wedding road trip

Is Divorce an Option?

Please don’t read anything into the fact that I’m thinking about divorce this morning. It was a topic of major conversation this past weekend during our hometown Wedding Road Trip interviews, and it’s still on my mind.

This past Sunday, we had the chance to wine and dine with my Aunt Jeri and Uncle Jim. Both on their second marriages, they talked candidly about the mistakes they had made in the past and what they had learned from their previous circumstances. While both ended up with two great kids, they admitted that when they got married the first time, they thought it would be forever.

But in this instance, second time’s a charm. Jim met Jeri while managing the apartment building where he lived. When Jim decided to ask Jeri out, she shut him down quickly, letting him know that dating someone in her building was a conflict of interest.

He put in his thirty day notice the next afternoon.

Their marital preamble was short and sweet, culminating in an engagement that involved a limo and a trip to New Orleans. They were married in Lake Tahoe a year later and have now been together for almost twenty years. A few years into the relationship, they were also “blessed” with my cousin, Paul. I put “blessed” in quotations because I am still bitter about the time that he beat me at a game of chess when he was only seven years old (I was 25). They have built a beautiful family, and both Chris and I always look forward to catching up with Jeri and Jim’s latest adventures.

Over the past two decades, Jeri and Jim have never contemplated divorce, no matter how trying times have been. Considering they raised three teenagers together and are now on their fourth, this is an achievement that is Nobel Peace Prize-worthy. When they instructed that divorce should never be an option for us, I balked immediately. If divorce had not happened in my own family, I wouldn’t have my younger brother, my stepdad, or some of my greatest Ventura memories. While I’d never advocate it as a first choice, is it really the big, bad demon that society has deemed it to be? I appreciate the sentiment, but is it reality?

Let me set one thing straight: I am not going into a marriage Chris with a plan to ditch him for a new model. I’m diving into marriage with everything I’ve got, which will hopefully translate into a lifetime together. But I’m also not going to say that a divorce could never happen. To make a statement like that requires me to be able to forsee the future, something I’ve yet had the power to accomplish, no matter how many books on E.S.P. I’ve read.