SOS Village

Why did I write the book? A very good question. Most people – and more often women than men, I find – assume, when they see the cover and read the title and subtitle, that it was written out of bitterness after a financially painful divorce, but that’s not the case at all.

The book came out of my painful efforts to understand the degree of my unhappiness in marriage, and in doing so I worked out why most marriages are unhappy, whether or not they end in divorce. I certainly had no plan to write a book that some people (broadly, traditionally-minded and especially religious people) might object to. The story of the book’s strange genesis is related in the book’s Introduction.

In my midforties I married for the second time, to a kind and loving woman of a similar age. Her happy first marriage – of over 25 years' duration – had ended with her husband's death. The length of her first marriage helped me believe I might make more of a success of my second marriage than my first. How wrong I was. How deluded.

In 2007 the marriage failed, after only three years, for reasons wholly connected with me and not with my wife, and I resolved to understand the problems I had with the institution. For some time it was only a personal quest and I could not then have imagined that I would eventually write a book about marriage.

In my customary introverted manner I turned to books (written by 'relationship experts' this time) to deliver the insights I was seeking. But a problem soon emerged. While I couldn't readily fault what I was reading, much of the material didn't seem very relevant to me or my unhappiness. A frequent piece of advice – particularly from female writers – was to communicate more about emotions with a partner. That didn't help. I had been unhappy in my marriages but I didn't know why. I had nothing to communicate.

After reading a number of these books, I started to realise that the majority of the writers were unlike me in at least two important regards: they were female and extraverted – they clearly derived great pleasure from intimate relationships. And they were often religious, too, which I'm not. The general thrust of their arguments appeared to be that they themselves had enjoyed lengthy and happy marriages, and they attributed this to certain things they did (or didn't do) in their marriages, such as the ways in which they resolved conflict. And the 'ways' would be outlined in the book. The inference seemed to be that if you followed the writers' advice, happiness would surely follow.

My sceptical mind simply had to challenge that inference, by testing its logic in another context. Let's imagine that a world record-holding Olympic athlete wrote a book relating in detail how he'd trained on the way to getting a world record. In the book he led the reader to infer that all he or she had to do to achieve their own world record was to adopt the same training regime. The reader would surely regard the inference as absurd, knowing that he or she almost certainly didn't have the physical 'right stuff' to start with.

But what's less obvious is that we might not have the personality type, the temperament, nor the mental and emotional 'right stuff' to improve our relationships through reading books written by 'relationship experts'. And this might explain why those books sell in such high numbers, and the divorce rate keeps on rising anyway. Maybe the same phenomenon accounts for the growth in diet book sales in parallel with the growth of waistlines across the developed world.

I wasn't getting very far trying to understand my unhappiness in my marriages. Then I had a stroke of luck. A business associate was driving past my home town, and had a little time to kill before a meeting. We met for lunch. I outlined the struggle I was experiencing in trying to understand my unhappiness with marriage, whereupon he had a good idea. He said:

"You've been improving major organisations' annual profits by millions of pounds every year, for over 25 years. You do it by analysing and then solving some of their most challenging problems. Here's an idea. Why not apply sound analytical approaches to help you understand the source or sources of your unhappiness? You might then also discover a range of reasons behind why other people are unhappy in their marriages. Imagine that the government, knowing the negative impacts of marital unhappiness and the high and rising divorce rate, is determined to reduce marital unhappiness and thereby reverse the divorce rate trend. It has charged a number of organisations with making recommendations, and one of them has commissioned you to conduct a two-year-long study. Take your usual professional and disciplined approach and deliver a book at the end, along with recommendations. Oh, and the organisation demands that you tell them the facts as they appear to you. The people there don't want their feelings spared, and they're not easily shocked. They'll be perfectly happy for you to report something which differs from 'received wisdom' on the subject."

His advice made sense, and I felt that I'd soon know whether or not this was a worthwhile project. In the event it took only a day or two before I had persuaded myself that the project did merit serious attention. My work over the course of two years led me to a thesis which I believe to have structural integrity.

I’m always delighted – but often surprised – when ladies enjoy my books, particularly my politically-incorrect travelogue Two Men in a Car (A Businessman, a Chauffeur, and Their Holidays in France). Details of all four of my books are on www.themarriagedelusion.com.

Share your own starting over story: email us here {loadposition suzymail}

For me, part of the thrill of getting married was the relief of never having to go on another date. Thank you, hubby, from the bottom of my heart that I do not have to fire up my married friends search engines for “eligible” or “available,” nor suffer the angst of “will he call or won’t he?” A trip to the altar in a family tiara put paid to that. Or so I thought. Yet three years after I threw my bouquet in the air, as if celebrating a win at sports day, I was poised to go frog kissing. Again.

I think that’s one of the most daunting things about Starting Over. Your belief that you had reached the cosy domestic destination of commitment and compatibility and had laid that anxious, unsettled, always-searching-for-him-or-something-better part of your life to rest. Then there is the sheer disbelief to surmount that it didn’t work out and you have to go out there all over again. Dating Groundhog Day, only this time you are older, wiser, cynical and tired.

