But You Seemed So Happy Read online

  Dedication

  This book is dedicated to everyone struggling in a good enough relationship with a good person (that person can be you).

  How to Give Unsolicited Advice to a Friend Who’s Just Announced Her Divorce

  Don’t.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Preface : My Little Homewrecker

  Prologue : The Honeymoon

  Me

  Maiden

  Say Thank You

  What to Expect When You’re Expecting to Be a Gen X Girl

  Notes from Family Living Class

  Teenage Dirtbag

  These Are the Things I Know about Myself

  Marriage

  A Relationship History, in Brief

  A Portrait of the Man and the Moment

  Some Questions for Men in Engagement Photos

  Philosophical Frogs

  Why Did You Get Married?

  Life Is Better on Weed

  Now That We’ve Had a Baby My Terms and Conditions Have Changed

  Everybody Wants Some

  How to Fix Your Hedonic Treadmill

  DIY Marriage Therapy

  Contempt, and Other Things Familiarity Breeds

  Funny Story

  And You May Ask Yourself, Well, How Did I Get Here?

  “Divorce”

  Lightbulbs

  How to Punch Your Kids in the Face

  Hi, We’re Getting a Divorce

  Thank You, Acquaintance, for the Very Good Advice on How to Save My Marriage

  Looking at Strangers

  The Unbelievably Boring but True Tale of Divorce Witch

  The Anglerfish

  Things People Say When You Get Divorced That They Really Should Say When You Get Engaged

  Nuts and Bolts

  Creating Our Grief

  When Sally Divorced Harry

  Epilogue: Adult Swim

  Reading List

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Kimberly Harrington

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Preface: My Little Homewrecker

  When you tell people you’re writing a book it’s not unusual for them to ask what that book is about. I’ve found that their reactions to my answer provide a peek into what I can expect out in the larger world. Because people can’t control what their faces do, no matter how hard they try. They think they’re modulating their tone of voice, but they are surprisingly . . . not. And depending on the topic, the reactions are so automatic and visceral that they’re just suddenly there, subconscious verbal burps.

  When I was writing my first book focused on motherhood, I would say as much: “I’m writing a book of essays and humor pieces focused on motherhood.” Boom. Straightforward. The reactions told me everything I needed to know. Most women who were mothers drew closer and asked questions. Most men, regardless of their parenting status, usually responded with a very uninterested-sounding “Oh!” or nodded in a way that said, “I will never read your dumb boring girl book.”

  Those reactions neatly summed up what was at play in the world, that women writing about women’s experiences would only be interesting to women. And motherhood specifically? Forget it. Only in America could something experienced by eighty-five million people be considered niche.

  But those reactions couldn’t have prepared me for the reactions to this book. Because when you’re writing about motherhood, it is safe to assume motherhood is an experience some women want to have on purpose. And it’s an experience, at least on a superficial Hallmark-card level, that our culture approves of. Or to put it another way, a book about motherhood is harmless. It’s a book that will affect the world not at all. But when you tell people, as I haltingly did, that this book would be about “Marriage . . .” then mumble “. . . and divorce, uh, my divorce”?

  Well.

  Divorce is something no one goes looking for or grows up dreaming of experiencing one day. Our culture disapproves of divorce. It judges divorce and everyone involved. Divorce is an opportunity for people to wonder if you couldn’t have done a better job not just with your marriage but with your entire life. So. This book, and by extension me and my divorce (which, spoiler alert, still hasn’t happened as of the completion of this book), might prove to be dangerous and possibly contagious. This book sounded like a homewrecker.

  People took the topic of my book personally. Which is fitting since people take other people’s divorces personally. Even though I wanted to blow up how people talked about divorce, examine how I felt about my marriage ending, and even make fun of both marriage and divorce in general, I was the one who was still mumbling the word divorce in polite conversation. As if it was (mumbles) cancer or (mumbles again) prison.

  Some of that hesitation came from knowing I would have to manage what came next. And what came next was always some version of this: :(

  There might be an “Oh wow” said in a way that meant “Oh wow oh shit I wished I hadn’t asked that question.” Or the inevitable, “Aw, I’m sorry,” which made me want to punch a wall. Because then I’d respond with, “Well I’m not!” which sounded like I was trying too hard or like my future ex-husband was a terrible person or our marriage had been a disaster, and none of those things were true. And then there we’d be, two tight smiles in a face-off, pretending like we weren’t marinating in mutual bad feelings.

  What a perfect way to convince someone to buy your book.

  The implication behind all of this was, “Why write about that?” And also: “Ick.”

  Why, indeed. Why put my family through this when we were, in fact, still going through it? Why examine something so uncomfortable and bad? Was it always bad? Why do this to my kids when I already said I never wanted to go through the mental gymnastics I had put myself through on my first book, when I wondered why I focused so much on protecting them day-to-day but then would turn right around and write about our lives for complete strangers? Why dredge up the past? (People really hate all the dredging up of the past! Stuff that shit down where all the feelings go!)

