What Getting Divorced in My 20s Taught Me About Love
When I was growing up in the 1990s, getting married wasn't an 'if' in the Midwest, but a 'when'—and 'divorce' was practically a curse word. Despite the statistics even then, I felt wildly entitled to a love story, and blissfully ignorant that it could one day end.
Now, the #DivorceTok hashtag has racked up some 1.4 billion views on TikTok, while the likes of Sarah Manguso and Miranda July have written best-selling novels about the same subject. It's also become more common to split up sooner: 'People are more financially independent and having kids later in life,' divorce attorney Shana Vitek tells me. 'Nowadays, it's just more acceptable to get out of a bad relationship.' As a 45-year-old woman who survived the dirty d-word in my 20s, I'm amazed at the cultural shift; we've moved from hushed tones to viral conversation.
I fell in love with my first husband at age 26. Although Match.com had recently emerged as an edgy new way to meet people, I was thrilled to be fixed up, the good old-fashioned way, by my best friend. He was her husband's cousin: a sweet, broke, 28-year-old office-supply worker. Sure, our connection wasn't entirely intellectual, and he hated that I didn't find him especially funny, but he was there and I was restless to get to the altar. Days filled with bridesmaids duties and baby showers made me feel like I was already lagging behind.
Two and a half years later, for our wedding in downtown Chicago, I hand-made table numbers to correspond with 18 meaningful locations from our courtship, and the two of us did a choreographed dance routine. But if I felt magic in the air that day, a suffocating fog quickly settled over the marriage that followed, as I goaded him into sex during my ovulation windows and we bickered in the car after every couples' game night.
Then, six months in, on an otherwise uneventful spring weeknight, he came home and said, 'I don't actually want to have kids. Getting married was a huge mistake.' I asked him if there was someone else. He denied it, but eventually I discovered that he had reconnected with an ex. I stood at the stove, over a robin's egg blue Le Creuset dutch oven I'd just taken out of the box—a gift from my cousin—and stewed. At 29, I felt I'd been uprooted before I'd even settled down.
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