Life after the separation
Not a single tear cried the 38-year-old tax clerk Marie Sander *, as the movers pack their belongings from the apartment in which she had spent the last eleven years as a supposedly happily married woman. She was also completely satisfied when she signed the divorce certificate and then moved into her small single apartment. To new shores, she thought almost euphorically, as the last box was unpacked. Marie Sander had insisted on a divorce when she could no longer suppress the fact that Claus, her husband, did not want to renounce his marriage, but not his lover.
My marriage felt like a pus.
She had fought for him for 15 desperate months, made herself small, even smaller? and getting lost more and more. Even the baby had accepted her, which, as he put it, "unfortunately happened" to the other. "I was nothing, I was not there anymore," she says today. At the very low, when she lay drunk in bed while Claus was called to give birth to his son, she knew it was over. It was his first child, she had never conceived, and the pain was so great that it supplanted any weak decision. "My marriage ended up feeling like a purulent bump," says Marie, "which I had to express so that she could no longer poison my life."
And then, three months after the divorce, she stood at the reception of the ski hotel in Switzerland, where she had celebrated New Year's Eve with Claus and four pairs of friends, and the owner asked in astonishment: "A single room, what happened?" ? "We broke up," Marie said, managing to make her voice sound natural. What she did not manage to do was pretend to her friends how normal this situation was. Every minute until her return trip felt like a pinprick. The breakfast, alone among couples. The Doppelkopfrunde with a strange fourth man. Even the cheese fondue on New Year's Eve, which she loved so much, tasted stale and cheerless. "I do not want to go back to Claus," Marie wondered, "why does it still hurt so much that we're separated?"
Divorce: One turns two again
Man is a binding being that knows two extremes: falling in love and falling apart. Each time all our sentient atoms are whirled up and reassembled. One becomes two? and vice versa. This can be liberation or amputation, departure or demise. Who falls in love, merges with the partner; love then turns into love, commonalities, habits, rituals, teasing, stories. From this we weave a dense network. Those who break up often find that they are more likely to hurt their separation from their partner than to part with their shared life. Recognizing how dependent we are on the familiar seems like a shock. Love is over; but not the net she has woven. For every person who has an emotional meaning in our lives leaves an image in our soul that remains. Even if the person has left.
* Names changed by the editor
The pharmacist Iris Zimmermann *, 51, has experienced the dissolution of her nearly 25-year-old marriage as so traumatic that on the day of the bitter divorce she celebrated a "liberation celebration" with her friends. "Our breakup was like a bad movie," she remembers, "in the morning he said goodbye to me tenderly, in the evening came a mistaken, you, I have to tell you something." Then he packed the suitcases and finally moved into the apartment, which he had already shared for two years with his "hurtful" young lover from St. Petersburg. "Long live the cliché," says Iris Zimmermann.
With him, a part of me broke away.
The breakup, she found out, had her husband planned long, locked his account, the house already sold. Her hatred of him was so strong back then that he wore it over the next few months. She moved to a friend, then gradually noticed her life getting smaller and smaller. Common friends retreated, "on the social bacon side," as she adds, because unlike her ex, she had no house to offer in Mallorca, not a sailing yacht in Denmark. "I do not miss him because I still love him," says Iris Zimmermann, "but because with him the part of me that could only be with him is broken away."
And that was a good part. The well-fed wife. The generous hostess. The relaxed counselor. "I felt like skinned," says Iris, "the old skin was gone, a new one not yet regrown." For many women, the partner disappears a bit from the old life, which one sometimes considered boring, but always taken for granted.And that one painfully misses, even though one believed to have resigned oneself to the separation. "How much I hung on my often boring life with Joseph, I only noticed when it was over," recalls the 46-year-old educator Karin Linke *. "It suddenly came to my mind that I could do without Joseph very well, but only with great difficulty in our married life, not on our weekends on the Schlei, on the fresh fish we barbecued with the neighbors in the evening, not on the sunsets from our bedroom balcony Not on Mollie, because nobody called me that. "
Loss of friendship and familiar rituals
It does not matter if the separation was intentional or unintentional. Karin Linke says, "My friends took it very seriously for me to expose them to a fait accompli, but there was no other way, Joseph and I had such a close circle of friends, we got together so much, they would have me Love, passion, the very madness? None of us had any more on the slip. " So when Karin caught her as unexpectedly as she did, with a vacation acquaintance, she lived her love without warning to the rest of the world. It reacted with withdrawal and indignation. "Suddenly I was alone," she says, "everyone advised me against it, there was only me and him." And then just her? the new love broke three months after her divorce. She would gladly have slipped back into her old life, not under the conjugal coverlet, but in her old friendships and all the beautiful, familiar rituals.
