Closure?

gotta start ticking the old divorce box

My divorce is officially final. The email from HMS Divorce and Dissolution landed in my hotmail inbox yesterday morning, sandwiched between Walmart’s notification of my pillow delivery, and a confirmation of my boujie deodorant purchase from Sephora.

It read a bit like the notification of a late credit card payment or failed Amazon delivery. ‘Dear Eve Simmons… The final order has been granted. You are now legally divorced.’

Seeing as I am now a part-time creator of divorce-related content, my first instinct (after telling mum) was to use this latest development for a dark comedic instagram post that would rile my followers up a storm.

But I stumbled over the caption. I clicked through to the final order itself, scrolled through the PDF that alerted me ‘the marriage has ended’, and looked for inspiration. In the end, I babbled something about a gift from Santa (it’s christmas) and proceeded to stare vactantly at the inevitable messages of congratulations that came pouring through.

Six months a go, I’d spoken about this day with the girls, and we’d made vague plans for a no-expense-spared divorce party, complete with items that symbolized irritating parts of my ex’s personality (a tansluscent mirror to represent lack of self reflection was my fave) to gleefully destroy. At the time, I could think of no better way to bookend what has been the most surreal and heartbreaking period of my life. When the email came through, I texted the girls in haste telling them celebration was in order tonight.

The thing is, I don’t feel at all like celebrating. It does not feel like an achievement, or a win. It’s not the long-awaited bookend that will finally bring me peace. All I wanted to do was stare at the word divorce in front of me, cry, and maybe eat the rest of that Almond Croissant I couldn’t finish at breakfast time.

I tried to do a therapist thing and consider the meaning I was attaching to my divorce - and what exactly it was about it that made me feel so…crap. Did a part of me miss the man who took my mother’s savings and tried to steal my toaster? To be honest, no. Was I grieving the life I had in the countryside where the nearest semi-nice shop was a place called HEALTH FOODS and it cost £20 a day to get to and from London? Considering I now live in New York which is, objectively, the best city on the planet…no. And despite my friends’ engagements and babies, I’m actually pretty content with being unmarried - the pressure I felt throughout my 20s oddly seemed to have eased within weeks of the break-up.

So what, then? I think it’s two things. First, the self-loathing that comes with the knowledge that you - and only you - got such a major life thing so very, very wrong. He was my choice - and it turned out to be the wrong one. I’m unsure as to why humans (or is this unique to women?) find failure so haunting. An interesting survey involving 500,000 adolescents published last year found that women are significantly more likely to blame themselves for failures, compared to men.

I am almost embarassed to admit the next reason. Basically, it’s what will people think? Who wants to be associated with a 32-year-old divorcee who couldn’t hang on to her husband for longer than six months, gets a headache after 1.5 glasses of Pinot Noir and falls asleep during 95% of Netflix series’?

It’s little wonder that divorced women fear being judged poorly, given the legal history. When divorce was first introduced to Britain in 1857, it was designed as a way for men to split from adultering women. And because we had no rights to property or money, us divorcees weren’t exactly considered the biggest catch.

It’s only been 100 years since women were allowed to apply for their own divorce. Even then, the majority of women abandoned their petitions because they’d end up out on the street with nothing. And get this, it wasn’t until 1973 that the law changed to ensure women had their financial needs met regardless of who was thought to be to blame for the marriage ending. Oh, and before 1984, you had to be married for THREE YEARS before filing a divorce petiton. Today it’s a year. It’s fair to say women have, historically, not done well out of divorce. So no wonder it’s not a club I’m dying to be in.

Maybe I’ll feel differently in a few days, or weeks. Perhaps one day soon I’ll wake up, see the metaphorical line drawn under my marriage, and exhale a huge sigh of relief. Until then, I’ll live in hope that Taylor Swift will get divorced soon because, if anything will put it on the map, she will.