a weapon to extract a better deal for herself. According to Stern, it’s a common tactic women use to get a bigger settlement.

Stern says his typical client today is someone who’s been married at least 20 years, has married off a few children, and has more children still at home. They might technically not be middle-agers yet because they married young, but they have treaded water in a bad marriage for many years, and the hot-button issues of kids, custody, and child support are always at the center of litigation. “Money you can divide, but you can’t cut a kid in half,” says Stern. So what happened to bring them to court after two decades?

“The chareidi community, which makes up much of my client base, is flooded with shalom bayis machers — some competent, some not — who put pressure on the husband or the wife to stay in the marriage,” he explains. In this unmonitored, unaccredited field, even a competent askan who has success with classic shalom bayis issues might not pick up the cues and patterns for pathological issues that an astute mental health professional will catch.

“If you’re dealing with a very charming narcissist, for example, an askan without a professional background in mental illness might buy into his story, giving untenable advice to the spouse who will wind up on a counterproductive guilt trip. This could go on for 15 or 20 years or longer.”

Another Way?

The road to divorce has many stations, and the first one is usually a therapist. When a woman after three decades in a challenging marriage stops at the therapist before the beis din, is she harboring hope that her marriage could actually improve? Maybe her husband has anxiety or anger issues, maybe he’s hypercritical and has destroyed her self-esteem, maybe they just feel empty with each other. Can a therapist turn the situation around?

“Secretly, these women want you to fix their husbands,” says Rabbi Salomon. “Women want to be married, and they want to be in a satisfying relationship. And, their concerns are very often valid. But I’m not about ‘fixing’ the other person.

“People come to me when they’re in trouble, but I will tell you that the relative competence of the therapist is not nearly as important as the willingness on the part of the couple to change, of a spouse being ready to look at him- or herself and say, ‘I’m ready to be someone different, I’m willing to work on myself.’ The ones who were successful were the ones who walked in really wanting help, and those that it didn’t work for were the ones who walked in saying, ‘This has nothing to do with me, it’s only about the other party.’ If they’re willing to open themselves up to change, to move forward, to do some internal work, then I can help.”

Rabbi Salomon knows what it means to have a vision of yourself and make it happen. That’s how he became Aish’s most popular video lecturer, successful author, and the compiler of the Torah of Rav Noach Weinberg ztz”l. “Aish came into my life in 1989, when I heard a speech by Rabbi Motti Berger. I went as a favor to a friend in order to fill the house, but I sat there mesmerized. Afterwards I went up to him and said five words that would change my life: ‘I want to be you.’

“The next morning, I was in an office on Coney Island Avenue learning how to be a Discovery lecturer. Two months later I was on a plane to L.A. doing Discovery seminars.

“It’s all about change, and about a willingness and a humility to make yourself into your best self.

“I’ll give you an example. I just ended with a couple — I didn’t give up on them totally, but I told them that in order to continue, they’d each have to write an essay about the most important thing they need to change about themselves without mentioning or referring to the spouse. I told them I’ll take mail, fax, or e-mail. I’m still waiting. When it comes, we can continue. Otherwise, they’re just throwing out money.

“If I were to ask you what the three most important words in a marriage are, you’d probably say something like ‘I love you.’ Really, the three most important words are, ‘I was wrong.’ I’ve had couples whom I told to practice saying this in the bathroom, in front of the mirror. If you haven’t said this in a few decades, you can practice it 20 times a day until you can say the words out loud to your spouse.”

But what if all these techniques don’t seem to work, if after decades the relationship seems frayed beyond repair and the couple — or one spouse — feels hopeless about the future, is there ever a time to call it quits?

“I believe the couple should make a Herculean effort to save their marriage before they take that step,” says Mordechai Yaakov. He says the parties should be meeting the following two criteria for at least a year: The first is to take responsibility. “You can always confess your spouse’s sins, but if your marriage is crumbling, you must have contributed to it in some way. So you should be asking yourself, not what your spouse did wrong, but what your role was in contributing to the disintegration of the marriage.”

The second is to form good marital habits. “Whether it’s our profession or our marriage, it’s really our habits that determine our level of competency,” he explains. “If people have gotten to the brink of divorce, it’s safe to say they do not have good marital habits.”

Given that most of Yaakov Salomon’s clients actually stay together in the end, has he taught them “good marital habits”?

“Well, I’ll admit that most of my clients don’t actually get divorced, so I guess you could use that as a statistic. But although they don’t divorce, most of them live on and suffer. Maybe it’s a little better, maybe they’ve learned a few techniques, but it’s usually not as good as it could be. Unless they’re willing to make a change. And ‘change’ is the scariest word in the dictionary.”

Splitting the Nucleus of the Nuclear Family

Sarah Shapiro

M

y former husband and I divorced after thirty years of marriage.

Twenty years ago, ten years ago… whenever another couple’s divorce took me by surprise, I’d be tempted to wonder: Why are we staying together? And I’d think to myself: Because of the children.

But was it so? And had I voiced this answer aloud, would you have believed it?

