LoveHowTo Blog

Today (Show) and Forever

I was recently recruited to appear in a segment on the Today Show on the subject of how to tell your spouse you want a divorce. It’s fascinating: I couldn’t get my wedding announcement into the New York Times 20 years ago, but now that I’m getting divorced suddenly it’s big news.

Anyway, this segment was first in a series the Today Show developed on having difficult conversations — like talking to your kids about the birds and the bees. (By the way, if you’re going to call sex "the birds and the bees," don’t even waste your time having that conversation with a pre-teen or teenager circa 2008.)

The segment aired on May 22, 2008 and also featured attorney-to-the-stars Neal Hirsh, whom I interviewed in the course of selecting a divorce attorney but couldn’t afford, and Debbie Ford, author of Spiritual Divorce. It also featured a divorced guy named Carl who was funny and insightful.

The gist of the interview was about trying to bring up the subject of divorce the right way so you set the tone for the negotiations to come. And yes, that first conversation is earth-shattering as you both say out loud what you have been rolling around in your respective minds for months, maybe years.

The first conversation doesn’t happen in a vacuum, though. When I thought back to my personal experience, I had to say that the conversation wasn’t the bolt from the blue the Today Show was portraying. You don’t walk around wondering about a divorce and suddenly spring it on your spouse. It’s in the air.

I found that telling the kid(s) about a breakup is much more difficult than the conversation with your spouse. My husband and I talked about our problems — and tangentially about divorce — for almost a year, with a counselor and alone together, calm and rational, or tense and angry. When we finally sat down to make it official it wasn’t a shock to either of us.

Telling our son, however, was the hardest experience of my life. His primal reaction and subsequent difficulty accepting it made all my preparations — the research, the consultation with an expert, the notes — useless. I was ready for anything but silence, and silence is what we got. I thought back to when my own parents told me and my siblings about their impending divorce. Only the 10-year-old had any questions. My brother and I, teenagers, clammed up, and my youngest sister, at four, didn’t get it at all. Plus she had come down with chicken pox that day and was distracted by her spots.

Adults are different. Adults need to talk it out. And those of us at the Today Show taping did talk, before, during and after the taping. Between the producer, correspondent, cameraman, sound guy, Carl and me, everyone had gone through a divorce except the producer — and he’s never been married (although he does have a live-in girlfriend and a baby). That’s a 100% divorce rate among the married folk and one couple too smart to fall into the trap.

Maybe I’m metaphor-challenged, but to me a divorce is like a fingerprint. (Hey, at least I didn't say snowflake!) From afar it looks like any other split. Close up, it’s unique, intricate, personal. We can talk ourselves blue and never have the right piece of the puzzle for someone in a different situation than our own. I know other divorced women, but none with exactly my set of feelings and circumstances. The fact is, when the time comes, we have to make our own way, find our own voice, take our own stand. Life is messy and one of its biggest challenges can’t be properly summarized in the 2.5 minutes of a Today Show segment — or in 2.5 hours, for that matter. But we do our best to make sense of it, get past it and move on.