Divorce gave me a second chance at a life of love and respect. All women deserve the same.
The other woman helped me leave.
I could have hated her. I only knew her from the texts I saw on his phone and photos I frantically scanned on Instagram: glossy black hair, bright eyes and caramel skin. Pensive in one picture, laughing and carefree in the next. A beautiful image of young womanhood that I was not. Shameful envy consumed me, magnifying my innermost insecurities, as I stared tearfully at her photos.
For a long time, I felt I could do nothing right and wished in vain that I could be effortlessly exciting, more captivating and prettier. Marriage promised security and companionship, yet I felt perpetually hyper-vigilant and deeply lonely. I believed myself unlovable. One day, I could no longer tolerate my body’s heightened anxiety and disturbed sleep. I no longer wanted to accept the devastation to my self-esteem that his affairs caused, nor deny myself my emotional and sexual needs in a facade of marriage—marriage becomes a facade as soon as vows are betrayed as audaciously as he betrayed his—and I felt that I no longer owed him any loyalty.
I didn’t want to stay, but leaving brought its challenges. The idea of sudden change was daunting. But if I stayed, I’d be teaching any daughter I’d have with him to accept less than her value in a marriage. In the end, the facts were simple. I wanted to stop feeling worthless. I wanted the father of my child to love me, to be proud of me. And I wanted to break my family’s cycle.
I awoke one summer afternoon a year later to rain at my window and felt unusually calm. For the first time in a long time, I wasn’t afraid.
Generational Trauma
The women who came before me were less fortunate.
- Forced to marry her rapist, my great-aunt suffered years of domestic abuse.
- My grandmother, who never made it past elementary school, found herself tethered to not one but two abusive husbands. After her death, I discovered that her second husband, the man I’d known as Grandpa, cheated throughout their marriage and had publicly raised his hand to her in anger. If he did that publicly, what horrors did he visit upon her privately?
- My biological grandfather was no better. He would say, “I never hit women. What I do to them is much worse.”
- Other aunts found themselves quietly tolerating their husbands’ infidelity over decades-long marriages, suppressing their anguish at their husbands’ disrespectful entitlement to their wives’ pain.
We have swallowed our heartache in unfulfilling, selfish marriages and our pain has silently passed down generations of women. The critical difference between me and the women who preceded me: I could leave.
Men Who Blame and Restrict Women, Rather Than Take Responsibility for Their Own Behavior
Yet the extreme right cites women who refuse to settle for less as the root of societal ills.
Trump’s vice presidential nominee, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), claimed that leaving “unhappy or even violent” marriages “didn’t work out for the kids,” suggesting that people trapped in violent marriages should stay in them to preserve family stability. You know what’s worse for children than divorce? Domestic violence—highly destabilizing for children and disproportionately affecting women.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has also condemned no-fault divorce—as well as feminism and birth control—as responsible for mass shootings. In reality, enactment of no-fault divorce laws has resulted in significant decreases in domestic violence, strongly associated with mass shooters, and a significant decrease in women murdered by intimate partners. Yet, Johnson chooses to blame women, rather than address male violence.
Underlying these conversations is a sinister presumption: that women have a societal obligation to forgo their right to self-determination. Thematically, these men frame a woman’s choice as destabilizing to society, normalizing male entitlement to women and declining to encourage self-improvement or accountability among men. Structurally, they exclude women from the conversation about women’s choices.
It’s Giving Incel
Loneliness among men is an interesting public health crisis. Analyses of and possible solutions to male loneliness in the U.S. have abounded over the last decade.
One stood out to me: right-wing commentator Jordan Peterson’s call for “enforced monogamy”—the idea that monogamy should be the promoted social norm (though, isn’t it already?) to foster family stability. But Peterson, known for his “equality of opportunity, not outcome” stance, pivots to a solution that violates that stance, putting the onus of solving male loneliness to control male aggression onto women with a classically trite position: for the children. Peterson justifies his defiance of his own values with moral posturing, arguing that raising children in an optimally stable environment “mean[s] sacrifice of opportunity and choice on the part of adults. It’s necessary.” He embarks on a diatribe that I can only describe as sexist, labeling women as “hypergamous” and “gerrymandering” the heterosexual dating scene with free-market tactics. (These kinds of men love capitalism—until it works against them.)
To Peterson’s pompous speech I have only this response: We don’t owe you our bodies or companionship.
Violent men who feel entitled to women would rather adopt a victim mentality in which women are deemed aggressors than focus on introspective maturation. The vast majority of heterosexual women, like myself, who want secure, long-term relationships are looking for reciprocal love, respect and selflessness. We want responsibility, equality and mutual support. Prove you can offer us these things and focus on self-improvement. But don’t blame women for your loneliness if you aren’t prepared to give as much as you demand to receive. Imagine the cognitive dissonance—how can you desire that which you seem to despise and disrespect so abjectly? Unless what you desire is not a relationship, but subjugation.
Divorce Offers Freedom
No-fault divorce offers a compassionate exit from an impossible situation.
Marriage should never be a prison. Today, an open heart is tattooed on my arm, a reminder that no man is permitted to make me feel that type of pain again. Divorce allowed me to live on my own terms, affording me an emotional escape and an opportunity for happiness. Still, there is an undercurrent of pain that runs through my daily existence that I can’t quite rid myself of. But this existence is superior to the life I believe I’d have led, had I stayed.
I preemptively acted as my own private investigator and found an Other Woman myself. In a beautifully feminist twist, she gave me the evidence I needed to obtain adultery fault grounds. We’ve formed a friendship and unique support system between us, and I’m immensely grateful for it. And although I obtained my divorce on fault grounds, I will always defend for no-fault divorce. A woman filing for divorce against a husband who may not want to admit his role in the demise of their marriage is often threatened with court; research has demonstrated that mothers who report abuse are not believed, with an increased risk of losing their children. No-fault divorce offers a compassionate exit from an impossible situation.
I don’t want people to be divorced. I never anticipated being divorced myself—but it is a far better option than life with him. Freedom is delicious, and any potential partner is now competing not with another man, but with the tranquility I have single-handedly built for myself since leaving. Marriage for marriage’s sake is not my end goal. Marriage to a man who loves and respects me, makes me laugh, and wants to be a stable, enduring presence in a shared life with me is the end goal.
All women deserve that chance—and no self-important politician has the right to imprison a woman in a state of loveless servitude by convincing her of a false societal responsibility to settle for less than her worth.
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