Lessons from my divorce

This blog post might come as a surprise to some of you: yes, I was married. For three years. There was no big wedding, no big announcement, no change in surname. We did it the way we wanted to. Perhaps that's one of the biggest disappointments I have from the experience because we intentionally did it our own way (perhaps that was part of the problem) and things fell apart. But this is not about the sordid details about what happened. This is a reflection about what I learned after he left and I had to pick up the pieces of my life. I'm still putting myself together again. I'll always grieve the relationship and parts of myself I lost in the process. But in the bigger scheme of things, I've learned to appreciate my freedom. And perhaps that is what this post is about: freedom.

It's important to note that I'm writing this blog for myself: a heterosexual Black woman who was raised on a good dose of heteronormativity about what it means to be a man and a woman. This post is partly about naming some of that and unlearning the unhelpful lessons from my socialisation about what relationships mean. Talking about divorce openly is also not to discredit marriage; I've noticed that when I talk about divorce as freedom people seem to think that I'm knocking marriage. I'm shedding lighting on the toxic and unhelpful elements of marriage which are causing problems for people but part of the code of marriage is silence and discipline: thou shalt not share what is happening in thy marriage. There's merit to privacy but not when there's toxic behaviour.

• The first lesson was about shame: STOP SHAMING US FOR GETTING DIVORCED! We still don’t know how to talk about divorce beyond the narrative of shame. Divorce is as old as marriage; if anything, most cultures all across the world found ways to do divorce carefully, especially when there were children involved. I was stunned when people had no qualms making judgements and assumed I hadn't tried everything just because things ended after three years. My worst was someone saying "oh so you've joined the bandwagon" to my face, lol! Of course the shame is rooted in this unshakeable belief that marriage is the ultimate reward. That marriage is graduating into something special. It's not. Marriage is where the work begins. Divorce is liberating because it allows both people to start afresh and hopefully heal. I remember my mother (also divorced) who used the language of being a return soldier after her divorce. My heart broke for her because her whole identity became about failing at something she was supposed to desire as a woman. Watching her experience of being divorced and going through it myself I now understand her shame (especially for her 15 years ago). The shame is about people stripping you of your dignity because you are whistleblowing that something is amiss there by marriage and god forbid anyone ruin the one thing that every woman should desire. Shame is the punishment women get for not towing the line and divorce is about not towing the line. To all the people working through the shame that is given to them when they get divorced: it's not for you to carry.
  
  

• WE NEED TO RETHINK MODERN AFRICAN MARRIAGE: This is a complex one I'm
  
  still trying to unpack. Any young Black woman who is thinking about marriage needs to think carefully about what exactly they are getting themselves into. Lots has been said and written about how marriage has changed over time. I've been thinking about the version of marriage we are sitting with at the moment which is a new hybrid between African traditionalism and the isolation of Victorian marriage. What does it mean for women not to have space and freedom in marriage anymore? Men no longer go to war or hunting for extended periods and women are isolated from the communal version of mothering. This means women are bound to the home in very unhelpful ways (you literally have a bond with a house that roots you) and much gets centered around making that house a beautiful home. I'm still not sure men know what to do in the home other than watch TV. And then of course women also have careers and much has been said about women putting in the double shift at work and again at home. Who is carrying the burden of keeping the family together? Women. I'm not convinced men know how to family (let's make this a verb) other than the dysfunction they've seen of either absent fathers, abusive fathers, or the silent father in the home. This is a longer conversation about the practice of making a home within the context of heteronormativity and toxic masculinity which leaves very little space for imagination (I'm obsessed with the languaging around this particularly in isiXhosa which has emzini as a marker  of the home a woman has when she marries). While there are helpful tools from the past, we need new ways of homing each other as Black people because our homes have been the sites of struggle in ways that we are still not able to talk about.

