As the marketing brouhaha around ‘various romantic days’ temper down and we are left clutching our lonely hearts the least we can do is detoxify them of bitterness towards our ‘Exes’.At the end of the marriage we have a laundry list of faults of our spouse, in our mind, which somehow gets etched onto our hearts and manifests itself in our conversation. The list seems to increase each time we speak to a friend or a relative
The shortcomings of our ‘EX’ could well be their physical characteristics. Either they were too fat, too thin and definitely had gained too much weight since we had married them. This would of course reverse if we had married someone skinny and after marriage they had become skinnier, although my experience shows these cases are rare. We tend to forget that we have changed physically too. After all, we looked different in school, college and in our first job. Then why do we expect our ‘ex’ to look exactly the same when we got married. So why focus on their changed physical appearance even after the marriage is over? If the physical appearance deteriorated after marriage then that’s not what you’d like to remember your spouse by, in case you’ve forgotten even you may not be the same knockout you were at the time of marriage- you can’t hold the marriage and ensuing divorce completely responsible for changes in your appearance.
It’s the focus on only the negative traits of your spouse and then holding onto those thoughts that adds to your misery.
Similarly, emotionally, the connect may not be there and hence the marriage may have ended. The level of understanding and acceptance that brought the couple together may have diminished or completely disappeared with the progression of the marriage. At times you may find that the entire conversations may have completely dried up and suddenly there’s nothing left to talk. It happens in marriages and the marriages just fall apart and come undone at the seams. Does it mean that your partner was always emotionally distant from you? If that was the case you’d accepted him/her that way before marrying them and if they became that way after marriage then doesn’t it explain the downhill slide of the marriage?.
The situation repeats itself for all the aspects be it sexual or financial state of the marriage.
The focus should shift from the negatives of the partner to what were the best memories of the marriage. The emphasis on the sadness of the marriage caused by the spouse’s is unnecessary and futile. The reality that we all tend to forget is that if all was well in the marriage then we would either be renewing our marriage vows or going for a holiday together or better still, a second honeymoon, rather than going for a divorce. The harsh truth is that the marriage is over and constantly rehashing the negatives of a spouse only add to our misery. The marriage has gone and perhaps it’s time to let the spouse become an ‘ex’ in the true sense of the word.
The divorce has set us free legally, but we must set ourselves free from carrying the negatives of the spouse in our psyche…and that should our second ‘divorce resolution’ for the year.
Vandana Shah is an Author, Divorce Lawyer and columnist .
(This article also appeared in Thrive Global)