I Want a Divorce

Eve Marx

Word Count 1176

For years my husband has uttered the words, “I want a divorce” at least twice a week. Over time these words have lost their power to upset me but this hasn’t always been the case. When he first started saying it, about five years into our marriage, I took him seriously. At the time we were going through a rough patch and it wasn’t our first. Since I thought he really wanted a divorce, I began making plans. 

The first thing I did was talk to my divorced women friends.

They all said the same thing which was, “You have to get an attorney.” 

This seemed like a lot of work. 

One friend, who was already three years into obtaining her divorce, advised me to hire a forensic accountant. 

You need to find out where the money is, she counseled over chopped salads and white wine. We were in a suburban trattoria at a strip mall. She talked for forty minutes about her not-quite-ex with whom she’d had three children. The guy was loaded and vindictive which is a heady combination. She relayed a wealth of information about his hidden off-shore bank accounts and corporate accounts he’d created in a holding company’s name and accounts he shared with his brother, his business partner, and her sworn enemy.  Her words passed over me like fog although I kept sipping wine and nodding my head and grimacing in sympathy whenever it seemed appropriate. I left the table feeling depressed and a little wasted. In hindsight I had no business driving.  

Around this time a realtor friend told me about a little house on a nearby lake that was for sale. It was a summer place and poorly insulated, but it was cheap, very cheap. I could afford it on my own. I took a male friend with me to take a look at the place who was supportive of my getting divorced. I thought he would be helpful recognizing if the structure was sound or if it was falling apart. Instead, he fell in love with it and immediately began plans for building a dock. He envisioned me throwing boating parties and maybe being my roommate. I told the realtor I thought it was a bad idea and went back to pushing around the vacuum in my own wreck of a house. 

The reason my husband kept saying he wanted a divorce was mostly because we fought about money. We didn’t have much. We blamed each other for this and I silently brooded over an affair he’d had a few years earlier that I wasn’t supposed to talk about. I will say I don’t think he thought divorce was any big deal. His own parents were divorced and he thought that was a good idea for them plus he’d already been married before and gone through his own divorce.  An exciting fling he had with a co-worker ended one night when he came home very late with wet hair like he’d just stepped out of a shower. I confronted him and he immediately caved and told me all about it. I asked if he wanted to stay married or be with this woman and he said he wanted to break it off. I said I can help you with that, give me her number. I called but it was late, and she didn’t pick up so I left a voice message. I said, “Hi, I’m the wife. I know you’ve been sleeping with my husband.  If you want him, you can have him, but just know you’ll also have a seven-year-old boy with you every weekend. Call me back to discuss.” She didn’t. My husband and I went to marriage counseling after this a couple of times. Neither of us liked our counselor. We bonded over our mutual contempt for his methods and I said I would just forget about the affair and never mention it again if he bought me a Tiffany Etoile ring I admired. 

He continued to say, “I want a divorce” on a weekly basis. Finally, I said all right. Let’s do it, but we should sit down with a mediator. He found such a person and made an appointment. I agreed to the meeting. We arrived in separate vehicles. Water was falling from the sky in buckets. I was working as a journalist but had a part time gig helping out every day at a nearby horse farm. My job was to run over at noon and throw hay in the paddocks to give three horses their lunch. I returned at four p.m. to bring them inside the barn after I made up their beds and set out grain and filled their buckets with fresh water. At ten p.m., I returned once again to do a quick night check. I’d been doing this for months five days a week and it was just another thing that bugged my husband no end and got him talking about divorce. 

The mediator asked a lot of questions about our finances. Just discussing how little money we had made me anxious. The rain beat down in torrents. It was just after 2 o’clock. I jumped up and said I had to leave to bring in the horses because they might slip in the mud. The mediator was flabbergasted. She said couldn’t it wait. I said it couldn’t and left the meeting and drove to the barn where I got soaked to the bone bringing in three distraught horses. Just as I finished rubbing them down and oiling their hooves and putting them in dry blankets my husband called to say the mediator wouldn’t work with us any longer. She said I was disrespectful of her and the process and expressed sorrow for him being married to such a selfish person.

I laughed. He knew all along if I had to choose between him and a horse, the horse would win every time. 

It was around this time I learned to ignore my husband’s stated desire to get divorced. I realized it was his knee jerk reaction to every calamity, no matter how minor. He wanted a divorce because I ruined dinner. He wanted a divorce because I changed the channel. His wanting a divorce became a joke. It was his way of letting off steam, to talk about divorce. I just wanted him to stop saying it in front of other people.

When our son was leaving for college, literally leaving, like getting on a plane to go to a school across the country, at the airport he said a sad thing. 

You guys are going to get divorced now that I’m out of the house, is what he said. 

My husband and I looked at each other in surprise. We hadn’t ever thought he was listening. 

Of course not, my husband said to our son. Your mother and I love each other. 

I shrugged. 

That was sixteen years ago. 

We’re still married and he’s still saying he wants a divorce. 

Eve is a journalist and author currently scraping out a tiny living crafting police reports for newspapers in New York and Oregon. She is the author of What’s Your Sexual IQ?, The Goddess Orgasm, 101 Things You Didn’t Know About Sex and other titles bearing some relation to her stint editing Penthouse Forum and other ribald publications. She makes her home in a rural seaside community near Portland, OR with her husband, R.J. Marx, a jazz saxophonist, and Lucy, their dog child. Follow Eve on Twitter here.