Going through a divorce is like embarking on a 3 year puzzle. Maybe it takes longer. I don’t know, I’m totally guessing. For me it’s been more than 1 year, less than 2. I’m not trying to be vague but when did my divorce actually happen? Did it happen the day we decided to separate? Did it happen 6 months later when we filed our divorce papers? Did it happen 6 months after that when the divorce became legal? Maybe it happened subconsciously before any of these things.
Sometimes something small happens in my daily life, or in my current relationship, and then I think maybe I was mistaken to think it’s even in the past. Maybe divorce is the very last thing to happen, after you’ve made the decision, and moved out, and finished the legal process, and dated, and met someone, and your ex has met someone, and you’ve gotten involved in your work again, and time has gone by, and you’ve used up all the tearful calls to friends, and lived through two hundred mornings where you’re in the shower thinking “how can I still be thinking about this”, and you actually start to get angry that it’s taking so long. Maybe it happens well after all of that.
I’m grateful for my divorce, in every way. My ex and I never stopped being friends, never dropped out of each other’s lives, never walked away angry. What little we had we split equally, we don’t have kids, and still it’s a big long mess. And as those episodes of messiness get further and further apart, they are all the more alarming when they occur. Because you have forgotten them, or even worse, gotten cocky and told yourself they are vanquished forever. Then something small triggers a flashback, and you realize that you’ll have to live with it a while longer.
You rock, Blied. Thanks for your honesty.
I don’t know nothing. My hunch is you got divorced almost exactly when you moved to New York while your wife stayed in LA. It took you a few years to over come your niceness to ratify what your career choice actually meant?
I can’t offer you any remedy for your grief. I do recommend you pick up a history book or visit a massive essay online. Give yourself an interesting quest: try to figure out where, when and how marriage even began. Discuss with yourself whether or not the similarities or differences with the generic historically evolving understanding of marriage is what you actually had. Once you identify the delta or lack thereof, then you’ll either be in a place of oppt or you will be bored out of your mind. But you might wonder more about the dispensing of marriage.
It is totally rude to say this but please don’t curse me: a marriage without children is harder–objectively–to keep going. Children are a shared product—yes, project too but also product. We call works of art our babies not because art is better than babies.
At the end of the day, anyone who knows you Blieden thinks you should probably be a dad. You are a testament to your parents. Give them some grandchildren for Gods sake. Only kidding but it reminds me of a story.
A good friend of mine is a really great person. Ethical, wise, funny, curious and willing to change his life and embark on a courageous adventure if the opportunity arises. One day I casually asked him–after his divorce–why didn’t he have children? He said because he would surely ruin his kids as his father ruined him. Imagine the nicest guy youve ever met telling you he was ruined. Very astonishing claim. But his father had committed suicide when he was young. It didn’t ruin my friend. It just made him very afraid and protective of the children he could never have. True story.
Again, please forgive this but the state is right to make it onerous to exit marriage. The problem is the state doesn’t make it onerous enough to enter it.
Please don’t punch a wall. Your essay was very touching. I wouldn’t have written so much if it had been a dud. No one else was chipping in any insight for fear of offending. Peace!
I’ve been thinking about this reply for a few days. I love it. I agree with it.
Life is certainly a strange and interesting beast, as far as tangible realities go, and maybe this reply will be no different.
I wonder if you will remember this, but am hoping you will because it’ll make me feel more special (and who doesn’t want to make me feel more special?). Somewhere in the long ago of 2003, just after your movie “Melvin Goes To Dinner” premiered at a theater in Portland, Oregon, I wrote you a long email praising the movie, but more so sharing with you the awesome experience my friends, my then new girlfriend, and I had as we took a road trip from Seattle together to go see it. It was one of the most awesome experiences in my life and felt like, based on what I knew of your work, you would appreciate and understand my sentiment. And you totally did! You wrote back to me with super genuine words and feelings about it, we corresponded briefly after, and I’ve always regarded that exchange as a super cool, real life connection between two people who didn’t know each other, but shared something meaningful regardless. In other words, to me it was an awesome element in my life, even just being a couple emails.
And it’s always stuck with me, to some degree. I’ve often thought about it fondly, especially when I see some of your work, or your cameo’s in Arrested Development (which I’ve watched way too many times), even though about a year ago I lost all of my important emails, including those ones. Anyway, I’ve always had the thought that it would be super cool and fun to contact you like 10 years later (which it has now been) give some kind of update, and hope you remembered like I did. So that’s what this is. I would have sent this to the email address I used to have for you but as I said, I lost all the emails. Hopefully this doesn’t come across as totally crazy…
The reason I decided to write this now, and in reply to this particular blog post, is because the subject matter directly related to my life, as was the case back when I wrote the original email. Back then, you and I were both freshly in new relationships and experiencing all the wonderfulness of that, which was part of what made my experience going to see your movie so amazing. Well, I wound up marrying that very girl some years later, and spent about 8 and a half glorious years with her. I won’t get into the why’s and who’s about what happened, but she wound up breaking it off towards the end of 2011, which as I’m sure you know, totally turns life upside-down and makes everything horrible and crazy. From your post here it seemed as though your marriage ended roughly the same time, and I couldn’t help but wonder if that was also the same girl you told me about 10 years ago in the email. If you remember, let me know! I know it doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things, but it’s interesting to me regardless.
So, your words in this post were very relevant to me, as I experience the same issues all the time with the lingering remnants of my ex refusing to get out of my brain, regardless of how many other distractions are in place. I think what you perceive as the “divorce” moment is always different, and has way too many complex layers to really keep track of. It’s been a year and a half for me and there is still huge, often hidden parts of me that won’t let the whole thing go. So even though the divorce has been done for a long time, I haven’t totally processed it out yet, but it seems like little mental divorces happen all the time as life goes on. I always equate the whole thing to essentially having to completely rebuild your own reality, and experience everything again for the first time, without the other person.
Essentially what I am saying is this; when you’re with someone for a long time, especially if it’s someone you really loved, that feeling will always come back whenever you’re faced with something you haven’t faced since being with that person. Shit, I can be going for a nice hike in the mountains, look down at my shoe, and the next thing I know I’m super sad thinking about the ex. You never know when something like that will happen, and it’s always got strength, especially if it’s been awhile since you’ve thought about it. Love is a weird thing, and I truly believe that once you’ve loved someone deeply you kind of always will, even if things don’t work out, or you trick yourself into believing otherwise.
Interesting side note: I hadn’t talked to my ex in many months (not out of anything negative, just for distance and recovery purposes) and saw her for the first time last weekend. As I spent the next few days obsessing about her, I then was thinking about the emails I mentioned before and wondered if she had a copy since she was so directly a part of all of that. Turns out she did save them! And will be forwarding them to me, so I will have them again. That’s pretty awesome. So with all of these things happening at the same time, it seemed like the right time to say hello to you once again.
OK, I’ve taken up enough of the reply section of this post I think. I’d love to hear back from you at some point if you’ve got the time, to continue this 10 years later experiment. I sincerely hope all is good and well in your life!
-Bob