My Parents' Divorce in My Twenties Hit Differently Than I Expected

My parents had stayed together through what I understood, in retrospect, to be years of managed incompatibility, and when they divorced I was 25 and living independently in Amsterdam and told myself and others that it was fine - I was an adult, I understood that relationships ended, I was glad they were being honest with themselves rather than continuing something that was not working.

All of those things were true and none of them were the complete picture. What I had not accounted for was the specific effect of watching the primary reference point for what a long-term relationship looks like disassemble itself.

I had grown up with my parents' marriage as a constant, not a happy constant necessarily but a stable one, and its dissolution produced a disorientation that I found difficult to explain to friends who had experienced parental divorce in childhood and who assumed my adult status made the experience milder.

In some ways it did. In other ways it was its own specific difficulty: I was old enough to understand what they each had tolerated over the years, to see them as individuals rather than as parental units, and that visibility was not entirely comfortable.

I also discovered, in the year following the divorce, that I had absorbed specific beliefs about relationships from watching theirs that I had not previously examined because they had been encoded too early to register as beliefs rather than facts. Things about what you could reasonably expect from a long partnership.

Things about what compromise looked like and what it cost. Things about whether intimacy was maintained or whether it was something that existed at the beginning and was gradually spent.

I went to therapy partly to process the divorce and partly to examine what I had inherited from watching a marriage that had, on examination, not been what I had thought it was. The work was useful and ongoing.

I am in a relationship now that I am building with much more consciousness of the patterns I have absorbed and an active commitment to not reproducing the ones that were not good. I did not expect my parents' divorce at 25 to be a significant developmental event. It was.