Welcome to Divorce Dialogues. I'm Catherine Miller. Divorce Dialogues brings expert guests to the airways to talk through your divorce questions and fill in the gray areas of that's equating. From thinking about divorce, to how to behave during divorce, to what to do after, this is Divorce Dialogues.
Welcome to Dialogue on Divorce. I'm Catherine Miller. I'm the founder of the Miller Law Group and director of the Center for Understanding in Conflict. And my guest today is Wendy Farris.
She's the author of Splitopia, Dispatches from Today's Good Divorce and How to Part Well. It was published in March of 2016, and she is an essayist and author. Her articles and essays have been published in numerous publications in New York Times, Psychology Today, New York Observer, The Guardian, Washington Post, so on and so on. So I thought it might be really interesting for our listeners to start with your story.
What led you to write Splitopia, and what was your experience, and what was the trajectory of the experience? You know, I read a little bit about this in my book. I had written about weddings for years. I worked as a journalist in New York City, and a lot of the work I got was for wedding magazines.
And I had written about honeymoons. I'd gone on 20 honeymoons, you know, by myself or with other type of awareness. I had never written about divorce. My parents were divorced when I was five, and it hadn't been in my life forever.
So I was married and lived in New York, and, you know, I married a great guy, but we did not have a great marriage. And I complained about it a lot, and it was pretty clear the ways in which we were incompatible, and it kind of went on and on. And so, as I read in my book, when we announced to our friends that we were going to do a trial separation, I thought they would say, you know, good for you. Finally, you're doing something about it.
You've been complaining for years. You know, they bring over champagne and chocolate truffles. I know it's the end of the marriage, but it was not working. And this was not the feedback I got.
And this was in New York, and this, you know, rather liberal crowd. And, you know, the feedback I got was something, it was like, you're going to be miserable. You guys are getting along good now, but this is the honeymoon phase of divorce. It's going to get worse.
Your child will be destroyed. You'll be too destitute to work. When my friend said, maybe you're just unhappy in your career. Another friend said, I know a number of single women your age, and they have been unable to meet someone new.
This could happen to you. You know, it was all this, like, doom and gloom. When my parents divorced in 1973, I didn't have the experience that my friends were describing. My parents didn't hate each other.
I didn't hate either of my parents. I, you know, I had a great home life. I was like, where is this coming from? So I started to do some research, and I realized that our fears of divorce are from facts of an earlier era, for one thing, before no-fault divorce, when the only way to get divorced was to go to court and publicly accuse your spouse of some heinous crime, like a felony or adultery or hitting you.
Before no-fault, you had no other way to get out of your marriage. And in the 70s, when my parents divorced, it was very common for the mom to have full custody and the father to become, like, a weekend visitor, or an every-other weekend visitor, and this is not the case anymore. You know, every state authorizes joint custody. This doesn't mean, you know, the children have to go back and forth, but it doesn't mean there's an expectation that what's in the best interest of the child is that there's a full character to be involved.
So kids don't lose contact with their fathers the way they used to do. Fathers don't lose contact with their kids nearly as often. You can get divorced because you're in this as well, like we were, without, you know, having to prove that your partner's horrible. Women work, which was not the case in the past.
We live in a society where half the adults in many major cities are single, so, you know, being a single adult doesn't have the stigma that it used to. Your kids aren't going to be the only child, you know, the only children in the classroom with divorced parents. It's a very different era. So my friends were reacting to the fact of an earlier era and they were reacting to what we see in the news.
You know, now, like in the last two years, we're starting to see things like when it's Paul Trow talking about conscious uncoupling. But when I started my book in 2012, if I Googled divorce, what came up with the most expensive divorce, celebrity divorces in history? You know, the ugliest divorces you can imagine. And there's a lot of reporting about the bad divorces and, you know, much less conversation about the decent divorces.
And then there's a lot of bias. You know, these pro-marriage pendants will often conflate gaps on single moms, for example, with divorced moms. Single moms are among the poorest people in our country because half of single moms are adolescents. So when you talk about single moms, you may be talking about a high school girl, you know, trying to raise a child on her own.
