Nothing Tastes As Good As Final Feels
By Kimberly Harrington
I didn’t think my divorce being final would matter all that much, emotionally speaking. Legally, of course, it means everything. That’s what you pay for. When I found out the date, it felt more like an administrative pivot point to anticipate. The date when I could change my life insurance beneficiary, remove him from my health insurance, and take care of the remaining handful of tasks to separate our lives completely. I found this a little exciting, since you are constantly warned to NOT MAKE ANY INSURANCE CHANGES UNTIL THE DIVORCE IS FINAL.
I fleetingly regretted not celebrating when the divorce papers were signed, since that was the real relief. And that’s what Nicole Kidman is actually thrilled-as-hell about in that famous photo of her leaving her lawyer’s office — signing the papers, not her divorce from Tom Cruise being deemed final by the courts.
The last signature on our agreement landed via DocuSign on what would’ve been our 26th wedding anniversary. Anyone who’s been through a divorce knows that you can’t game the dates, and that is an all-time understatement. The alignment of both our beginning and ending on paper should’ve inspired me to buy a lottery ticket, but I was too broke to consider it.
As anyone who’s been through a divorce also knows, nothing is final until it is indeed final. How long (or not) everything takes is enough to make you go mildly, or in my case majorly, insane. I’ve had the misfortune of paying thousands of dollars to sit on Zoom calls and if that won’t make you go off the deep end, I’m not sure what will. I think we can all agree that being on Zoom for free is still a price too steep, so just imagine.
The divorce process is rife with uneasy silences alternating with blow-the-Earth-up conflict, and scrambling to pull the numbers together or whatever the next fire drill is that won’t result in any appreciable updates for weeks, if not months.
It — to use a technical term — totally sucks ass. The very real possibility that signing the papers wouldn’t really be the end, that something else would pop up, that the judge would ask for more information, more documentation, push something back, felt entirely and completely possible.
I’ve said this before but I’ll say it again now: If couples had to go through what it takes to get divorced in order to get married, the entire institution of marriage would come to a grinding halt.
Oh, you love each other? Oh, you think that’s all that matters? Here, spend a minimum of 12 months and anywhere from eight to tens of thousands of dollars putting every detail of your marital terms and conditions into a contract to prove it. Be on video calls with lawyers — people who do not know either of you at all, really, and will charge you hundreds of dollars to respond to an email — as they negotiate on your behalf. Watch as you each stake your ground, curl into a ball of defenselessness, or become unglued and start screaming through tears at the screen. Do you still love each other now? Are you excited to be together forever? No? Why not?
Almost a half year passed between signing those papers and our divorce being final. That was a hell of a lot longer than I thought it would take for a judge to basically look at our fully negotiated and agreed-upon divorce and give it the equivalent of the thumbs-up emoji. What they (“they” — articles, books, the divorced men I’ve dated, lawyers) say about divorce is undeniably true: Everything takes longer than you think it will. Everything costs more than you think it should. The arguments and details will all be stupider than you can imagine, but you will be willing to die on those hills anyway, because you want your money’s worth or because of the whole “but it’s the principle” thing, which I bet is the phrase divorce lawyers hear more than any other.
It’s been seven years since I said I was done, six years since we told people, four years since the pandemic that extended our living arrangement (admittedly, in a way that I still perceive as a gift to our family, especially our kids), and two years since we fully and explosively came apart for good. What these timeframes don’t take into account is what so many divorced folks already know, that the deciding and announcing are preceded by years of pain, fear, guilt, and heartache. They are embroidered with gaslighting (from yourself at yourself, or by your partner, or your family, or culture), running the numbers to get your own place, and asking others to talk you off the ledge or to convince you to just jump off of it once and for all.
I often feel embarrassed by how long all of this took. I think the feeling of having wasted your life is common amongst those who have been married for decades and kept ignoring what was happening – or were afraid to do the hard thing that would set them free. Or, in my case, continuously asked for permission to leave from anyone who would grant it, without realizing that’s what I was doing. Someone please tell me it’s ok to go, even though this isn’t technically horrible. But “not technically horrible” isn’t where the bar should be set. The thing is, anyone who’s been through this knows that divorce isn’t just doing one hard thing but a series of the hardest things, some that you can’t anticipate or prepare for.
There is the admitting it to yourself, the conversation between the two of you, the telling the kids, and telling your friends, and watching shock play across people’s faces, which only shows you how well you had been hiding everything all along. All those jokes and self-deprecating stories in the corner of every party where all the women gather and roast their husbands and complain about their lives? We’ve all been there. I am now the person who will probably respond to these conversations with, “If it’s so terrible, if he’s so useless, if your life sucks so much – then for the love of god get a divorce. Life is too short for this garbage.”
