Posts Tagged ‘divorce’

I have a theory about the Seal & Heidi breakup

January 27th, 2012

Is it just me or is every celebrity marriage dissolving in front of our eyes? I mean, Russell Brand and Katy Perry is one thing – not even they can have imagined it would last as long as it did – but now the news that Heidi and Seal are to divorce? It’s just too much.

The interwebs are aflame with disbelief. Not Heidi and Seal! they say. Of all the celebrity couples out there, we thought at least they would last.

Am I the only one who thinks a white scarf runs the risk of making you look like Mumm-Raa from ThunderCats?

This got me thinking.

Why is it everyone was so convinced that Heidi and Seal’s marriage was so goshdarnit perfect? It’s not like any of us could tell how well they communicated, or how well they physically clicked and used intimacy as a glue to hold their relationship together. We don’t know what their respective love languages are, and how fluent each was in the other’s.

I did a quick google of all the blog posts and news items and it turns out that everyone in the entire world who thought they were a solid couple based that belief on one main factor.

They renewed their vows each year in a lavish ceremony.

As far as I’m concerned, there’s definitely a risk that if you do a lot to outwardly show how in love you are and what a great couple you are, it’s either an attempt to mask the fact that you’re a terrible couple, or at the very least it’s an activity that takes your energy and focus away from actually spending time doing the real things that will sustain and improve your marriage. Melissa thinks that the fact I’m making this statement on a blog all about our marriage is hypocritical. But the difference (I think) is that this blog is reflective of the amount of work we put into our marriage. When things aren’t going so well, we share it.

I’ve got nothing against vow renewals. Melissa is desperately trying to convince me that we should have one, as a way to mark the amazing improvements we’ve made in our marriage over the past couple of years. TLHP alum Alisa Bowman and her husband Mark had one because they turned their marriage around from the brink of failure.

But an annual vow renewal has all the power stripped out of it because it becomes a foregone conclusion. Which means you stop thinking about whether you want to renew your vows, and start doing it because that’s what you do. It’s a little like giving medals to all the kids who take part in the race. Sure, it makes it look like everyone’s a winner, but that doesn’t mean you won’t find someone crying under the bleachers before the afternoon is over.

Do you think there’s more to the Heidi and Seal situation than meets the eye? What’s your theory?

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Posted in Bad Marriage Role Model, Musings on Marriage

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What a Scorcese movie taught me about marriage

January 9th, 2012

Over the holidays, we watched Living in the Material World, the Martin Scorcese documentary about George Harrison. It was utterly fascinating and I could write a whole blog about what a compelling, paradoxical, talented and larger-than-life character the “quiet Beatle” was.

For me, the most interesting moment of the documentary came during an interview with George’s wife of 30 years, Olivia Harrison. She made a simple, but brilliant, observation about the secret to staying married for so long:

I’m not one to say that people should stay in a miserable marriage no matter what, or claim that divorce is evil. I support people’s right to call time on their marriage if it’s not working. But I loved what Olivia Harrison had to say about the commitment she made to her marriage, and the rewards she reaped for sticking with it through good times and bad. She was glad, in the end, that she stayed with George even though he wasn’t always the perfect husband. She felt her life, and their marriage, had been enriched by the hardships they endured.

It’s an interesting frame of reference the next time you hit a tough patch in your own marriage. You can look at it as a reason to walk away. But you can also look at it as an opportunity to work through a challenge with your partner. I know that one of the darkest and most troubled periods in my own marriage actually led Tom and I to make incredible discoveries about who we were and what we wanted as a couple. Funnily enough, we wouldn’t be as strong and happy as we are today without enduring a period when we wondered if our marriage would survive.

There are rewards to sticking with it. So take inspiration from knowing that the toughest of times can be the making of your marriage.

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Posted in Films, Musings on Marriage

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Should we judge short-lived celebrity marriages?

December 12th, 2011

Back in January I wrote a blog post about the married couples we’d most like to interview. On the first draft I included Ryan Reynolds and Scarlett Johansson, but by the time the post was due to be published, they’d announced that, after two years of marriage, they were divorcing.

And we judged. We said “if you give up after two years, you haven’t tried hard enough.”

How is it possible that neither of these people is Canadian?

At the start of November, another celebrity divorce stayed under the radar. You may not even have heard about it. Zooey Deschanel (professional kook and star of one of the last decade’s best movies, Elf (500) Days of Summer) announced her divorce from Death Cab For Cutie frontman Benjamin Gibbard.

After two years.

Now, the reason it stayed under the radar was because – on a good day to bury bad divorce news – the announcement came just a day after Kim Kardashian filed for a divorce from her husband of 72 days, Kris Humphries.