How much she missed them, she felt every Friday, when she bought at the weekly market. "Crabs with scrambled eggs, that was our weekend opener, friends came by, we mutually pulped out crabs, someone brought a brown bread." Never again crab bread with scrambled eggs, she thought at the fish stall, and the grief overwhelmed her so much that she began to howl. "That stupid crab bread was so emotionally charged for me that I gave it up for months," she says, "I avoided the market like the plague."
The heart is a stubborn little muscle.
That's right, says ChroniquesDuVasteMonde WOMAN psychologist Oskar Holzberg, because in a breakup, the old rituals have to be "de-ritualized" or new ones created. "We are creatures of habit," he says, "when we need or want to part with a partner, everything flares up again, then we want exactly what is beyond us, we are addicted to the familiar and familiar, although we are know that it does us no good, it's like an addictive behavior, except that the drug we're addicted to does not give the reward we expect. " Nothing can be more damaging to the sore soul than what is fondly postulated as "sex with the ex": the ill-considered dose of old life that one takes, nostalgia, longing, or because one believes one has one's feelings long in the grip. Sadly, you do not have any longer than you think possible because, as Woody Allen once said, the heart is "an extremely stubborn little muscle". And our glasses dive the past stubbornly in pink.
When Marie's ex stood in front of her door one night because the young Russian woman had left him, she left him back in her bed? and in her heart. "It felt wrong right from the start," she says, "but suddenly, at least, the hatred for him was gone, and I could let him go in peace later." Often things only acquire the meaning they have never had before in loss. "Not nothing without you, but not the same," says a love poem by Erich Fried, "not nothing, but less and less."
After the divorce, the past is generalized
Often it is small, stupid things like a cheese fondue, crab bread or like the second toothbrush, which is now missing in the glass. The knowledge "Never again!" makes every memory precious at this stage. Never again breakfast in bed with Krümelpiksen and newspaper reading! Never again his annoyed face, when his mother strokes his hair and sighs "That was already more". Never again lukewarm sex, but never again divine foot massages. The past is transfigured the second we leave it. And then comes the question that makes fear: Who am I without him? A comedy, a tragedy, a farce? Iris said, "My successful ex-husband has greatly enhanced me in the eyes of my parents, and he has helped me to meet the high performance requirements." As a single, I stand in front of the family front, unprotected, because I'm a failure now. "
To live the old life with the new.
Who separates, tears the net, feels vulnerable, naked, like a blank slate. "I did not remember who I was," remembers Marie, "because despite frequent quarrels, we also complemented each other, he cooks well, I like to eat, I'm outgoing, he's a social muffle, and without him I have to do all that become again what he has taken from me. " Who divides, skins, in the good, in the exhausting.A new life beckons, but only when the wounds are scarred. For this reason, men often "rejoin" after a break because they are less able to form their own social networks. "My ex lives on with his very new our old life," marvels Iris, "the same tennis club, same hotel in Corsica, he calls them even Spätzelchen, as formerly me."
How can he? Oskar Holzberg says, "Men have this forward-pressing pragmatism, which is conditioned by their inexperience in mental struggles, they live a new love, even if the old one is far from finished." The conclusion: They are never really in the new Relationship." When men leave, are there two variants that make it difficult for women to pull the final line? they either remain caring and facing, trying to do the balancing act between old and new love.
"I think every man has a more or less well suppressed desire for a harem", Marie thinks. "It would be best for her if the old and the new woman understand each other well and they can move around stress-free." Or they are devastating and extinguishing, according to the motto: I prefer to break my toy before anyone else can play with it. "Joseph literally poisoned our circle of friends against me," says Karin Linke, "I stayed the evil for a long time and suffered. Then I called everyone who was important to me and said, 'You can keep us both in your life just keep changing over until grass has grown over the divorce. ' It worked so well that we're invited back together now, with or without new partners. "
Divorce does not mean the loss of life
Because, if deferred, there is no new beginning, no new life. Every separation, says the pair psychologist Oskar Holzberg, runs first inside and then outside. This lasts and hurts and must be endured. We must find meaning in her, otherwise old fears and poison our new life. Because that's what divorce means: we lose part of our world, but not our lives. Marie Sander has recently overcome her worst fear, the fear of how she would react when she sees her husband with his child. She has thought of her favorite phrase of Goethe: "Action contains magic, grace and strength" and invited her ex with wife and child for coffee. "During the afternoon, I hugged the baby and wished my father luck, which was nice, but now I'm free."
