I never want to make light of divorce—it’s serious, heartbreaking, difficult, and a million other things—but it has its upsides. I can tell you, because I am divorced. You might think at first: How can I be apart from my child 50 percent of the time? It’s scary, and you will miss them. But also you will end up relishing a bit of quiet and space. Just last Sunday, I took advantage of a full day with no plans or other humans around to stay in bed with a book.
That book was This American Ex-Wife, a new memoir-cum-manifesto by journalist Lyz Lenz, which tells the story of both her divorce and the systematic oppression of women via the institution of marriage. It is a rallying cry for real change in our society and legal systems, both of which still tend to overwhelmingly favor men. I read it straight through with a break only to heat up some borscht for lunch. The book is intimate, persuasive, funny, and compassionate. And it’s the opposite of bitter. Lenz walked away from her marriage to rebuild her life in her 40s, and to find out what freedom feels like. Reading her story, we get to feel that freedom too. I talked with Lenz—divorced woman to divorced woman—about why divorce isn’t a tragedy. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Hillary Frey: So the first thing I wanted to bring up, because it really resonated with me, was the moment in the book where someone you run into says, “Oh, how are you?” And you’re like, “I’m getting divorced.” And they’re like, “Oh, I’m so sorry.” This very same thing happened to me.
Lyz Lenz: There are so many things we’re uncomfortable with in our country! Our cultural concept of marriage is deeply informed by Christian ideas. And I use Christian in the loosest of terms, in the most conservative of senses, because I think it’s important to acknowledge there are other ways to be religious. But marriage is just deeply informed by the idea that you get married and you stay married. And I think it’s also rooted in this idea that your happiness is frivolous, that you have to sacrifice for children, for family. It’s important to realize who’s being asked to sacrifice and whose misery is being put up on that cross.
People are really uncomfortable with a woman who is free and a woman who chooses herself. I think that adds into the dissonance—it makes people really uncomfortable when you say, “Hey, my marriage was not great and I’m leaving.” And you know this, too: The moment you get divorced, so many women go, “When did you know? When did you know? How should I know?”
Totally. “Can you recommend someone? I think I might want to explore my options.”
And there’s so much quiet misery, and we’re always looking to each other to say, “When is it bad enough? When do I get to choose myself?” And I think that concept of a woman choosing herself is really destabilizing.
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How do we change that narrative around people seeing the dissolution of a marriage as failure? I don’t think it’s a failure. I don’t think you think it’s a failure. The way people react to divorce feels so old to me, compared to the world we live in.
We need to have better cultural conversations about it. I also think we need to change our laws. The two happen together. There’s this narrative in America: Oh, divorce is the easy way out. But it is easier for a 16-year-old to get married in America than it is for a 42-year-old woman to leave her abusive marriage.
Right! People think that getting divorced is easy, like you just quit, right? But it’s incredibly hard, not just emotionally, but practically, to leave your marriage.
It’s so hard to get divorced. When you are living together and you can’t escape it? My ex really did not want to get divorced. It went against everything he believed and still believes. And he was trying really, really hard to get me back, and it wasn’t working, and it was actually making me want to leave more. But I also didn’t really have a lot of access to our shared finances.
There were so many practical things. I was working extra jobs to afford a down payment for the lawyer and to get money for the house I rented. I wrote marketing copy for Jezebel between midnight and 2 a.m. for some big Christmas package that they were doing. And I remember writing the editor and being like, “Thank you for funding my divorce.” I’d say that might not have been the most professional thing I could have done. I was crying every night, and waking up to emails from my ex begging me not to ruin our family.
On the one hand, your book is obviously a defense of divorce, but it’s also, in some ways, an attack on marriage. Should more people get divorced? Should fewer people get married?
I am not anti-relationship. I am so pro-relationship. But I am anti the legal structure of marriage, because it is founded on women’s inequality. Look at the history of marriage. Look at these laws of coverture. Look at the laws in America where marital rape wasn’t even illegal until the past 20 years. And that’s because wives are property, and that’s the way that our legal system views women. And I think a lot of well-meaning couples get into marriage and think it will be different.
It’ll be different. We’re different.
But then you realize the whole system … Who gets paid more? Who takes the hit when you have the baby? Where is the child care? Why is it unaffordable? You get into this system and you realize that it’s not your well-meaning intentions that are bogging you down, but it’s this entire system that is built on the unpaid labor of a wife. And you can be the most well-meaning egalitarian couple, and you have one, two kids and you’re like, “What the fuck? Now I’m a tradwife because we can’t make it work anymore.” That’s the system that I’m critiquing. With women we’re like, “Oh, you’re miserable in your marriage? Well, I don’t know, try sexy night.” No, you feel miserable in your marriage because you never get a break because this whole system is packed on top of your shoulders and you can’t fricking breathe. And then the one time you get a moment to breathe, he’s like, “Hey, we haven’t had sex in two weeks.” There’s a whole capitalist system built on the misery of women. If women were happy, the scented candle industry would tank, right? I mean, I love scented candles.
