There are three kinds of marriage. There is my marriage, which is special: distinct, complex, it defies easy categorization. There is your marriage, which is evidence: of how, as seen by me, your values have served or failed you. Then there is marriage: the category that presumes an ideal exists at all.
But every marriage is turned into stories. There are the ones we tell ourselves and the ones we tell our families, the ones we tell while the marriage is intact and the ones we tell after a divorce. The story we keep private and the one we make public are just two examples.
That there are two sides to every story is cliché. That there are two stories to every marriage is almost science. Once known as “discrepant responses” in postwar North America, it was a phenomenon researchers could not figure out. Multiple studies conducted over the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s and ’60s all suffered from the same issue: Why was it that when husbands and wives were asked the same questions, they didn’t give the same answers?
Often—not always—the couple agreed on facts, such as how many children they had, or their address. When it came time to ask about less-verifiable elements of the relationship, men and women seemed to be describing different marriages. How often they spoke to each other, to friends, to their children. How often they had sex. How often they shared chores or split household tasks. Who made the decisions? Who had the power? Men reported happiness, while women reported despair. Researchers wondered if it was an issue of methodology. Maybe the couples didn’t understand the questions. Jessie Bernard, a retired professor emerita of sociology at Penn State, wondered about a different methodological issue: Did researchers understand the answers?
In 1972, Bernard published The Future of Marriage, arguing that the responses were not and had never been discrepancies. Bernard’s predecessors had assumed that within a marriage they would find a unified narrative—that the married couple would see themselves as being an us against the world outside. Instead, Bernard, who studied the way biological sex and social gender influenced a person’s encounters with the world, found that there are as many stories as spouses. She offered a simpler way of looking at the issue: researchers should expect to see “his” marriage and “her” marriage, the perspective changing the account. The us versus them question they were looking for was inside the house: spouses saw themselves as partners in a dynamic that was me versus you.
She wrote that there are “few findings more consistent, less equivocal, more convincing than the sometimes spectacular and always impressive superiority on almost every index—demographic, psychological, or social—of married over never-married men.” It was so reliable, insurance companies factored it into their clients’ life expectancies.
Married women, in the same surveys, showed much more uniformly depressing results. While their husbands were serene, married women reported feelings of anxiety and unhappiness; they were more likely to consider themselves passive and phobic. Bernard called this the “shock theory of marriage”: the idea that marriage “introduced such profound discontinuities into the lives of women as to constitute genuine emotional health hazards.”
The quick-fading phase of romantic idealization is also known as the “honeymoon period.” In research literature, this is called “disenchantment.” Marriage made women feel less independent, less impulsive, less themselves. Their self-image declined the longer they stayed married. John Cassavetes, the film director who collaborated with his wife, Gena Rowlands, on movies about exactly this, once said he believed all women are “driven crazy by playing a role they can’t fulfill.” Bernard says, “It is wives who are driven mad, not by men but by the anachronistic way in which marriage is structured today—or rather, the lifestyle which accompanies marriage today and which demands that all wives be housewives. In truth, being a housewife makes women sick.”
To agree on what marriage is requires agreeing on a unified version of history. There are, Bernard writes, as many possibilities for pasts as there are for futures. What was common was not necessarily total; what was average was not always thought to be normal. Does marriage have a single past? No, says Bernard. It has as many pasts as it has futures. “For the past has been as varied as the present, with a meandering course and scores of tributaries, large and small, and many potential futures,” she tells us. Later in the book, I found a beautiful sentence she had written: “The future does not hit everyone at the same time.”
I could tell you about my last night with my former husband, but mostly I think about how the night passed no matter what we did to hold still. My marriage ended when those scenes stopped being scenes. The fights were the same as the conversations, and the coffee was made no matter what was said the night before.
The fight I think of as being the first—although there were others before it, this was just the one I think of as the beginning of our end—happened when we were far away from home, on a vacation with our friends. Late at night and very drunk, we screamed at each other. Remembering our volume the next morning was its own kind of hangover.
As the sun rose, our friends in the next room coughed and I heard it through the walls; everyone who hadn’t passed out from rum had heard us fight as clearly as I heard that cough. I apologized—I always did—then I spent more time thinking about his words than I thought about what I was sorry for. “But you’re my wife,” my husband had said to me, and that was enough. Only eight weeks into our marriage, my status in his life was as his wife. I took no pleasure or power in that title. I felt what he meant: that what I was to him should be enough. The next morning, he apologized, and I knew he meant it—both the apology and the title. He was sorry. I was his wife.
What happened after that? I don’t even know how to answer that question. Which after? As a condition of his visa, he had to stop working for a period after we moved, and I was working more than ever. He got a job, and then I lost mine. We were never in our apartment at the same time. I began to tell other people things I used to only tell him, thinking I was relieving our relationship of unnecessary stress. I was just creating more things we didn’t know about each other. We fought. I apologized, over and over again, but I did not change. Why had I married him? we asked each other, by which we meant why, besides the reasons we told other people. I didn’t know.