And now that the Kardash dust has settled, I’m tempted to throw some retrospective judgement at Zooey and Ben. Two years, guys? That’s the best you can do? What did you think marriage was going to entail? How can you give up on your marriage after two short years?

No-one should stay in a marriage that isn’t working, but equally, shouldn’t one only leave after all attempts to save the marriage have been exhausted? How many attempts can you have made if you’ve only been married two years?

But are we right to judge Zooey, Ben, Ryan, Scarlett, Kim, Kris, Ashton and Demi? Why is it anyone’s business what anyone else chooses to do with their lives? After all, if we (vehemently) believe that same sex couples have the right to get married, shouldn’t we also believe that any couple has the right to whatever sort of marriage they want – even if it’s a frivolous, misguided one?

Probably.

Which is why I’m setting aside judgement of stupid celebrity marriages. If Zooey and Ben are ready to throw in the towel, it doesn’t really affect me. And it certainly doesn’t affect my marriage.

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Posted in Bad Marriage Role Model

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Divorce parties – if it’s that amicable, why are you splitting up?

September 21st, 2011

A few months ago we read about the weird divorce party thrown by Jack White and his ex-wife, British model Karen Elson on their sixth wedding anniversary.

It's a look...

We thought it was just a weird celebrity thing.

But then, the New York Times ran this piece all about the new Japanese trend for ceremonies to mark the end of a marriage. They range from small, intimate gatherings to lavish parties to rival weddings in size and expense. Most of them take place on butsumetsu, the unlucky days of the month when few brides dare schedule their weddings.

The Times piece profiles a ceremony on the smaller end of the scale, where the focus is really on a symbolic act of closure (the wife’s wedding ring is hit with a hammer until it is unwearable) and on making proclamations about the future of the relationship, post-divorce.

The things most couples struggle with after divorce – money, how to (or indeed whether to) keep things amicable, shared parenting of any children – are addressed as part of the ceremony, and there is even a post-mortem about why the marriage failed.

But if you can communicate that honestly and frankly about the problems in your marriage, why are you getting divorced?

I’m firmly convinced that the vast majority of divorces are unnecessary. By that, I mean that in most cases there isn’t some intractable and real issue at the very heart of the relationship, but simply an inability to effectively communicate the needs and desires of both spouses. Sure, some marriages end for very good reasons – not just in extreme cases like domestic violence or child abuse, but also in cases where, say, one spouse desperately wants children and the other is firmly against becoming a parent. But my suspicion is that in the vast majority of cases, the single biggest problem is lacking the self-awareness and critical skills to be truly honest about what you want and need from the partnership, and the patience to deal with the process of change.

In the Times example, the post- mortem revealed that the husband had some secret debts and they had different hobbies. Great! Now that’s out in the open, let’s start to talk it through and come out the other side!

So who knows if divorce parties are going to catch on. Most marriages end with way too much acrimony, bitterness and legal wrangling for it to become the norm, but any sign that people are finding a way to really think about the causes of their marital issues has got to be a good thing, right?

Would you ever contemplate a divorce party? Can you imagine getting to the point with your spouse where you don’t want to be married, but still want to keep it friendly enough to throw a party together?

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Posted in Musings on Marriage

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Bad marriage? Or bad spouse?

November 8th, 2010

Working on TLHP can be a real eye-opener sometimes.

I was just googling other marriage blogs so I could make a nice list to refer back to later. You see, we’re trying to increase our exposure by connecting with other marriage bloggers, offering comments and links and so forth.

The first link that comes up on a Google search of “marriage blog” is Bad Marriage: A Man’s Chronicle of his Failing Marriage (http://badmarriageblog.blogspot.com/) which is kind of weird because the latest post is no more recent than July, 2005.

When I saw that, I almost clicked ‘back’ immediately – there’s no networking opportunity there, after all. But I stuck with it, and started reading some of the posts from the beginning (you need to head into the archives from September 2003 for that).

Wow.

Just… wow.

The idea is that this guy, whoever and wherever he is, was conscious that his marriage was failing, and was headed towards an inevitable divorce, and decided to blog about it. In great, steaming, vitriolic fashion. With the gloves off.

And it makes for interesting reading because with every post you can say to yourself even when I’m behaving at my absolute worst, I am still 1,000,000 times less of a jerk than this guy.

Part of me would love to know what has happened to the dude in the five years since his sign off. I would hazard a guess that if he remarried, the new marriage is also headed for failure, because it’s clear from his posts that he doesn’t really get it.

And, of course, the worst of it is that he spent so much time communicating so clearly, in his blog entries, exactly what the problems were in the marriage, where resolution could be found, how the difficulties they faced made him feel….

…but I’d bet my mortgage that he didn’t communicate any of that to his wife.

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Posted in Bad Marriage Role Model, Musings on Marriage

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