• Now that we've made marriage about love (remember this is a recent change thanks to De Beers "diamonds are a girls best friend" propaganda) DO WE KNOW HOW TO LOVE EACH OTHER? SIYAKWAZI UKUTHANDANA? The first book I returned to during my divorce was All about love by bell hooks. Then I came across The spirit of intimacy by Sobonfu Some. Both books offer different perspectives about the practice of love but at the centre of each book is the provocation that love is a practice not a feeling. If you are thinking of getting married or you are in a long-term relationship with someone or you are crushing on someone I recommend these books. The challenge with love as a feeling is the Hollywood version of love and romance. Sobonfu writes at length about the facade that romance creates because it is a performance of a version of the self. This is part of the reason Mili and I did an episode on ukujola and spirituality in our podcast Umoya because there's a latent understanding about 'love' which is not serving us; especially as Black people who are still in the throes of the trauma of violence in our homes and communities (I write about Black people because I don't know what's happening in white people's homes and communities; y'all have high walls). Ukujola is not the best preparation for marriage. It creates the impression that niyazana but
  
  actually anazani. What people know is how to reproduce the dysfunction they’ve seen at home already. The default position: memory kicks in and we rely on an old trope of marriage that is not useful for anyone but we do it anyway. And so the question remains: do we know how to love each other? See each other? Especially because love was never really a prerequisite to getting married but now that we’ve made it about love; do we know how to love each other as Black men and women? The stats about intimate partner violence tell us that we probably don’t. The levels of masquerading in relationships suggests that we don't. While having this conversation with a friend she used the analogy of looking for a school (for a child): ukujola is the process of looking for schools, researching their curriculum, asking people who know the school if it's any good etc. The research. Marriage is the part where you choose the school and go to class, but you never actually graduate. Love is the lessons you learn while in class. We need to become students of love. I've removed All about love from my book shelf and getting ready for another reading. Become a student of love if you want to experience it otherwise, jolani at your own peril!
  

• MARRIAGE IS NOT FOR EVERYONE! Someone people make better lovers than husbands/wives. Don't confuse the two. I don't think it's necessary to be a lover and a spouse but somehow we believe Hollywood and then get wholly disappointed. And if someone says they don't want to get married please don't tell them they'll change their mind. Stop that. Just stop. In the same way when womxn say they don't want children and you tell them they'll change their mind: stop that. Please. 

• WILL YOU GET MARRIED AGAIN? This is the worst possible question I've had to engage with in the past 2 years. I was taken aback that while I was in my feels grieving the loss of a relationship and a person in my life, people felt the need to ask "Will you get married again?" There's so much wrong with this question I will probably come back to it in another a longer post. But for now let me say: the question often came before the question about healing. I can count on one hand the number of people who asked me "how are you healing?" without creating the impression that the way to recover from a divorce is to already think about rectifying the failure through another marriage. This is an unhelpful question. It is invasive and rude. Of course the question is couched in some latent fear that now that one has seen the horrors of marriage which have led to a divorce, will they buy into the institution again. The question is also about the lack of acknowledgement that more often than not, people are in toxic marriages having bad sex or no sex at all (we also need to talk about bad sex in general). So here's the answer to the question: I love the freedom of no longer pining for something I have heard about since I was a little girl. I don't have enough words to describe this freedom. I was raised to desire marriage in spite of the fact that my grandmother Bhele had chosen against it. I grew up with aunts who never married and wore that as a badge of both shame and honour. I wonder a lot about what kind of life would I have chosen if I had not been raised to desire marriage. Do we have an imagination of little girls who aren't conditioned to desire the attention of men throughout their whole lives in order to become wives? 

• There are still REMAINING QUESTIONS on this issue I can't do justice here:
• Why would you marry your best friend? (That just feels unnecessary) 
• What does the nature of marriage tell us about the nature of friendships between men and women?
• Capitalism and marriage: the money conversation. Starting marriage with debt and we don’t talk about that. Why?
• Black mothers and marriage: I think many of our mothers are watching incredulously: why would you do that? 
• Cheating...what does this even mean? How can we talk about compulsory monogamy in a context where people have desires with other people?

I may come back to this issue when someone triggers me about being divorced. But let me pause for now. I'm hoping that this post will give people permission to talk about marriage for what it is: a complex thing we've inherited that needs serious attention if we intend on keeping the tradition. I hope for those who are divorced, you'll breathe a little easier and shake off that shame. Fetch your life from the dregs of shame. My divorce has helped me think about healing, self-love, community, love and that in fact, as Black people, we seriously need to talk about intimacy and love.