It's a very different story than two professionals in their 40s who decide to get divorced. So all this stuff sort of swirls around and makes us overly fearful about divorce and overly angry. It sounds like partly what you're saying is despite a much more modern actual life that we lead, or at least you are friends, and I think this is my experience and the experience of my clients as well, our emotional reaction to divorce or the idea of divorce is rooted decades and decades ago. Yes, it's rooted decades and decades ago.
Now, an American, you know, one of the scholars in my book talked about marriage is more fraught than the United States than anywhere else. We valorize marriage. We glamorize marriage. We aspire to be married.
And we also valorize independence and self-actualization and becoming all you can be. And so we have these, in that case, we have these opposing kind of ideologies. And I mean, politically, I don't think we're in our own home. So some of it is like, no, we want the marriage to work for the reason.
I want marriage to work too. But there's also that. We pin our whole time in divorce and it's made in with a history of negativity and disappointment. And, you know, a two-day divorce, what does that say about me?
You know, there's a lot of fantasy about marriage and romance that we don't want disrupted. So you did this research and you discovered this big disconnect between the life you were leading and the reaction you were getting to the news. And you did all this research. And is that what inspired you to write the book?
So I started with this, like, you know, a couple of things. Yeah, I started doing some research and, you know, talking to people. And then I met a woman. My son was going to a little kind of Waldorf school class in the East Village in Manhattan.
And I met a woman there who was traveling to France with her ex-husband and their daughter for the summer. And I guess we had started talking about divorce or before we started talking about divorce. And I was like, wait a minute. You can get divorced and still travel with your ex.
Like, where do I find out? Like, you know, I didn't want to boot my husband on my life. But I didn't want to have a marriage we had. So, you know, I met her and I started doing some research.
We said, okay, we're doing a house separation. I, you know, talked to more people. And I was walking around saying, okay, I'm doing a divorce project. You know, I'm going to do something about this.
You know, I don't know what it's going to be. And then, you know, I'll just tell you personally, I didn't have a job at the time. And I applied for a job at helping some post writing about weddings and divorce. And I was like, I am the perfect candidate.
I've written about weddings for years. I've written a book about weddings. I'm getting divorced. I do want my family to divorce.
You know, surely I'll get this job. And my job is based in L.A. And I don't want helping them post to own divorce. And so, I've been in divorce because I witnessed how bad his divorce was.
And, you know, he's an author. And we were talking about it. And he was saying, I think you can write a book about it. I think you can do it.
You know, I believe in you. Why don't you, you know, take this interest, take this research, and write a book proposal. And so, that's what I did. And, you know, I've been a writer.
I've been an author. So, it wasn't a huge stretch for me. But I had never done a book like this, which I, you know, can be three years to write. I had a huge amount of research.
And I interviewed like 200 people. And I also was every night at home doing kind of free writing, just, you know, on my computer, writing down like you would in a journal. You know, what happened today? And then I would sort of say, you know, this is happening to other people.
I had a health crisis in the middle of this. And my daughter told the book, and I had a health crisis. And I was talking to my editor. And she said, you know, I think this is common in divorce.
And I spoke to a lawyer in DC and said, 99% of my clients have some kind of health crisis. They lose too much weight or they're not sleeping or, you know, actually run to the hospital. And so, now I have a day. And he was like, okay, there needs to be a chapter on, I call it hurricane, you know, on the crisis.
So, that's sort of, you know, how involved it became the project I was looking on as I, you know, as I went through the first few difficult years of divorce. This is Catherine Miller. You're listening to Dialogue on Divorce. This is a program here on WVOX, 1460 AM in Westchester, on WVOX.com from 5 to 530 every other Wednesday.
And today I'm talking with Wendy Paris, the author of Slutopia, about her journey to find a good divorce and to write about it. So, Wendy, what was the biggest surprise for you in fashioning a good divorce with your ex-husband? You know, I'll take you things. You know, it's a great question.
The biggest surprise, I want to answer the biggest surprise for me in researching the book. Because I thought there was just a dearth of good ideas out there. And it turns out there are great ideas about how to do this collaboratively, right? I mean, people like you have, you know, years of experience.
You know, how do we do mediation? How do we do collaboratively? And then I also was interviewing psychologists and positive psychologists and child development experts. And we know conflict is what's most damaging to kids.