I do too.
Let’s just be honest. I’m not saying you can’t be in love or you can’t have relationships, but I am saying those relationships should not be predicated on your misery. And I think men should know this too. If you’re in a marriage and your wife is unhappy, that’s a bad marriage. And I don’t think enough men realize that, because even the worst marriage still benefits a man in the end, because he is still getting free child care and his dinner made every night.
I don’t want to tell everybody they should get divorced, but I have to say, I think my ex-husband and I are both better parents on our own. I think people don’t understand that having joint custody is not a bummer. It can be an amazing thing for everyone.
I was the primary caretaker. My ex had never taken them to a doctor’s visit. I hear women say, “I don’t want to lose time with my kids.” And I felt that way a little bit too, especially in the beginning, because my kids were 4 and 6 when we split up, it’s very young. But in so many ways getting divorced enabled them to actually have a relationship with their father, because I wasn’t taking care of everything. I wasn’t that mediator to their relationship.
You weren’t managing it.
I wasn’t managing it. And he had to face them. He still does. I think of it rather as a gain for them, because they deserve relationships with the happiest version of both of their parents. Now, they can see that their dad is so much happier and with a person who’s what he wants rather than a person who was not what he wanted, and we are happy in our house. A lot of divorce research really just focuses on the immediate one-to-two-year aftermath of divorce and not five or 10 years down the road. That’s a huge gap in our social understanding, but also our understanding of what kids can comprehend and what they’re capable of. Kids know when their parents are miserable. God bless, my parents are still together, but we knew, you know what I mean?
It’s OK, I hear you. My parents are also still together. They just celebrated their 55th wedding anniversary.
Good for them.
Good for them. And actually they’re very happy now that they’re retired old people.
I used to think that there were so many things that I would never put up with, and then I did. And now I don’t sit in judgment of people’s marriages anymore. But I’m also just not pretending. Don’t look at me and tell me that that was 55 years of bliss.
I don’t know if this is the same for you, but I really thought that getting in a new relationship would be a betrayal to my daughter. And I really struggled with that. I started going back to therapy just to manage this. And I was told that, actually, the best thing you can do is live your life, have relationships, because otherwise the kid becomes your whole world and they don’t have that freedom you’re talking about to have the bigger space of emotions, because they learn to manage your emotions.
Yes. Because they’re everything to you. They know that. I have been dating, if that’s what we want to call it, in earnest, and having a great time with it, and also a miserable time too. I hid that from my kids for a really long time, because it’s really uncomfortable to be a sexual person to your kids, because if you tell, especially a tween daughter, that you’re dating, she wants to know, are you having sex? And then you have to talk about it. I believe in open honesty, but also I felt really uncomfortable being that person around them and to them and for them. And so I kind of had this wall between the two worlds: There’s the mom that I am when they are with their dad, and then there’s the mom that I am with them.
But recently, as my kids have been getting older, I made a plan. I brought it up with my kids. But their fears were not what I thought. Like you, I thought they were going to think that I was going to upset their world, that they were going to be replaced in my heart, or some sort of thing. And they just didn’t. But it does open up a dialogue to then talk to your kids about those kinds of things. And so I think the lesson is always to be a full and complete human being for your kids. They’re human beings, they get to have their own journeys, and you need to be a full and complete human being so that they can be a full and complete human being.
That’s right.
And I never want them to be my emotional support animals. They’re humans. I have dogs for that.
I think it can be easy to confuse being emotional support for your child with them becoming that for you. You know what I mean? And once you can see it, it becomes so clear. I was so nervous telling my daughter that Stefan, my husband now, had asked me to get married. It was a total surprise proposal. And my daughter’s reaction was, “We’re going to have a wedding?” He’s not her stepdad. He’s part of our family. He’s my partner. And if you asked her about him, she would say, “Stefan makes things better.” What else could you want?
And that’s the thing: You don’t have to replicate and re-create these rules. My kids don’t need another dad. They have a dad. They don’t need that. If you’re in my life, it’s because I want a relationship with you. It’s not because you have these other roles. You’re not my supporter or my caretaker. You’re just a partner. And I do think there’s a problem with masculinity where men don’t know what to do with themselves. “Well, if I’m not the provider, if I am not the father, then what am I?” You’re just, like, a human, dude. You’re a human being.
Yeah, just be a person.
Oh my God, be a person, my dude. And that’s really, that’s a hard thing to ask of a man. They just melt down. But that’s their problem, it’s not my problem. That’s a different book. And this book is for our liberation.
