The End of a Marriage Can Be as Cataclysmic as a Literal Death

Five years ago, Janet Locke, who thought she was happily married, found herself unexpectedly in the middle of a divorce. “It was so sudden--so out of nowhere,” recalled Locke, who is 41 and lives in Los Angeles. “We were best, best friends. We held hands. We slept in each others’ arms for five years. He met a woman and four weeks later he left me for her. I was in shock. It was pure devastation.”

Divorce shreds the landscape of one’s life so totally that people who’ve gone through it liken it to a death or, rather, multiple deaths. Experts who study and counsel those who have been through divorces say there is a predictable, if difficult, road to recovery.

A colossal emotional storm erupts with divorce, its stages of mourning paralleling those psychologist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross identified as what survivors experience when a loved one dies. But in divorce, the person being mourned is still alive (and if you have children, will be around for years as a co-parent). It takes an average of two years for people to stabilize emotionally after divorce, according to research, and as long as five years for couples with children. But how long shock, denial, hopelessness, resentment, anger and, finally, rebirth play out depends largely on who initiated the divorce and how well each person has coped with a life crisis in the past.

“Any time you lose someone through divorce or death, there is an identity crisis,” said Stan Charnofsky, professor of counseling psychology at Cal State Northridge. “It is, ‘Who am I in this new life situation? Who am I as a single person? Who am I as a sexual person?’ You need to recover. You are wounded, and if you go back out there and date, you are damaged goods.”

Divorces are rarely mutual, said Constance Ahrons, a USC sociology professor and author of “The Good Divorce,” (HarperCollins, 1995). The initiator often feels guilt and may have emotionally divorced their mate long before requesting a divorce. “Frequently, the person leaving the marriage feels more empowered,” she said. “But they also usually have sought therapy to deal with the issues.”

Charnofsky, whose own divorce 21 years ago inspired him to write “When Women Leave: How Men Feel, How Men Heal” (New Old Library, 1992), said that once the decision to divorce has been made, disbelief and 11th-hour attempts to repair the marriage are not uncommon. “She gives a laundry list of what’s wrong, and he sets about trying to do the practical things to fix it,” he said. “But the emotional divorce has already occurred before the physical and [the initiator] cannot change the way she feels.”

This can send one or both parties into weeks or months of hopelessness and paralyzing depression. Simultaneously, there can be grieving over smashed dreams. Every contact--real or imagined-- with your partner is emotionally upsetting. “I would get up in the morning, go to the kitchen and realize I needed something in the bedroom and not remember what I needed,” said Locke, describing a typical day during a three-month period of shock and depression after her husband left. “Then I would realize five hours had gone by. He would come try to talk to me on the doorstep, and I couldn’t hear what he was saying or say anything I was so numb.”

“People divorcing may stay angry for a long time,” said Ahrons, and this isn’t always such a bad thing. “It is functional because anger mobilizes and depression paralyzes.”

For Locke, the anger came when she had to sell the house she’d shared with her husband, move, get a new job and start all over. “I resented the fact that he went off and had a new life,” she said. “And he never really said he was sorry.”

Complete forgiveness may not be possible, said Charnofsky, but the passage of time makes forgetting a little easier, and it paves the way for a time when life can once again be savored.

“When I talk about it now, it seems like I am talking about someone else,” said Locke, who is happily involved with someone new and who credits her year-and-a-half recovery to the unwavering support of family, friends and a good therapist. “I just can’t believe how strong I was.”

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Birds & Bees is a weekly column on relationships and sexuality. Kathleen Kelleher can be reached at kellehr@gte.net.