We know how do you encourage post-traumatic growth if your divorce is traumatic? What are some good coping techniques? How do we harness our drinks? How do we boost our resilience?
This information is out there. There's a huge gap between the information and people who are facing divorce. So, this was the biggest surprise to me in the sort of divorce project. That there are great ideas and people just aren't having access to them.
The biggest surprise to me in my own divorce, personally, I guess I would do two. One is that it was harder than I thought. My husband got a girlfriend right away and it completely flipped me out. And I was just, you know, sick of him and our marriage.
I was not expecting to have that reaction. I'm not a jealous person. So, very, very surprising. And I seemed to be single forever because the biggest source of conflict was I wanted a very intimate relationship.
And his idea of intimacy, you know, was quite different than mine. And I felt, you know, I felt like he'd be happier by himself. So, I was, you know, surprised by how difficult it was. And then the other thing that surprised me is, despite that, my divorce is a lot better than I thought it would be.
Like, I really like him now. And I really have started to loathe him when we were married. And I wasn't expecting that. I was not, you know, working on his website.
He's been helping me with it. And I just decided I really wanted to pull our son out of the public school and send him to another private school because he was having trouble in the public school. And, you know, my husband was on board for that. He's been paying for it.
And, you know, I felt like he was kind of a workaholic when we were married. And I wanted more, you know, time with the family. But now that I'm divorced, it's great that he's a workaholic. I mean, he can pay for private school.
So, I'm surprised that I actually really like this man who I'm just so unhappy with. Wow, that's a lot. Let me go back to what you said was your biggest surprise when writing the book because I am on a mission to change how people divorce and to help them divorce with dignity. And, you know, that's a challenge.
And I think one of the biggest challenges is to get the possibility of that to the ears of somebody facing divorce early enough for it to make a difference. Because I think, Wendy, that many people really yearn to have a transition that isn't going to be easy but that makes sense to them and to restructure their families in a way, as you have, that really support the co-parenting relationship and raises healthy kids. I mean, let's face it. There's no one else other than the other parent of our children who's ever going to feel anywhere near as proud of them as we do.
And to be able to share that with that person is really a wonderful opportunity. Oh, I totally agree. And, I mean, I'm so glad you're on this mission. I don't know what drives me crazy.
People don't get this information. And you're totally right. One is, you know, I'm trying to say to people, you can start a collaborative process. You can only go adversarial if it doesn't work.
But if you start adversarial, right, you may not be able to back up from that. And, you know, I encourage people to throw down on the legal process. Like, we didn't make it legal for a couple of years. We just moved apart.
And, you know, I didn't have a job. I was nervous. And I think I just wanted to get more confident and comfortable living alone before having discussions about stuff and money. And I think people, they just get hurled into this and they get really bad advice.
And I think the reason is one reason is when you're thinking about getting married, you know, you probably go to the bookstore and look at bride magazine. You look at these pretty photos and housewares. And, you know, there's a lot of aspirational planning. But nobody wants to know anything about divorce until it is upon them, right?
So you come to this with almost no information. And then, you know, your friends who don't know what they're talking about will rush in and say, oh, you've got to use my lawyer. Yes, I have a lot of divorce. I've spent $350,000.
It was the worst time in my life. I have a great lawyer. You have to go this route. And people just get swept up into this adversarial process before they've had time to stop and say, okay, I have to love this person and not to marry him.
Let me slow down. Let's think about, you know, our family as a unit. You know, it's a system. And we've got to restructure it without the marriage part.
And how do we do that in a way that people both do really well? Yeah, I think, Wendy Paris, that people are really worried about being vulnerable and looking bad and feeling bad. And so it's very hard. It's very shameful, I think, still.
Even though, statistically speaking, half of our marriages end in divorce, it's still something that people feel a lot of shame about. And so it's hard to do the kind of research that you would do. And it's certainly hard to feel good about, you know, comparing this pattern of China to that pattern. Right.
No, I think you're right. And, you know, I'm trying to fight against that shame. You know, I talk about this a lot in my book. And, you know, it's understandable that divorce was such a terrible thing in the past when, you know, women basically had no ability to support themselves without a marriage.
