5 Lessons I Learned From Divorce: What My Failed Marriage Taught Me

A divorce was never on my teenage bucket list. And yet, there I was, married, separated and single again within a matter of months, with a crash course in adulthood I had definitely not signed up for. 

None of this was my decision. My parents had decided that their college-going daughter would be much better off married to a stranger in another city. So, off I went, packed into a life I knew nothing about, armed with a wedding, a few instructions and the comforting assumption that the adults knew what they were doing. Spoiler alert: they didn’t. 

What followed was one of the loneliest and most painful periods of my life. It changed me in ways I didn’t understand at the time. Even twenty years later, I still find it hard to believe what I went through. 

I’m happily remarried now, with a teenage son of my own, which occasionally gives me the full sledgehammer realisation of just how cruel, arbitrary and spectacularly ego-driven my parents’ decision had been. As a parent, I wouldn’t do this to my son in a million years. 

But in doing so, they also left me with some lessons I will carry for the rest of my life. Yes, there’s boatloads of angst, trust issues and enough emotional baggage to fill a Boeing. But also some takeaways. The biggest one? I have a spine of steel. When push comes to shove, I can surprise even myself with what I’m capable of.

So, 2 decades and one divorce later, I have assembled a list of 5 lessons that my divorce taught me.

 

Trust the ick and spot the red flags

 

Whether it’s a pre-arranged courtship or casual dating, when something doesn’t feel right, trust your instinct. Your gut never lies. We ignore red flags because we don’t want to be “too fussy” or accused of overthinking. Maybe I’m imagining it. Maybe I’m being unfair. Maybe I just need to give them a chance.

Maybe. And maybe not.

That uncomfortable feeling may be the first glimpse of who someone actually is. The mask slips and instead of paying attention, we look away because we want the person in front of us to be better than what we’re seeing. 

When I spoke to my ex over the phone or even met him in person a few times before marriage, I was struck by how hollow his conversations were. Every topic met a premature dead end and it was up to me to desperately clutch at straws and find things to talk about. 

My doubts and inhibitions about his intellect were shot down by my parents and I was left with no choice but to keep trying.

But staying under the same roof with him soon taught me how right I had been in feeling uneasy. Indeed he had very little intellectual horsepower to speak of. 

He had no spark and no depth. I found him as boring as a bowl of nothing. And for someone who could happily spend hours reading, learning and talking about random things, for me it was like living with a human buffering symbol. 

Leaving Is Not Losing

We’ve grown up listening to elderly women talk about how they stayed. They stayed when the marriage was miserable, when the home was hostile, when their spirits were slowly being crushed. Somehow, surviving a hellhole and killing every last bit of yourself in the process became a badge of honour.

I have very little patience for this glorification of suffering.

These are often bitter women with wasted years behind them, unable to imagine that another woman might have the courage or support to break the shackles and walk away. And so the brainwashing continues. 

The deep sighs. The pointed remarks. The grim, self-righteous faces. The endless lectures about compromise as though a woman’s primary responsibility in life is to remain miserable so that everyone else can feel morally comfortable.

Breaking out of a toxic relationship takes guts. And this is where my father showed up for me.

If I had stayed, I would have become a shadow of myself.

And those concerned aunties? Not one of them would have come to save me.

They would have offered sympathy from a safe distance. Maybe a lecture about how marriage needs sacrifice. Maybe a reminder to “adjust”.

So here’s my advice: pour the spoiled milk down the sink and move on. There is absolutely no prize for doubling down on a bad decision simply because you have already invested time, money or emotion into it. You are not required to spend the rest of your life defending a decision that is destroying you.

Make Your Own Money. Make Your Own Decisions

I know what financial dependence feels like because, at nineteen, I had very little choice in the matter.

I was in my first year of college, with no salary, no savings and certainly no secret emergency fund tucked away for marital disasters. 

I depended entirely on my parents, and thank goodness, my father brought me back home. Because had they decided that I should stay, I would have been a lost cause. 

So, independence is a wonderful word, but when you don’t have a rupee of your own, it can remain just that….a word. 

So to every woman about to get married, I have one request: make your own money. People treat financial independence as a lifestyle upgrade. It isn’t. It is leverage. It is security. 

It is the ability to say no without wondering whether you can afford the consequences. That is real financial freedom.

Of course, money cannot make any woman completely safe. We have seen cases where women who were educated, financially secure and from perfectly respectable families were still exploited, abused and even murdered. There is no magic checklist that can guarantee safety. We cannot control another person’s capacity for cruelty.

