It's Valentine's Day and of course my thoughts have turned to love.
My love for sweets.
Check out the candy, specifically, that I can (and do!) buy for myself.
opinion columnist
Robin Abcarian
I have been single for about 13 years, since one day I came home from work and found on the kitchen table a manila envelope with a divorce petition from my husband, who at that very moment was chatting calmly in the study with my daughter, who was then a senior in high school, about the classes he planned to take his freshman year of college.
“You do not remember?” he said later, after I went a little crazy and threw all of his clothes on the floor in the spare bedroom. “We've always planned to get divorced when Chloe finishes high school.”
Did we have? News for me.
When I spoke to a divorce attorney, the man shook his head and said, “I've been doing this for 25 years and I've never heard of anyone filing for divorce without mentioning it to their spouse.”
She was so traumatized that it was a few years before she could utter the word “ex-husband” or mention in casual conversation that she was divorced. I had been married for so long that being half a couple was simply part of my identity. I never saw myself, nor even imagined myself, single.
However, now, after so many years, I can't imagine myself being anything other than single. How is it possible that people get divorced after 30 years of marriage and then turn around and remarry someone else? Of course I've dated someone, but the idea of starting a new life with another man doesn't appeal to me. My life is full, my friendships are deep, my work is rewarding.
I'll probably never forgive my ex for the way he handled things in the end, but after almost 30 years of marriage, he had become a different man and, as it turned out, not one I really wanted to spend the rest of my life with. my life. life anyway. He wanted to sell the house and travel the world alone.
Accepting that took a lot of work on my part. I wanted to be mad at him, but how can you stay mad at someone who actually did you a favor? Nowadays we are friendly. We share vacations with the children. In October, he and I walked our daughter down the aisle together. Things are well.
Better than good, actually. I didn't realize how much I would love to not be married.
The night before my wedding, my mom took me aside and told me that the secret to a good marriage was the willingness to compromise. Good advice for sure.
But what a blessing it is to not have to give in anymore. I spend my money how I want, I go on vacation where I want, I stack the dishes in the dishwasher how I want. And the best of all is that no more fighting, no more fighting!
Not that fighting is all bad. In their new book, “Fight Right,” married psychologists John Gottman and Julie Schwartz Gottman argue that marital conflict matters.
“We tend to equate low levels of conflict with happiness, but that is simply not true,” the Gottmans write. “The absence of conflict does not indicate a strong relationship; in fact, it can lead to exactly the opposite. … It's not whether there is conflict in your relationship that makes or breaks it. Even the happiest couples fight. This is how you do it.“
In 1996, the couple founded the Gottman Marriage Institute in Seattle, an evolution of the work John Gottman had been doing at the University of Washington with his research partner Robert Levenson.
In 1986, the two built a “laboratory apartment” on campus and invited couples to stay so researchers could study their communication patterns. In the end, thousands of couples volunteered to stay in what was inevitably called the Love Laboratory. Researchers observed their facial expressions, body language, and conversations. The couples were hooked up to machines that recorded their heart rate and blood pressure.
“Gottman earned his reputation by introducing hard science into a field—ordinary marriage—that had long been the purview of therapists,” wrote journalist Philip Weiss, who spent a not-entirely happy night at the Love Lab with his wife in 2000.
By observing the first three minutes of a fight, Gottman found that he could fairly accurately predict the state of the relationship six years later. They could predict whether a couple would divorce with an average accuracy of more than 90%.
He discovered that doomed couples used four unpleasant styles of communication: criticism, contempt, evasion, and defensiveness. Technically, this theory is called “the waterfall model of relational dissolution.”
Gottman discovered that couples whose relationships were meant to last maintained what he called a “magic ratio” during conflict: five positive interactions for every negative interaction.
I think about my marriage and for the life of me I can't remember much about our conflicts.
But what I am most grateful for is that we no longer have them.