Were your worldview consistent with basic secular psychology and Western culture’s prevailing wisdom, you would have seen such extreme self-sacrifice — if in truth it was undertaken from a sincere desire to protect the kids — as unnecessary, and not in the latter’s best interest anyway. You would have reassured me — a sensitive, dedicated, guilt-prone, responsible, unselfish mother — with one of those pop-culture conundrums well-designed to relieve parental conscience: Children need above all to see their parents happy….They need you to respect your own needs….Children are resilient! You would have suspected that perhaps we were actually a couple held back from self-fulfillment by inertia and fear of change, and of lowering our status in the Orthodox world’s social hierarchy; or of being alone, a couple deceiving themselves for the sake of pride that their motives were loftier and more altruistic than was actually the case.

You would have said we were acting out of fear of the unknown.

In fact, we were indeed acting — or rather, not acting — from fear of the unknown.

I

knew this, and knew that he did, too.

Which is not to say that communicating with each other had ever come easily. Back when we met in the late 1970s (several trustworthy people had red the shidduch independently of each other) I could see that this dignified young man, a sincere baal teshuvah like myself, was kind, intelligent, refined. I prayed fervently, with confidence, and was temporarily hesitant when the shadchanit advised me to prepare a few subjects of common interest for our fourth date. “He’s wondering why the conversations don’t flow so easily. But don’t worry, I told him that’ll change after the wedding.”)

So the years passed. I tried without success to be honest with my conscience. It did seem, above all, to be the unknown impact on our children that held us back. Was I inhibited by the standard fear — so pervasive in the frum world — of the associated stigma’s impact on our children’s future shidduchim? Would surrendering to this bugaboo constitute a form of spiritual cowardice, a failure of emunah? Or was the Torah world simply more realistic about inevitable psychological truths? It’s no mystery, after all, that parental divorce is guaranteed to cause children — no matter at what age or stage — immeasurable sadness. If the child is young, still dependent, still living in his childhood home during the so-called formative years, the impact is unpredictable. No generalization works, except that there will be suffering, embarrassment, confusion, torment, and that grief will endure. Such trauma — if it’s buried and still festering later on, on any level of the psyche — cannot be ignored when he or she is being considered as a marriage partner, nor the possibility that this candidate might be secretly carrying around a distorted concept of many things marital. Few childhood experiences are as likely as the divorce of a mother and father to fragment the mind and heart, not to mention harm physical health.

These questions haunted me.

Ironically, they also served as an aspect of the mutual respect between my former husband and me, because we felt the same way about this central responsibility. It pulled us through. As parents we were on the same page. We felt such thanks to Hashem for the blessing of our magnificent children, of course the best children in the whole world. That shared love gave us purpose and meaning as individuals that we dared not forfeit, even as our lives were increasingly proceeding on parallel, distant tracks, he in learning Torah and I in writing.

Had either of us been sadistic or cruel or dishonest by nature, or a parent whose presence was more damaging than his or her absence, saving our children via divorce would have been mandatory, pronto, at the earliest possible juncture. But this was not the case. So by default, without knowing where we would end up, we took the safest route and stayed put. We were two normal, moral Jews. Given the price that’s exacted emotionally by any couple in an uncommunicative marriage, I felt both cowardly and heroic.

This grueling, usually unhappy, deeply rewarding process, over many years, served as our personalized hard labor camp, spiritually speaking. It put us through what we had to go through. Being forced to learn how to be good actors in front of the children did maximize our happiness, and taught us the spiritual benefits of faking it. We learned the vast power of a smile.

And where, having waited, did we find ourselves upon becoming single again? We were both alone, struggling to reorient ourselves to life no less than any adolescent, just as we entered the so-called golden years.

T

he genuine task at any point in life is to identify and investigate one’s own failures and weaknesses. No easy task! How very tempting to simply never grow up, to remain blind to my yetzer hara, to project things I dislike about myself onto others!

Any husband and wife, with their opposing natures, contain all humanity in microcosm. A greater understanding of myself has bestowed more understanding of others.

Loneliness during the marriage, especially as our nest gradually emptied out and I was no longer the busy mother bird, differed from aloneness in the years after divorce. I think loneliness — and feeling ungrounded — was more difficult for me than for my former husband. Whether that’s a matter of basic male/female differences, I’m not foolhardy enough to speculate.

But we both experience a similar happiness now, and it’s profound. It is the peace of mind of having done what we know — in our case — was right. I’m not advocating this as the Right Way. Every family is uniquely, infinitely complex, as is every situation. We learned through the years the power of putting on a happy face, thereby making it possible for our children, and now our grandchildren, to have essentially normal childhoods. To the best of our ability, we had to accept the test that was meant for us.

Bottom line:

For a child, divorce strikes with the magnitude of an earthquake, cracking open his home and the ground he walks on. It can destroy a child’s innocence and sense of safety in the world.

Or, alternatively, it can teach him, and all of us, that in this imperfect world, our idealism and love can survive, and prevail.

The two of us, my ex-husband and I, are rewarded with the immeasurable satisfaction of seeing our children happily married. There’s a self-respect engendered by having put our responsibilities as parents first, and I think this is why we’re not afraid of running into each other at our children’s — and, b’ezras Hashem, in the future, our grandchildren’s — simchahs. We can face each other with pride in the shared achievement: We waited for our children to be grown and settled happily in their own lives, before we ourselves moved on.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha Issue 513)