You know, you wouldn't even consider this a person. You were, you know, you were part of your husband, you know, for much of human history. But, you know, when religion has had a position against divorce, you know, we're living in a different time. And so I'm wanting to say, you know, let's model people who have really good lives after the marriage expired.
You know, let's try to step back from that shame. And I write about one of my principles of hurting is commit to self-compassion. And one piece of self-compassion is see the universality of your experience. And I think one way to maybe help people get past the shame is to recognize that, you know, too many people divorce in the United States every year.
The numbers are rising around the country. We're living longer. We have a lot of pressures on us. And people divorce from all walks of life, all parts of the country, you know, all political parties.
It isn't like, you know, whatever one terrible thing you think you did wrong, but there's somebody else who lived in their marriage in exactly the opposite way and is still getting divorced. You know, it isn't some unique personal failing. It's a, you know, we're part of a society. We don't have great education about marriage.
We often don't choose right. What one changes, there's so many reasons. And what you have control over is what you do next. Yeah, I think that the idea of divorce equaling failure is a misnomer.
It's a misunderstanding. Margaret Mead said when she was asked how it felt to have three marriages that failed, she said, I had no marriages that failed. I had three marriages that came to their natural ending. Yeah, so, you know, my husband was really saying, you know, let's look at this as a success that has run its course.
You know, because at one point I was like, oh, whatever friends are right, and I'm going to wind up alone with my pretty cool, you know, with just me and dog, you know. And, you know, the flip side is, you know, maybe it's a failure, and that's also okay. You know, we fail at a lot of things. And I agree with you, right?
Let's say this is a success that has run its course. Who says a marriage is only a success if it lasts for 70 years? You know, maybe this is a beautiful relationship for, you know, a time-limited period. And, you know, when I talk about wanting a different word than an ex-husband, we're able to say my high school girlfriend.
You know, we don't think it's a failure that the high school girlfriend didn't become your wife. We understand that it was a relationship that worked at a time and a place. And, you know, I agree with you. Let's try to be more expansive about marriage and about our relationship.
And the relationship can continue, not as a marriage. And I also do think the other side of it is true, too, that all these books coming out from Silicon Valley about the upside of failure and the benefits of failure. And you've got to try and fail in order to succeed. And so, you know, yeah, we had an idea of how our lives were going to be.
And, you know, it didn't work out that way. And I think that's real life. This is Catherine Miller. This is Dialogue on Divorce.
And I'm talking today with Wendy Paris, the author of Splitopia. And Wendy, you just spoke a few minutes ago about one of your principles. I think you have some more. And you write about them in your book.
So why don't you give us a little bit of information about the book, about the principles, and where people can get more information. Great. So my book is called Splitopia. And it is available, you know, on Amazon online.
It should be in your bookstore. And if it's not in your bookstore, please tell the bookteller that you want them to order it. I spent a few years writing it. It's published by Simon & Schuster.
It's a Simon & Schuster called Atria. And it looks at my own trajectory from separation to divorce. It looks at my parents' divorce. And, you know, interestingly enough, my mother got divorced from my stepfather shortly before I split up from my husband.
And it should be married to my stepfather for 35 years. And so my mom and my dad were single at the same time. So there's this whole piece in my book over. My mom and my dad are going to get back together.
And she's still kind of wanting that. I had a very nice experience with my mom and my dad having a type of reconciliation. So the book follows, you know, I see personal stories. And then I interviewed 200 people in positive post-marriage relationships about, you know, how did you do it?
What did you do well? It has a lot of information from the family law reform movement, which you're part of. You know, let's talk about, you know, we call it alternative dispute resolution. But I don't think it should be alternative.
I think it should be standard. You know, let's try communication. Let's try collaborative divorce. Let's try to work together.
And there's a lot of research. psychologists and positive psychologists on strengths and surviving and resilience. So I came up with these seven principles of parenting in my chapter two, and I came up with them from, you know, from these years of putting all this stuff together, you know, what do we know about the law, what do we know about psychology, what do people say? And the one that I mentioned was my principle number one, which is commit to self-compassion.
