My divorce gets legally finalised tomorrow.
I like to picture a judge slamming a gavel in a flourish to mark the moment, but apparently I’ll just get sent an email. How decidedly unceremonious.
We met on a Monday morning a few weeks ago to sit in front of JP and sign our joint divorce application that’s taken the better part of two and half years to get around to, not an intentional delay just a lack of executive function on both of our parts. A classic final move. We arrived exactly at the time the JP began their shift and when we sat down my ex joked, “Just a cheery Monday morning divorce for you this morning,” as the mild, grey-haired JP very seriously said, “Oh, my second one today.” He’d only stamped one other document on this morning and it was another set of divorce papers. “Really!” we exclaimed, “we thought we’d be special,” we joked, giggling.
Image Description: Me as a bride in 2015 checking myself out in an ornate gold mirror.
We were together for nine years, almost married for five. I don’t regret my relationship with my ex, or my marriage. My wedding day still is one of the best days of my whole life. I am grateful for the immense learning and growth that my ex and I did together, and that I’ve done since we separated in 2020. But, what I think about the institution of marriage has changed, there are things I wish my thirty-one year old self knew. So, in honour of my divorce, here’s what I want you to know…
Dear love,
Your dream of weddings, soul mates, ‘the one,’ honeymoons and romantic declarations is entirely valid. It is dreamy and beautiful, and love is fucking grand. You are worthy of the romantic ideal you fantasise about, and the belief that that kind of love is absolutely and entirely possible. But there’s a reason most films end at the declaration of love, or with the wedding, because we haven’t quite worked out the story of the next bit. We certainly don’t talk honestly about the next bit. Especially when we have Disney ideals, a capitalistic view of love and marriage and very little capacity for hard conversations about relationships. You throw in a silent agreement about behind closed door privacy, a dash of shame for airing your dirty laundry and none of us have any idea about ‘normal.’ What I’ve learnt is that sometimes we don’t even know that our own normal isn’t all that nourishing when you’re living in it.
My wish for you, my love, is to interrogate your why. Why do you want to get married? We talked about this a lot before we got married and where we landed was craving a commitment to our commitment, and we loved the public facing notion of partnership. But truly, thinking about it now, I don’t think I really, really interrogated why. Why marriage? I’m not religious. Our fathers didn’t need our union to settle any land disputes. We’d been together for four years. Lived together for three and a half. We were committed to each other. Had built a life together. I think I got married because I loved the notion of a public declaration. Of a party. Of feeling beautiful and loved. Of the ritual. The societal tick of approval that I had found a person and thus I was worthy. It felt like the next obvious step, because I deeply loved this person, and because of this it felt entirely reasonable to spend a lot of money, time and energy to sign legal paperwork to involve the government in this declaration.
A question I’ve pondered a lot in the last few years is this…
Is this enough for you?
To consider this…
If nothing changes, if everything stays exactly as it is now, is this enough for you?
We don’t talk about the ache for all involved when you’re in love with someone’s potential instead of the person standing in front of you. This is a hard truth to learn as an optimistic, romantic idealist who believes wholeheartedly in the sparkly bits of everyone. But, if someone had asked me this question at many points in my life when I was ignoring the silent, unspoken truth in place of the ideal, my answer would’ve had to have been no, because that was the truth.
Do I believe in collective change and progress and growth? Of course. But radical transparency and authenticity means both people need to know what they’re agreeing to. Hard cut to needing to learn about the depth of your people pleasing tendencies, your attachment style and the truth of co-dependency after your separation and it’s a battle cry for asking this question more often.
Is this enough for you? This job, this relationship, this conversation, this body, this moment? If the answer is no. Then, I see you, and I wish you bold action and bravery in your terror.
Love, I’m pondering our disconnection from our intuition. Pondering our unwillingness to believe we are worthy of more. I’m pondering the bad PR that changing your mind has received. The minimisation of our desire. The worth we place on being in a couple and the imaginary tick boxes and supposed rules that dictate success and markers of thriving. I’m pondering the models we have for healthy relationships. Pondering why we only celebrate one type of relationship model. Why we talk more about weddings than we do about marriage. I’m pondering that the single marker we have for a successful relationship is longevity. We don’t talk about the quality of that connection, or the satisfaction of both people. We don’t talk about expiry dates and growing apart and the fact that some relationships have expiry dates and often the best thing you can do is not be together anymore.
