Inventing the Rest of Our Lives by Suzanne Braun Levine

Author:Suzanne Braun Levine
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2005-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Moving On

Some marriages can’t—and shouldn’t—be saved. Many women need to literally walk away from their earlier lives in order to make room for themselves. Almost one-fifth of women in their fifties and sixties are divorced or separated. Increasingly women are initiating divorce, and regretting it less, even though they know it will be hard—emotionally, financially, and socially. It is a trial by fire. “Divorce reconfigures identity,” writes Ashton Applewhite in Cutting Loose: Why Women Who End Their Marriages Do So Well. “It requires that women come up with new ways of seeing themselves and road-test them under grueling circumstances.” The challenge to a woman’s ability to establish her own authority, and the enormity of the space she is carving out for herself by doing that can be overwhelming.

“The money stuff is the worst,” several women told me. If ever the bag lady syndrome is out to get you, it is in these vulnerable circumstances. But once the divorce is over, most women emerge energized by the knowledge that they will never be so dependent—financially or otherwise—again. Lenore J. Weitzman, who conducted over 200 interviews for her landmark book The Divorce Revolution, found that “even the longer-married older housewives who suffer the greatest financial hardship after divorce (and who feel most economically deprived, most angry, and most ‘cheated’ by the divorce settlement) say they are ‘personally’ better off than they were during marriage…They also report improved self-esteem, more pride in their appearance and greater competence in all aspects of their lives.”

It turns out they are also in better health. The conventional wisdom that marriage is good for you—the so-called marriage benefit—is being called into question. While it is true that married people, especially men, live longer than their unmarried counterparts, new studies are showing that a bad marriage is bad for one’s health, particularly for women. Power, or lack of it, is an especially significant indicator. A fifteen-year Oregon study found, for example, that having unequal decision-making power was associated with higher health risk for women, but not for men (maybe because women don’t have the other opportunities to exercise power that men traditionally do). Powerlessness is a major contributor to stress and depression. Tension and arguing can cause high blood pressure, reduce immune protection, and slow healing from injury and even from heart attacks. Dr. James Coyne, who studied the effects of marriage on recovery from congestive heart failure, told the New York Times (October 22, 2002), “Some of these people, if their spouses said, ‘Breathe for the next half-hour,’ they’d try to hold their breaths,” he says. “It can get that stubborn in a bad marriage.” The many women who say they initiated a divorce to save their lives may be literally right.

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