  The answers are likely not all that surprising if you’ve been through or are going through anything like this currently. I was desperately trying to find meaning in a relationship that had spanned half my life. I was trying to understand what it meant to enter into an arrangement as serious and theoretically permanent as marriage when I was still in my twenties. I wanted to know why I thought that was a good idea and why everyone around us thought that was a good idea, too. I wanted to understand what this all meant for me now, a woman who was about to be single and entering her fifties in America of all places, a country that largely perceives older women as clueless, sexless, useless, and shrill. I wanted to either stop being angry at myself or find new things to get even angrier about. I wanted to move the needle on my thoughts and emotions past the I Hate Everything red zone I’d been stuck in for two years. I wanted to explore whether or not I really knew “everything” and was very clear on “what went down” in my marriage, as I had convinced myself over time. More than anything, I wanted to make the case this had all meant something, anything. I wanted to understand who I was, who I am, and who I might be going forward.

  It became clear to me early on that others were also trying to find meaning in their relationship struggles. They were trying to figure out if “happy enough” was good enough. More than anything, they just wanted to talk about it, but nobody would talk about it with them—at least not openly or honestly or without platitudes or judgment. We all hear the dramatic stories of divorce, but we don’t hear much about boring divorces. Or perfectly okay divorces. Or divorces that simply sig
nify a relationship has run its course and is now complete. Because if there aren’t affairs, custody battles, nervous breakdowns, and an overall sense of humiliation then who cares?

  As I discovered, a lot of people do.

  The idea behind this book took shape just weeks after we announced our divorce straightforwardly and to as many people as possible. In that announcement we also shared we would continue living together for the foreseeable future. Our children were teenagers and our time with them was fleeting. Or so we thought. Our announcement took place in a pre-pandemic world, where school happened in person, children moved out at eighteen, and transitions were inevitable. With parenting they say the days are long but the years are short. But now the days are years and time is meaningless.

  What became crystal clear to me in the wake of our announcement was that the simple act of being honest and open about our situation, choosing not to follow the expected script for how marriages typically dissolve, and refusing to act ashamed about any of it had kicked off a larger conversation. Friends who had felt ambivalent discussing their marriages texted me, asking if we could talk. Friends who were already separated and hadn’t told anyone reached out. More than one work call got derailed as someone spilled their guts to me about their marriage or their fears over their career imploding because they were getting older and suddenly this was all intertwined. Most of the people I knew had married later, had kids later, and now it was all intersecting—suddenly they were middle-aged, with kids still at home, realizing their marriages were either going to implode or just slowly bore them to death.

  I am not a champion for divorce. I spent the majority of my life running from it, both as a teenager and an adult. I am not a divorce evangelist. I don’t think divorce is a wonderful idea and everyone should run right out and get one. I mean, I haven’t even gotten one yet. If I’m an evangelist for anything, it’s for all of us to think a bit more deeply about marriage and why we care so much about it. And if we find ourselves facing the end of a marriage, maybe we’d bend just a little less to the social pressures around us and do what’s best for ourselves and our families.

  A marriage doesn’t just happen suddenly. We ramp up to marriage. We meet, we date. We get engaged, we have a wedding, then the marriage begins. Some would argue that a marriage only truly begins after a certain number of years or the birth of a child. But when a marriage is over, we don’t ramp back down. We expect a marriage to end, a divorce to be final, and the relationship to be pushed off a cliff.

  Although Jon and I didn’t set out with the intention to evolve our marriage at the same time we were ending it, that’s what happened. Along the way I wondered: Was it possible to truly still be a family while no longer being a couple? Did I think someone was going to tell us “no” (sometimes it felt like it)? Could we want the best for each other even when that “best” wasn’t each other? Could I examine my own role in the unraveling of our marriage without defensiveness or anger (ha ha, probably not!)?

  It was about more than having an amicable divorce, a toothless way of saying “we mostly don’t want to knife each other.” And it was about more than friendship, it was about kinship. A kinship that represented parenting and partnership, family and friendship, free of the weight of an interdependent, romantic bond.

  I’m making it sound like we approached this phase with purpose, sitting cross-legged together at therapy, mooning over our “process” and scribbling in a common journal. That is . . . absolutely not what happened. We did not go to therapy. Neither of us currently keeps a journal. And if anyone had told me we’d be dabbling in “conscious uncoupling” I would’ve made a barf motion, but that’s what we sort of accidentally did. Mostly, we were lazy. Do you know what’s easier and cheaper than packing all your shit and moving to another house? Not doing that. We stumbled ass-backward into it, without a plan, barely talked about it, and it still worked, proving that it isn’t always hard.