The hard stuff is the hard stuff, though. It’s the judgment (real and perceived) from others. You fall out of the social construct of a community that used to feel like yours, but was all conditional on you being a neat little part of their Noah’s Ark. You see your ex with their new partner, and although there isn’t a single cell in your body or brain that loves him or would ever want him back, it feels like a full physical and mental glitch to get it to compute. You had a compact, understandable family unit and now you will be a diffuse constellation of relationships from here on out. That’s the deal.
A funny understanding I've come around to over the past few years is that divorce books are for married people. When I was writing mine, I thought I knew about divorce. I had grown up with it, and felt enormous grudges and resentment over my experience. I thought I was better than that, that I had come up with the solution to the transition between marriage and divorce.
But it was me who was wrong. I wasn't better than any of it, not my parents and not divorce. I didn't know yet how it would feel, how the process was so flawed, convoluted, brutal, and expensive that it'd be a miracle for anyone to come out of it with a single good feeling left. That it would set off so many deep-seated triggers around jealousy, abandonment, betrayal, and control.
A transition is not an actual ending. When things truly blew apart and we were no longer on the same team, I felt a depth of rage I didn't know I was capable of. I was (unreasonably, selfishly) angry at my friends for not centering their lives around me, and at my (now former) friends for doing the typical conflict-avoidance thing of cutting me from their lives. I didn't know yet that divorce still had the stink of stigma on it publicly and the allure of a siren call privately. Actually, I did know that: My DMs, emails, voicemails, and text prove it to this day.
Let’s be clear, the current Divorce Discourse is very much about heterosexual marriage with children. The current conversation is about how marriages can be blown apart by having kids in The United (lol) States of America. And the majority of the people who get paid to write about that publicly and in a book, turn it over as a navel gazing or academic exercise, are fairly privileged white ladies (including me) who are mothers.
It shouldn’t be a stretch to understand that not everyone has the same license to be cavalier about leaving or whoring around or being a single mother. And if you don’t have kids, it’s too easy to be dismissed with a, “well, what’s so hard about it then?” I hope this is changing, as the divorce discourse forces larger cultural conversations about relationships, community, partnerships, support, and structural inequality.
Back to the point: I didn’t think my divorce being final would matter all that much, especially emotionally. Our divorce did not need to be settled in person in a court; everything was done via the internet, email, and Zoom.
I had considered pulling together a Nicole Kidman outfit as a joke to mark the day, but do you know who looks good in that outfit? Literally not even Nicole Kidman. I ordered myself a mug with the famous photo, hand washed it, and put it away until the actual date arrived. That morning, I sat in my apartment and drank the same coffee I drink every morning, but out of that mug. You know what? It really did taste like freedom.
I had asked my two closest friends, women who have been with me through what I can now see was a terrifying, amusing, oppressively needy two-year-long ride, to mark the day with me. We didn’t need to do anything special, I told them, and I meant it. They had already done so much for me throughout this dumb process. They were the perfect audience when I started dating again and were all-in on hearing about my slutty adventures. They endured me flipping out, crying, and yelling at them — IN PUBLIC — over the holidays. They listened with empathy to the same stories, grudges, and insights on repeat. They asked regularly what the latest was, how was the lawyer stuff going, how was I doing? I needed them like human oxygen masks. I don’t know how they did it with their own overwhelming lives, families, and work, but they did.
On the Day of Finality, they took me out to dinner. When I showed up, running a little late, they were already there with flowers, laughing. I did some robot moves on my way to our table and felt like my whole head and heart would explode with joy.
It’s easy in the face of divorce to keep the score. You note everyone who wasn’t there for you and never even tried. You mentally jot down who invited your ex and not you to a party or a dinner. You catalog every perceived slight, remember every shitty comment. But what I’ve learned is that one day it’s over and it all fades away. The erratic emotions are mostly gone, anything that felt monumental now feels tiny. It’s like a circus that packed up all of its tents and blows out of town, leaving behind patches of flattened yellow grass that will inevitably spring back up, given the tiniest amount of water and sunlight.
I know this isn’t the case for everyone. There are marriages and divorces full of abuse and control, of narcissism and threats. In this way, my marriage and divorce were fairly innocuous. I never feared for my safety, other than often being on the verge of a self-induced rage stroke. But what I now know firsthand is that divorce can feel so deeply psychologically, physically, and mentally damaging when you’re in it. Like being a week past your due date when you’re pregnant, you can feel completely convinced that it will literally never end. But it will. And it does.
And: It is worth it. It is. So fucking. Worth it.