The divorce lawyer is mighty disappointed. She has landed a couple who have so far not managed to provide her with even an ounce of drama that one would expect from a regular divorce process. And now while filling out the form, they can’t even remember their wedding date and the husband has resorted to ‘phone-a-friend’ for help. Her face reflects her abject exasperation. As they make their way to the court room, the wife stops to click pictures of the staircase while animatedly discussing their evening plan to celebrate the divorce over Old Monk while intermittently cracking lame jokes.
The experience of growing up amid domestic violence and then seeing her parents go through a bitter, prolonged, and complicated divorce, has been instrumental in her becoming a divorce lawyer herself—she wanted to help couples like her parents and make the process less painful. She is still a junior lawyer and is filling in for her ‘ma’am’ on the last day of this divorce hearing, and it is the first time she is encountering such an estranged pair. “I have never seen such a happy couple, are you sure you want this divorce?” she can’t help but ask. “We are happy people because we are not a couple anymore,” quips the woman.
That woman is me. And that was four years ago. My ex-husband and I had an arranged marriage, which lasted for about one and a half years. But it took us about 3 years after my moving out due to compatibility issues to file for a divorce. The reason? Compatibility issues! One of the few things we had (or have) in common is our laziness.
Cut to three years later; today, one of my favourite ‘activities’ is to scratch my belly sprawling over his couch (thankfully we are both ‘space enthusiasts’ and our compatibility does not extend to sofa choices and we have one to each) and watch movies on his ‘fancy’ TV or listen to Bengali audio stories until one of us starts snoring. He is my ‘phone-a-friend’ in case of emergencies—be it a short-circuit plunging my house into darkness and turning me ‘homeless’ for a week, or the need to reference a movie that I have not watched but want talk about in one of my articles...by now, he knows the pseudo-movie buff in me too well to judge me for not watching half the films I write about, though he still complies, albeit grudgingly.
Before and post the divorce, we were found hanging out at the press club, we spent the Covid Lockdown going grocery shopping together (well, he had shifted to a house in the same locality as his office was nearby), and there were a few short weekend trips here and there. We have always enjoyed each other’s company in a strange, platonic way—I love my space, and he is my space.
You would be wondering how we got here. It seems like we are soul mates, right?
Well, we could have been, but he already has a soul mate; a bestie from his college days. Although he is my phone-a-friend, I am not his! Moreover, if I am a social recluse, he is the throbbing heart of any party—a seemingly minor difference that had turned into a serious compatibility issue. For a person having a close-knit group of college friends who met and partied every weekend and celebrated every occasion together (including Valentine’s Day!), it was difficult to deal with a wife who could not become part of the ‘gang’. Also, when your friends become your family, there is no scope for building another family. And it was a sexless marriage. It didn’t help that I had undiagnosed anxiety, and he had (has) an alcohol issue. It all led to that night when shit hit the fan (I usually have very low tolerance for shit, but I call it a day/night when it comes to any sort of physical attack). And I decided that I am done.
But to get ‘done’ with a marriage isn’t easy. I had gotten married late, and after multiple failed relationships, had opted for an arranged marriage (that too, arranged through one of the matrimonial sites, totally the worst-case scenario here). My previous relationship had crumbled after 7 years (the 7-year itch maybe!) and the guy had gaslit me into believing that it was my temper and inability to compromise that were the sole reason—I was not a ‘marriage material’ I was told. So, when my now ex-husband wanted to marry me, I got a sort of validation that I desperately needed at that point. Also, we became great friends almost the moment we met—we met at a cheap bar and drank copious amount of Old Monk…what else is compatibility but this! I had thought. To me, till then, marriage was all about finding a buddy—a partner in crime. I was not an overthinker (or a ‘thinker’ in general), and fairytales and rom-com movies had assured me a ‘they lived happily ever after’. What could go wrong?
It turns out, fairytales are fiction. And marriage is not all about watching television and having Old Monk with your ‘buddy’. Maybe the real problem was that I thought ‘love’ is a marriage is a default setting, and he thought of it as a dispensable paraphernalia. So, essentially, I was married to someone who had kind of ‘sis-zoned’ me!
It wasn’t easy to accept that. Even when I decided I was ‘done’. What followed was a phase of serious depression—I had to take a break from my work as there came a point where I could not drag myself out of the bed to eat or take a bath, forget going to work. I kept staring at the ceiling. It didn’t help that I was staying alone in Mumbai, while all my friends and family were in Kolkata. I stopped taking phone calls.
But then, I think I have a rather short depression span. I feel all emotions too intensely but then get done with those—I exhaust the quota, I guess! And I exhausted my quota of anger, disappointment, hatred, but most importantly, love, for my now ex-husband. The real issue was my love for him and my expectation of being loved by him—now that I was over it, we can go back to the ‘watching television and having Old Monk with your buddy’ phase. When you are divorced, there are no expectations left. Also, knowing a person for this long, irons out the creases of confusion. When the disillusionment is complete and absolute, you stop being disappointed. You find an objective and more effective solution to deal with situations. When he doesn’t pick up your calls you first learn to not call back, but then you learn to text him threatening to land up at his house if the call is not returned!
Maybe some people have their default setting as ‘friends’. Maybe there is no romantic love involved, but there is no denying the fact that we care deeply for each other, and I can always emotionally blackmail my erstwhile emotionally unavailable husband into doing things by simply reminding him that ‘I am his one and only ex-wife’. So, it is a win!
Life is not The Notebook and toxicity in a relationship can’t be passed on as romance. But life it not Kill Bill either (I am not built to survive a butterknife fight, let alone kill people with a sword…too heavy for my arthritic fingers to get a grip on anyway). Never forget, never forgive, but move on. Even hatred is an emotion, maybe a much stronger one than love, and it takes too much effort.
I might still eventually take my revenge by haunting his house perched upon his shoulder (I am sure to cross 100kgs by then) when I am dead (watch Shutter by Masayuki Ochiai for reference). But until then, cheers to rum and coke, here is to The Inglorious Basterds!
