I know of a few people in my family who have only had one marriage, and since we are a large and dispersed bunch, there are many relatives whose life history is unknown to me. But we have certainly not been shy about ending marriages.

To my shame, I tried to go along to get along

Both of my parents were divorced before they married each other, and both breakups were far less than amicable. My Dad had four kids with his first wife, and so was left with financially crippling child support and alimony payments that made life quite difficult for his second – our – family. Presumably that is why her nickname in our family was “Fishface,” as in, “Don’t forget to mail the monthly check to Fishface.” It was so bad, he once told me, that his friends from the old days offered to arrange for Fishface to sleep with the fishes, an idea that he firmly quashed.  I met her once, when she was quite elderly, and didn’t think she looked at all Lovecraftian. In old pics I have seen, she looked very much the lovely Irish girl that she was.

Mom’s first marriage ended soon after her first child was born, when it became obvious that he didn’t at all resemble his Marilyn Monroe-ish Norwegian-descended Mom or her very blond Norwegian husband. She named the child David, although her father generally referred to him as “that little bastard.” She was pregnant again by her legal spouse when that marriage ended, resulting in two very different half-brothers, a mere thirteen months apart in age (“Irish twins”!).

Her actual divorce took considerable time and legal wrangling to come about, because by the birth of her second child, Husband 1 had abandoned both the kids and the wife and literally disappeared. He was never found* despite an arrest warrant for non-support being issued. As a result, her second husband, the little bastard’s father, was the only father either of the kids ever knew.

I have come to the conclusion that Mom was never really marriage (or parent) material, and that Dad, a weirdly taciturn, teetotaling Italian-American with a tendency to be self-righteous about it, would have preferred a TradWife to the wild, loud, opinionated and once again non-Italian party-girl with a serious drinking problem that he fell hopelessly in love with. Dad was clearly an iconoclast, in women among many other things.

Eventually they were able to get married, which led to the odd happenstance of me being a guest at my parent’s wedding. Again because of legal things, I was still saddled with Mom’s first husband’s last name until I was about twelve.

With their histories, it’s not surprising that their marriage was…troubled. Stormy, rocky, pick the cliche. It was years and years of screaming matches, of writing down of annoying things to recite to each other during arguments, of long cold silences when the kids were used as messengers (‘tell your father to get milk while he is out” when they were standing in the same kitchen) and the occasional thrown object. Luckily Dad still had his boxer’s reflexes; he was good at ducking.

All in all, between my parents’ marriage and the many bickering, unhappy couples I observed all through childhood, I did not have a high opinion of the matrimonial state. Which brings me to my own first trip down the aisle.

I met Wife1 at a barbecue held by a fellow grad student in August of 1982. A mutual friend knew her from a class they took together, and thought that she and I might hit it off, so he brought her along. I did find her quite attractive; we talked for a while and started dating soon afterwards. I don’t recall much more detail than that, except that I was quite enamored of her (prematurely) graying hair, as I have always had a “thing” for older women. I was twenty-six, and figured her for early-to-mid thirties. It turned out that she is the same age as I am, give or take a few months.

This story is about the divorce, not the marriage, so to summarize: we got married after two years, it was fractious and extremely unhappy even  before we (for some reason) decided to make it legal. I remember thinking that it was doomed, that I was doomed, even as we forged ahead with wedding plans. The day of the wedding, my friend Jeff and my Mom were in the back of the church, discussing how long the marriage would last. They guessed around two years. It lasted twenty-six months.

Wife1 turned out to be hyper insecure, irrationally jealous and extremely controlling. She gaslit me, and did her best to separate me from my friends and family. To my shame, I tried to go along to get along, like a good ACOA will (link). In August of 1986 she left me for one of her doctoral committee members. I didn’t blame her a bit for leaving; the situation was becoming untenable and increasingly dangerous (link).

The strange thing was that, after she left, people whom I told would commiserate with me, comfort me for having been so badly hurt, so foully betrayed. They figured me to be sad and depressed. I had to explain, time and time again, that I was actually happier than I had been since 1977. That the tragedy had been the marriage, not its demise. That I felt like a condemned prisoner who has  received a pardon. That finally walking out of the disastrous situation of our marriage was the greatest gift that Wife1 had ever given me. She gave me peace.

And more. She had no idea that, two months later, she’d turn out to have given me an even greater gift; when Gina became available and showed interest in me, I was free to reciprocate**.

For many months after that day in August of 1986, some lines from a song would come into my head. Often I’d sing them out loud. They are from the musical “Scrooge”:

 

*No, the Boys From Hoboken didn’t draft him onto the cement-shoe swim team. He just bailed. The younger child, curious about his bio-father, tracked him to Nevada in 2020. But he decided not to make contact. The younger child died in April ’23, so that won’t happen.

** When she found out about Gina and me, Wife1 immediately offered to take me back, to try again, to forgive me MY trespasses. Seldom have I laughed so hard during a phone call.