Love After Divorce, or How the Aquarium Became an Ocean

By Sophie Schoenfeld, MFT

Love after divorce is a different kind of love. It’s more like stepping into the ocean after a shipwreck. It’s finding your faith after you’ve lost it in the storm of life. Sometimes I have wondered if love only lives on the wings of delusion… it is a religion of sorts… it is an investment in something intangible, fragile, and unbearably light, such as another human being. 

We get married to the idea and a fantasy, a thought that something solid and unbreakable can be created through commitment. That we have the conviction, the strength, and the vastness to battle something through eternity, I would say love is a human attempt to defeat death; love is a statement that exceeds human container. Marriage, an ultimate commitment to that unbreakable promise of love. “In sickness and in health, through all the storms and all the devastation, I will love you and stand by you always and forever”… with one important caveat: it only works if both people agree to the terms. And this is where the whole business of eternal love and lifetime of commitment gets turned on its head. Because two people are two separate worlds, and in some cases, the distance between those worlds is in itself infinite. It is a cruel joke. Can a bridge be built in an infinite space between two objects? And when the bridge collapses while in formation, and one must face the failure of the very limit one tries to overcome, is it even conceivable to try again?

There are things that keep marriages together, and it’s not just the whale of emotion that propels us toward each other. Longevity and sturdiness of love relationships is mostly reliant on practical things, very unromantic things in fact. Finances, social and familial pressures, children, habits. In fact, the more things we build around the relationship, the sturdier it becomes. All of the practicalities begin to serve as the scaffold. Love is not just an emotion; it is an infrastructure, an infrastructure that is not infallible, and when that structure collapses, life must go on…wounded, shipwrecked, destitute even, if not monetarily, often emotionally, nevertheless, we go on.

So what does it look like when the greatest fantasy of what one is capable of vanishes? There are stages of grief, because divorce is a death. But then there is also a process of regrowth, rebirth and reclamation. I remember strange feelings, such as euphoria, liberation, accompanied by an emotional and mental whiteout. A profound feeling of being lost in the ether. My grief was delayed, for some years I felt numb, and perfectly ok living in a cocoon of familiar comfort. This was a gestation period, because you see, when you survive the chaos of divorce, which feels more like a dissolution of a business rather than a spiritual rapture that it truly is, you discover that solitary life in many ways is much more tranquil. There are no dramatic disappointments and fights, there is no management of opposing needs and desires, life becomes blissfully unperturbed. Through this tranquility, there were years of healing. Day-to-day single life can be wonderful, peaceful and quite sustainable. In contrast, he healing process — that is the internal transformation — can be quite violent. It can leave a string of broken hearts along the way, because you are simply emotionally unavailable, you have no bandwidth to care and while on the outside you seem quite self possessed, internally you’re screaming. Not because you have let someone hurt you, but because you feel like no one can ever reach you in places where it hurts. And who would have thought that the idea of not ever hurting again could be more terrifying than being torn to pieces by a heartbreak?! And yet, this is very much the core challenge when figuring out love after divorce.

My love was vast, infinite, and all encompassing, it crossed continents and oceans, it created life, and wealth and structure, it was an underwater kingdom of all things ethereal and enchanting, until slowly it became an aquarium, restricted, polluted and unsustainable, with no natural cleansing system in place. My ex and I wobbled along in that polluted water until one day the aquarium cracked, and we both found ourselves back in the ocean, cold, powerful and disorienting, we felt small, incapable of mastering its tides. Some people at that time require another fish to attach to, because it is so scary to swim alone. Not knowing which way one is supposed to swim, and no longer trusting one’s instincts as the fantasy of one’s invincibility has shattered. 

And yet we go on, we swim because we have to, and if you swim long enough, you begin to learn the ocean again. It is not the same as it was before, you begin to respect its power. If you swim alone long enough, your fantasy around what love is changes slowly, You become aware that you don’t need to build a bridge across the infinite space to reach another, that love is inside you, and all the things around you are simply representations of that infinite space within. You become the nucleus of your own universe and you are able to allow yourself to get hurt again, because now you are brave, and this is when you finally realize, you have become the big fish in the ocean, and that the ocean is you.