Kay Moffett - Not Your Mothers Divorce: A Practical, Girlfriend-to-Girlfriend Guide to Surviving the End of a Young Marriage

The book of love is long and boring and written very long ago. Its full of flowers and heart-shaped boxes and things were all too young to know.

The Magnetic Fields
69 Love Songs

W hen we, your fearless authors, first met in college, divorce was far from our minds. We were roommates and English majors who bonded over our mutual love of literature and, specifically, doomed women writers of the twentieth century. We spent many hours discussing (and procrastinating work on) our senior thesesSarahs on the tortured Virginia Woolf and Kays on the equally tortured pair of poets Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. At that time, the world often seemed overwhelming with all of its interesting options: The Great American Novel with that cute new professor or Victorian poetry with the dowdy and world-renowned expert? The pasta bar or the salad bar? The bookbag or the knapsack? The two of us were notorious for our indecisiveness. Perhaps most mystifying of all, we were particularly stumped by which parties to go to on Saturday nights. In fact, sometimes we would spend so much time debating the pros and cons of various events, that by the time we had devised an itinerary for the evening, the parties were practically over and we happily hung out drinking wine in our room.

After college, Sarah went to England to study steamy seventeenth-century poetry, and Kay began teaching public school in New York City. Soon after Sarahs return, we both developed crushes on, and eventually full-blown relationships with, men who were in the same fields as we were, with similar interests and ambitions. With age and growing confidence, we were both becoming more decisive. In fact, we both decided that these guys were the ones for us and married them about five years out of college and barely four months apart. In December 1995, Sarah and T. had a winter wonderland wedding in Central Park. In March 1996, Kay and F. had a funky, flamingo-filled wedding in Florida.

During our first years of being married, now living on different coasts (Sarah in New York working in book publishing, and Kay in San Francisco getting a graduate degree), we would on occasion confess to each other on the phone, This is hard work! But wed typically reassure ourselves that wed just hit some early stumbling blocks in the lifelong project known as marriage. Both children of divorce, we were determined to make our marriages workwe could do this thing that our parents couldnt, and we wanted to do it well.

When Sarah and T. landed in counseling less than a year into their marriage, Sarah believed that if I just work hard enough at this, we can work through the kinks (as shed euphemistically labeled their frequent fights). T.s temper was unlike anything shed ever experienced, and counseling was not, in fact, doing much to help get to the root of their issues as a couple. However, when one day T. exclaimed in a session, The problem is, you just havent read enough Faulkner! something shifted in Sarah. (She wished afterward that shed retorted, And you just havent read enough Shakespeare!). The preposterous accusation was her wake-up call to realizing, with immense sadness and disappointment, that T. was searching for something much deeper in himself that Sarah couldnt possibly offer.

T. moved out a few weeks after the Faulkner incident, and though it took Sarah quite some time to accept his decision to leave the marriage, she realized, though she initially hated to admit it, that she was much, much happier on her own. The period following T.s moving out felt incredibly scary and uncertain, but it also brought some unexpected opportunities. In particular, it was a chance to renew and deepen female friendships and family ties. Dating, for the first time as a true adult, was unnerving at times, but also proved to be an exhilarating and important part of the recovery process.

At about the time that Sarah was getting divorced, Kay began going through a period of intense self-exploration (she lived in San Francisco, after all). Over a three-year period of figuring herself out and growing into her own skin, she not only began to question her career choice, but also her marriage to F. Kay and F.s lives had become so closely intertwined during their early years together, with practically all the same friends and interests, that she eventually wanted more independence from him, which didnt suit his needs. Kay also realized that they had quite different sensibilities, worldviews, and future aspirations. While they got along well on a daily basis, on a deep level they didnt see the world in the same way and often didnt connect about some of the ideas and emotions that mattered most to each of them.

What was difficult was that Kay and F were strong communicators and cared about each other very much, so while there were major differences between them that they couldnt reconcile, they remained close in many ways. It was excruciatingly difficult for Kay to make the decision to leave F, with whom she had spent most of her twenties and who was effectively her best friend. But something inside of her knew the fit was wrong for the long term. She fought this feeling for a few years, but not listening to her heart only made her grow depressed. After a great deal of angst and torturous reflection, Kay decided to separate from F. He resisted her decision vehemently at first, but soon came to feel it was the right move, partly because he met someone with whom he felt he was more compatible. This development wasnt easy for Kay, but she came to accept it, and eventually she and F. decided to divorce.

Both of us, during the darker days of our respective divorces, scoured the shelves at bookstores for something to help us make sense of things and found nothing that spoke to us. All the books were geared toward older women with children. Many assumed the woman had been left by the man for another woman or that the husband was something of a scoundrel, which wasnt the case for either of us. Plus, they all seemed overly earnest and borderline cheesy, with titles and covers neither of us could envision handing the cashier. However, we definitely felt the need for some seasoned counsel, which we were able to get only from each other and the few other divorces we had each gotten to know.

The fall after Sarah and T. had separated, she planned a trip to the Bay Area to reconnect with Kay and their beloved college roommates. During a spirited dinner reunion, Sarah described the book she wanted to write, something which would put to good use the wry new perspectives and amusing anecdotes she was collecting through the difficult and unexpected process of her separation and divorce. Our friends all encouraged Sarah to write the book and promised wed buy it.

A year after her separation, Kay was feeling antsy, like she wanted to do something creative with all the pain, wisdom, and newfound joy that had come from the experience, but she didnt know exactly what. Fortuitously, Sarah emailed her around this time and said, Im thinking of finally writing that book about divorce. Do you want to write it with me? It was pure telepathy and cosmic alignment; Kay didnt have to think twice before agreeing and writing back, YYYYYEEEEESSSSS!!!!!! And, thus, this book was born.