But we can control how quickly we respond when something starts going wrong.

And this brings me back to my first lesson from divorce: when the alarm bells start ringing, listen. 

Don’t wait for the situation to become unbearable before you admit that something is wrong. 

Don’t keep explaining away behaviour that frightens you. And if there is physical violence, don’t wait for the second, third or tenth incident to convince yourself that you have a problem.

The time to leave is now. Don’t wait until it is too late.

Marriage is based more on respect than love

 

Love alone doesn’t build a marriage. Love is dreamy one day and complicated the next. Love can survive arguments, boredom, bad moods and even periods of distance. But respect is what keeps the whole thing standing. 

You can fall out of love and find your way back. But when respect disappears, something far more fundamental has been damaged.

From the very beginning, I had a sense that my husband thought poorly of my education. I was studying English, which he apparently considered an elaborate way of wasting three years.

He would turn to his brother, with me sitting right there, and say, “Your boudi is studying something completely useless. A zero-value-for-money degree. What exactly is she going to do with it?”

They would both laugh. I would sit there, burning with embarrassment, pretending I hadn’t heard. But it hurt terribly.

There was another instance where I was subjected to blatant disrespect in front of a roomful of relatives.

 A month into the marriage, his maternal aunt at a family gathering, decided I was not dressed suitably enough for a new bride. In front of everyone, she took it upon herself to tell me exactly what she thought of my clothes, my appearance and, apparently, my upbringing. Her voice grew louder, her words nastier, until I finally broke down and started crying. I was only nineteen. 

When I looked at my husband, I found him and his mother grinning. Apparently, it was all very entertaining to them.The other women in the room looked horrified. A couple of them immediately came over to comfort me. 

But my husband, the one person who could have stopped it with a single sentence, sat there and watched. I never forgot that. My throat burned with anger each time I thought about this incident. 

Kindness Can Come from the Most Unexpected Places

 

The four puppies in that house had, somehow, decided that I was theirs.

At the lowest point of my life, when I had very little to look forward to, these four tiny creatures became my daily dose of affection. They were allowed upstairs to my bedroom only in the evenings. And the moment they got permission, they would come bounding up the stairs as though they had been waiting all day just for me.

They would jump onto my bed, wriggle under the covers and burrow their warm, vibrating little bodies into every available corner of me. For those few minutes, I was loved without having to earn it, explain myself or ask for it.

It was perhaps the only time in that house when I felt completely safe.

Then there was the domestic help who left that house a few days before I did. The mistreatment had finally become too much for her. One day, she simply left, without even waiting for the three months’ salary that was owed to her.

She could have walked away and never looked back. She owed me nothing. Yet, from the railway station, before leaving, she made one last telephone call to my father.

She told him what was happening to me and warned him that I needed to be taken home. She did not have to do it. She had already got herself out. But she chose to reach back and pull me out too.

That one phone call changed everything. I was finally taken back to Kolkata, and so in a very real sense, that woman saved my life.

And then there were my friends from college in Vizag, where I spent those five months.

They were some of the kindest people I could have stumbled upon at that particular point in my life. They noticed things without making me explain them.

When the tiffin I was sent from home was sometimes barely edible (and I was far too nervous to complain), their mothers started sending extra food for me. Quietly. No questions, no fuss. Just an extra box appearing beside mine.

Occasionally, my friends would pick me up on their scooters and we would ride down Beach Road, the salty breeze tugging at our hair and brushing our faces. 

There would inevitably be tall chilled glasses of milkshake and tangy bhel somewhere along the way. 3 scooters and 6 friends, and for those few hours, I felt like myself again. 

Those evenings were small pockets of normalcy in an otherwise miserable existence. 

The distance between then and now

So let me sum up one thing loud and clear. A bad marriage is not an ennobling experience. There are no brownie points to be gained from suffering silently. 

But what you do gain is an understanding of how unpredictable and unfair life can be sometimes. But there is always, ALWAYS a way to course correct. 

Very early in life, I learnt that parents do not always come with a built-in guarantee of getting everything right.  They can be blinded by their own hubris and by the absolute conviction that they know what is best for you. 

They can make a decision that upends your life completely, and still believe they are doing it out of love. 

Meanwhile, you are the one left picking up the pieces. Which is very difficult to come to terms with because you never made that decision in the first place. 

But when the storm gradually clears out and life limps back to normalcy, you realize that you cannot go back and rewrite the chapters that were written for you. But you can pick up the pen and write the ones that come next.