What I’m trying to say is, know why you want to get married. Whatever your reason is it’s valid. But know why. And in case no one in your sphere has ever told you because they never told me…
You don’t need to get married. You don’t need to be someone’s wife, or husband, or legally bound partner. You don’t have to have a wedding. You can have a wedding and not involve the government. You can get married and hope you’ll be in the thirty-something-percent that it’ll work out for. You can get divorced. But, you don’t have to do any of it if you don’t want to. I wish I’d known that explicitly.
It doesn’t mean what you think it means if you’ve never actually thought about what it means.
So, think about what it means to you, if it is enough for you, and then know you can do whatever the hell you please.
Here’s what I want you to know about speaking aloud the true thought, about separating, and getting divorced. It is fucking hard and sad, and you will learn more about yourself and your shadows and your joy than you are told you will. But you will also feel peace, a full-bodied peace that is unparalleled to anything I've ever felt. I wish we talked about this feeling; I wish people described this feeling. Because if I'd known this feeling was possible, I maybe would’ve acted on many truths sooner.
This peace feels like being unencumbered. Like lightness and grace. The electric thrill of dancing to your favourite song when you’re not paying attention to anyone else. That self-led, aligned, free movement that has goodness at its centre. It feels calm and quiet and like I’m in on a secret. Like, I know things that other don’t; and what I know is myself.
I get it, my love, it’s easier to stay in the place that you know. Changing or upending your life seem so impossibly impossible, so it's easier to persevere. To stay in the normal. Especially if your normal is fine. I thought my normal was fine, because often it was better than fine, it was delightful, and amusing and entirely possible to stay in. My life was fine, and sometimes it was better than fine, and we don’t talk about how hard that is to leave.
The unknown is terrifying, but I wish that there was a disclaimer that said:
If you do this, go through with this, you will feel such calming, orgasmic peace in your body.
I've thought about this peace a lot. What it is. Why it felt so revolutionary to me. And I realised it’s because I'd never really felt it before. The peace came from trusting myself, above all else, and doing the thing that I knew was right for me. Even though it was hard, even though it meant hurting other people, even though it meant changing everything.
And what I want you to know is this…it’s okay to change everything. Take the agency you have and change whatever you need to. Because sometimes the universe will remind you that your complacency isn’t sexy and change everything for you. Or, more devastatingly it will remind you just how fragile and short it all really is.
I have spoken openly about all the things I’ve been through, and my grand revelations, and am often startled by the amount of people who message me with their own stories, their desires to leave their marriages, the heaviness of infertility, the weight of living within racist, patriarchal, capitalistic systems that are not designed to serve us all. I now know for a fact that people aren’t happy. They want to quit their jobs, have more sex, boldly express themselves. They want more. It’s not enough…and not in a gross capitalistic happiness at the end of a new thing lens, but rather in a core knowing settling sense. I know that people know what they want, and they know what they need to do, and they know how to articulate it, but they don't.
I look at books like Eat Pray Love, Wild and Untamed, that we collectively devour and use as touch trees of reclamation; these big, brilliant stories of a folks taking control of their lives, but they still feel so far away from most of our seemingly small realities. We’re craving examples of it working out for other people – which, my love, this is my very specific example of falling in love, having the best wedding ever, getting married, being married, separating, and getting divorced tomorrow. There is more love, more heartbreak, more learning, more growth, more, more, more.
It’s okay to want more.
Image Description: Me yesterday with my new hand tattoos and matching blue tracksuit.
Can we agree to be each other’s examples and champions? Each others “fuck yes that is a brilliant idea you must absolutely do that, buy that, leave that, say that, quit that, kiss that. Each other’s examples that enoughness is self-determined and changeable.
You know, my love.
So, enough.
Here’s to endings and beginnings and knowing you’re enough even when it’s not.
Love Claire.
Pearler is written and created on the unceded lands of the Yuggera and Turrbal people here in Meanjin, and I pay my deep respect to First Nation Elders past and present. This always was, and always will be Aboriginal land.
I don’t believe I can wholeheartedly support sovereignty of this land I live, love and work on without acknowledging the liberation of Palestine and honoring the impacts of colonisation of Indigenous people everywhere else.
Beautifully written, touching the special question of why?