Yeah, I think that's super important. Because without it, how can you possibly have compassion for anyone else? I think that's exactly right. Yeah, and then I was so interested in this because there was a study done at the University of Arizona where they were trying to say, you know, all the various traits and factors, what leads to positive post-divorce recuperation, like positive recuperation?
And, you know, is it the length of time to remarry or is it self-esteem? And what they came up with was that self-compassion was the most important trait and it was created from divorce. Self-compassion is a Buddhist idea, comes from Buddhism, and it has three parts. And one part is this, what I mentioned earlier, to see the universality of your experience.
You know, you really want to understand that you're not the only person whose marriage has ended. You're not the only person who had a vision for life and maybe didn't follow that. And because it's true, right, because suffering is part of a human condition, and because feeling like you're the only one who's ever had a tough time listening to you at a time already probably feeling lonely and, you know, off-center. So you want to recognize that this is part of a human experience.
This is not something exhaling. Another part of self-compassion, my first principle of parenting, is to practice mindfulness. When you talk about mindfulness in divorce, meaning, you know, being in the moment, as we all know. So if you begin to divorce, you feel like this is the only thing that's happening, you have this kind of constant illumination, and you want to be able to put that down and go on and do other things.
Or if you're having breakfast with your children, be with your children. You know, not rehearsing a fight you want to pick later in the day. And mindfulness in divorce also means being aware of your feelings, you know, being present to them rather than running from them or, you know, breaking them away. So practice mindfulness is part of self-compassion.
And then the third part of self-compassion is view yourself with understanding and forgiveness. And there's really a tendency in divorce to be, you know, incredibly harsh. You know, I'm such a failure, I'm such a loser, or I criticize my husband too much, or I work too much, or whatever it is. And those, you know, what Richard shows is what those kind of harsh words that we use on ourselves cause our body to respond as if to a physical threat.
You know, we tense up, we have this really cordial, we have this fight or flight reaction, and, you know, prolong this can lead to real health problems and, you know, make it harder for you to deal with the real challenges of divorce. So I talk about this view yourself with understanding and forgiveness in that we all know how to treat a friend going through a difficult time, but we often think to ourselves when we speak to an enemy, and we don't even realize it. Self-compassion is really about trying to step away from that negative language, understand you're not the only one, give yourself with understanding and forgiveness, and try to be aware of your skills and not let them overwhelm you or totally define you. You know, Wendy, it sounds so easy and so obvious, but I think it's really hard to do.
It's really hard to do. Do you help people in the book sort of give them exercises as to how to find that space? You know, we want to do a workshop, and we've been talking a lot about doing an online course where we could, you know, we could do these exercises. I talk about a couple in my book, specifically for self-compassion.
There's this exercise where you write yourself a compassionate letter, like the way you would to a friend. You know, so you sit down and you say, you know, you're Catherine, I, you know, I know, if you're Wendy, I know it's four years since you're divorced, and you're still having found someone, and, you know, I know this is really hard, and then try to, you know, how, what would you, what would you say yourself if you were, and I tried this exercise, and recently, you know, I had a lot of resistance to it, and I'd be curious if, you know, if you have listeners who do it, if they, if they find that, like, I had a lot of resistance to making the time to sit down and write myself a letter, not even, like, telling myself how great I am, just trying to be really, like, loving toward myself. I found it really difficult, so, you know, it was interesting to me. That's what I mean.
It sounds so simple, and it's obviously true, but it's really, really hard to do, to make that space to treat yourself with that kind of compassion that you would for a close friend. I know, it's like, oh, then I'm not, you know, taking responsibility, then I'm not owning an opportunity. It's really, I talk about, I think, is a researcher at New York at Texas, and she has a website, selfcompassion.org. And a book, she wrote a good book about it, too, and she has a lot of exercises in there.
She has a lot of exercises, yeah, so, you know, it might be good, that's a place people could go. You can certainly go to my website, litopia.com. We have a whole section on coping and thriving, and there's a lot of ideas there, and, you know, I will be putting up some kind of course, and I do coaching, or counseling, or consulting, and consulting about this, and then I would say Christine F. site is another good one, selfcompassion.
Super. Wendy Paris, thank you so much for being our guest on Dialogue on Divorce. I really appreciate your time today. It's been great.
Oh, thank you.