Nobody told you how important it would be to constantly appear stable while you were getting a divorce, because everything you said and did would be more meaningful and poignant than you’d intended. Standing alone in the middle of your office, staring into the middle distance, was not a sign of stability.

The lesson? Fill out the form, even when it fills you with dread. The other lesson? Go with what you want instead of what you are supposed to want.

“I know that it’s continued. And even if continued marriages aren’t happy, they are still categorized as happy.”

Or maybe now there was something about his current situation, being newly divorced and a little wounded, that had somehow made him that way.

He thought of the decisions he’d made and whether he could have seen the warning signs.

It was that he couldn’t bear to be with anyone who didn’t yet truly understand consequences, how the world would have its way with you despite all your careful life planning. There was no way to learn that until you lived it. There was no way for any of us to learn that until we lived it.

Even the purely good memories are now haunted by a sense that I was a fool to allow myself to think that life was good and that a kingdom of happiness was mine.” (I told him I understood his metaphor, but also that’s not how you play Othello.)

He couldn’t bring himself to contact any of Rachel’s friends and ask if they’d heard from her. There was something about this that was so deeply embarrassing that he couldn’t handle anyone knowing it. Yes, divorce was ugly and people understood that, but getting abandoned by the wife you’re already separated from seemed even too humiliating for him

The stories he heard from divorced women were all the same—not the details, but the themes: This thing I thought was just a whim was actually an important part of my spouse’s identity, and still I’m surprised. This thing they had always been doing they kept doing and still I’m surprised. Here is how innocent I was and here is how cruel my spouse wa