Oh and emotionally you feel not just bruised but broken. Yes, divorce can literally break a woman’s heart. American research published in The Journal of Marriage and the Family has revealed that women who divorce are 60 per cent more likely to develop heart disease in later life. Men showed no increased risk. Maybe because men tend to boomerang into some grateful bints bed just to prove that they don’t have a problem, whereas women tend to take longer to break through the ice of our own shock and feel our feelings. And there is nothing like the end of a marriage or long relationship to unearth buried emotion with volcanic force.

When I left my husband after fifteen miserable months of marriage – I knew with gut-wrenching clarity on my honeymoon that I had not married my soul mate (aka the right man for me) – I went home to stay with my mother. For weeks I lay on the bathroom floor, literally too humiliated to move. I sobbed so much I broke tiny blood vessels beneath my eyes and some days I hyperventilated as I couldn’t breathe. I just couldn’t stomach my stupidity. That I had been so hung up on the wedding, that I had over-looked the marriage. I was more in love with my Italian crystal tiara, than the groom at the altar. How could I, the bright girl with the University degree and promising professional future, have got my personal life so wrong?

The sense of failure was all consuming. Marriage was the first thing I had ever failed at in my life and it hit me hard. But actually, it was the making of me. I didn’t settle for less than my heart’s desire – and wreck not only my life but my poor ex’s – I had the courage to get out. And with that move came a growing awareness of a stronger sense of self. Knowing what or whom you don’t want is not just part of discovering what and whom you do want but who you are. I know it’s a cliché that you tend only to grow through adversity but it’s true. Crippling disappointment and aching pain force you to grow up. To get real about life; that it isn’t some ruddy fairy tale and that happy ever afters aren’t inevitable.

Yes, Starting Over isn’t easy but nor is settling in an unhappy or suffocating situation. And the greatest gift of Starting Over is the burgeoning belief in your self that you can survive. Three years ago, I was left a single mother to a 2 year old. (My relationship after my marriage didn’t work out either despite the birth of our daughter. That’s not uncommon, apparently. Figures from the Office of National Statistics show that 39 per cent of all marriages are remarriages for one or both parties – and 60 per cent end in another divorce.) We weren’t married but we were in a committed relationship. Or so I thought. Anyway, after he left, I used to lie awake at night paralysed with fear about my new sense of responsibility. Not just caring for a child on my own but having to shoulder the running of the house alone. I live in an old cottage in the country and didn’t even know how to light a fire. Or re-set the central heating. Or pay the Council Tax. I was a domestic cripple. I remember when the boiler broke down, trying to find the oil tank in the garden in the night with a torch to read the oil levels to an emergency plumber on the phone and wanting to lie down on the damp ground in my nightie and scream. But I coped because I had to and along an arduous way, I acquired a whole new set of skills. Lighting a fire now? No problem. Surviving Starting Over makes one feel invincible. Fewer life scenarios hold fear because you’ve been to rock bottom and eventually climbed out and that is utterly liberating.

Of course to get to the safe place of feeling secure within oneself as a single person and not part of a couple takes time. So much more time than you initially imagine. According to some sources, it takes half the length of the time the marriage lasted to recover. Grief, shame and regret aren’t linear. They tend to erupt when you least expect them. Two months after my daughter’s father left, our sixteen year old dog died and I didn’t stop crying for three weeks. The sense of loss and the intense heavy pain in my stomach wouldn’t lessen, whereas for the month after my ex left, I never shed a tear.

Finding your separate identity is a lonely business. Your friends get compassion fatigue as their lives move on. And so must yours. Then, one day, when you least expect it, you realise that you, too, are sick to death of your sad story. When you’re bored by your own drama, you know that you’ve taken a quantum leap in healing. You’re not obsessed (as I was for years) by what you see as the failures of your past and you suddenly see the promise of a fresh future. You start living for today, as opposed to regretting your past. You forgive the most important person in all of this – your self – for the part you played, the decisions you took – and you realise that how people treat you is their karma. How you react is yours.

Starting Over is about realising that the clouds will pass if you don’t try and chase them away. And the silver lining is that along the way you discover who you really are. Not who you were. I’ve left and I’ve been left, so I’ve Started Over twice and I feel twice the woman that I was for it. I’ve learned that empowering strategic spiritual tension whereby you hold on to yourself and let go at the same time because we can’t predict the future. But endings can only mean one thing; new beginnings.

(Anna has based her popular novel ‘Daisy Dooley Does Divorce’ on her own life experiences.  Read about the book on our book review page or click this link to buy a copy of the book)

Share your own starting over story: email us here {loadposition suzymail}

Athlete, author, relationship and business coach Julia Armstrong, shares her story:

I wonder whether the happily ever after stories we are fed as children, and later as adults through  literature and songs and films - the prince meets princess or princess kisses frog who turns into prince and they marry and live happily ever story - somehow answer a yearning for certainty within.

A desire to know, to be safe, and we misguidedly seek that safety within the arms of another who is doing the same thing. Or in the definition of a career, or in my case in sport – if I run fast I will be loved. If someone marries me then I am definitely okay and loveable. If I succeed then I will be recognised and loved. I sought okayness within the chimeras of all three of these things!