  Anyone who has ever dared to share an unconventional idea knows people love to shit all over it. They’ll toss out a thousand reasons why what we’re doing won’t work for them (or anyone). It works for us, for now, which leads me to believe it might work for a few others. I know this because people tell me they want to try it, have tried it, or want to at least propose it to their partner. I know other people who have done it, long before us. And that proves people should stop making perfect the enemy of good. Do I want to live in our current arrangement forever? I most certainly do not. Would we be living together if we didn’t have kids? That would be a hard no. This is where we have found ourselves and this is what we have chosen to do given the circumstances. It is choosing us over others’ opinions of us. It is choosing to do what feels right, right now, and worrying less about what the typical divorce script looks like or what the future might hold. As it turned out, it was the perfect year to give up thinking about the future entirely. Expectations—in marriage, in life, about what we are owed, about what we can control—have always been the problem.

  But I don’t need to convince you. I don’t need to convince anyone. The only people I’ve cared about throughout all of this are the four who are still currently living in this house, including me. At the end of the day, I believe the same thing about divorce that I believe about abortion: If you don’t like it, don’t get one.

  I wrote this book in reverse order, starting from where I stood. That part felt easy at first, because my thinking was current, my perspective inseparable from my experience. But I knew I needed to reach back, much further back. But in reaching back I was still seeing everything through my current lens. I couldn’t really remember how I thought or felt twenty or thirty years ago. So I sifted through old yearbooks and letters, a pile of high school and college journals I hadn’t even remembered (I thought it would be just a few, it was more like twenty), and even some high school and college class assignments. It’s impossible to reconstruct roughly thirty-five or so years of my romantic relationship history and, besides, this book isn’t intended to be a play-by-play of my life. I am not famous and that would be boring. Mostly I was looking for clues. I was looking for the aha moments that would make it all seem so plain. I discovered quite a few, but not the ones I expected.

  This book is for the ambivalent, for the second-guessers and overthinkers, for anyone who has ever felt alone in their marriage and been told, “It’s not so bad, what are you complaining about?” And it’s for anyone who feels like what was even the fucking point of that relationship, that marriage, or my entire life while we’re at it?

  The point is, if you look deeply enough, behind you, all around you, you might find the mistakes weren’t as colossal as you believed. What if you did get smarter over time and what if you weren’t all that dumb to begin with? What if you experienced more moments of grace than you realized? What if you knew yourself better when you were a teenager than you thought you did? And what if you discovered all the ways you rationalized changing yourself over time because you thought that would make you a better person but, instead, all those changes just made you less you?

  You might be a little less hard on yourself in some ways and much harder on yourself in others. You might discover that, surprise, surprise, cis-het marriage is an outdated and often unequal arrangement that we keep clinging to because it’s what everyone else is doing so why not? We haven’t evolved nearly as much as we like to think we have. And you might discover that divorce has been imbued with feelings of such darkness and shame that rarely does anyone question whether it can be handled differently. We just get ready to fight and prepare to lose.

  Ultimately, every marriage is a story written by two people and retold, with varying degrees of accuracy and all sorts of hidden agendas, by everyone around them—their children, their families and friends, acquaintances, strangers. When there is a writer in a marriage, there is an unfair advantage. Because that version (this version) will be the only version recorded, as if it is the one true version. I am here to tell you it is not. I have done
my level best to be careful and fair while portraying my experiences honestly, sometimes darkly, other times perhaps a little too cavalierly.

  The most important keepers of this marriage story—Jon and our children—initially reviewed the essays that pertained most directly to them. Jon went on to read the full manuscript several times, only requesting minor adjustments. He never once asked me to take anything out, an act of unfathomable openness and generosity for someone so private.

  Memory is fallible and perspective inherently biased. I have reconstructed details and dialogue to the best of my ability. Some names have been changed and identifying details altered or omitted where appropriate. This is not a court document. This is a love story. It is, as many marriages tend to be, the story of one’s life.

  Prologue: The Honeymoon

  I am writing you from my honeymoon.

  The honeymoon of my divorce.

  I am not on a beach or holding a coconut pierced with a straw. I am not on a plane to anywhere. I am not walking a cobblestone path to a quaint pub, teetering in my impractical honeymoon shoes. I am not backpacking nor road-tripping. I am not filled with blind hope. I am not divorced, not yet.

  What I am is free.

  I am free from a yearslong conversation about how happy is happy enough? I have continuously asked myself how I could possibly be so selfish as to prioritize my own happiness. Isn’t it incredible what marriage and motherhood will do to your most basic sense of what you deserve?

  On the ledger we all keep, tallying our misery and joy, or weighing the tediousness of thankless tasks against the appreciation that another person knows all of our faults and elects to stay anyway, I am constantly recalculating:

  + He is a good father. A strong, warm, involved one. A father who does more than almost any other man I know. That kind of father.

  - I have no regrets (yet). Will leaving (or staying) be one of them?

  + Our kids.