Could we stay together forever was the question I asked, again and again, but what I meant was would we. I asked questions of everyone, tried to find someone to tell us what to do: Should we get a dog, or go to therapy, or plan a vacation? Should we move back to the place where we rarely fought, where we had stayed together for years and years, the place where we had known something no one else did?
I never knew what question I should ask, but I did—eleven months into our marriage—know my answer. My answer was no. The night I told him I wanted it to be over is the night I think of as our last, for reasons that are obvious and also my own. When we were done, I put one hand around his neck and let my fingers touch his ear, my forehead on his shoulder and my other hand on my heart, which had slowed so much I was light headed. I said his name again and again. I can still hear the way I said it that night. I am not ready to hear it another way.
Sometime in the summer of 1973, Adrienne Rich sent a short letter to Elizabeth Hardwick. “Dearest E,” she began, “I’m still feeling bloodyminded about those poems.” Rich was a good friend of Robert Lowell, Hardwick’s then-estranged husband, and she was blunt with him in private and in public about what she read in his book of poems, The Dolphin.
“What does one say about a poet who, having left his wife and daughter for another marriage, then titles a book with their names, and goes on to appropriate his ex-wife’s letters written under stress and pain of desertion, into a book of poems nominally addressed to his new wife?” Rich wrote in The American Poetry Review, before revealing she had a suggestion of her own: “I have to say that I think this is bullshit eloquence.”
The remainder of her letter to Hardwick reads: “When two people have had something together, however difficult & painful, it is not the right of one to choose to ‘use’ it in this fashion. I think people are ultimately more important than poems (I know you do too!).”
To tell a divorce story, from start to finish, is beyond betrayal. It would be its own form of infidelity—the breaking of a promise made in marriage that carries well past divorce. Every writer who cares about goodness, not just as a form of craft but as a principle, relies on the same technique: a shading of the borders around the story, a writing or expression that gives depth to the details, sensations, and emotions of an experience as an exchange instead of saying what really happened.
The divorce plot, if such a thing can be said to exist, resists the contemporary facts of divorce: even if anyone can and does hold the capacity to end a marriage, it is still rarer to find a protagonist who is the one who leaves rather than the one who is left. Just the fact of a divorce can already inspire a recoil, and it is a brave person who will confront this assumption deliberately rather than avoid it indefinitely. What are the terms that must be met in order to write about one’s divorce with beauty and respect? Asking the writer will be a very different experience compared to asking their ex.
Like a dedication to the genre, the divorce memoir reenacts its own reasons for existing: publishing one breaks hearts. When we read a divorce memoir and look for ourselves within it, the choice of who to relate to will change depending on where—not who—we are. What role do readers play in this exchange? Because the divorce memoir is neither a confessional nor a conversation, its writers have to play by ear: How will this sound? How will it echo back to me? When we place ourselves in the reader’s position, are we making ourselves into the author, collecting our thoughts into sentences and our sentences into a story?
Are we the anonymized ex, measuring our opportunities for rebuttal? Or are we the friend—the Adrienne Rich—waiting for the moment to say what we really think, and hope it finds space in someone’s consciousness?
Because I don’t tell stories, everyone thinks I have secrets. I try, I swear I try, but I end up making eye contact with the table and saying non sequiturs so nonsensical I might as well be speaking in tongues. As a result, my friends and I are alike in that we both have no idea why my marriage ended. (We are different in that they think they can find the answer, and I know I never will.)
I’m thinking, I protest when my friends tell me I’m too quiet, but I do have a secret, and it’s that I have a broken television set where my brain used to be. I am ashamed of the lo-fi quality of my thoughts. They are constant and circular, a staticky skimming of the surface.
I came closest to expressing real anger when a new friend told me she assumed I didn’t think about my divorce that much because I barely talked about it. I considered my response, waiting for my heart rate to level before I spoke. Each word came out with a telltale beat: “It would be a mistake,” I said, “to consider talking the best indicator of thinking.”
Later, when I was calmer, I thought again. Once, I had thought of nothing else but my marriage and my husband. To think less at all felt like a lapse I couldn’t let myself admit to; to speak at the same volume as my thoughts might reveal more than I could risk.
I took the subway to visit a friend one day. I arrived exactly when I said I would. (Being punctual is like being superstitious, if you think about it. It means you believe that time exists.) I stayed until evening. My friend lit candles when the sun went down. I sat at the head of their long wooden table while her husband lay on their overstuffed couch, pretending to read—trying to make it seem like he wasn’t eavesdropping, but every so often he would twist his head around the arm of the couch to face me and ask a question about what I’d just said. I did my best to answer him as he asked what happened when, which event followed the introduction of which new man, which moment came after which ending.
At a certain point, he sat up on his elbows and began to speak plainly but beautifully about their marriage. He told me, very simply, that he never thought he would be a man who could be strange about understanding his wife in relation to himself. He had maybe never thought of himself as a man who would feel anything other than the most straightforward expression of his good feelings. He would always be able to see her for how he existed in the world, almost like how he saw her hair colour, a favourite outfit, a deftness for parallel parking or mixing a certain drink—something he would enjoy for the happiness it brought her but had nothing to do with him. An example of what had made him fall in love with her.
Now, he told me, he realized how stupid that had been. He saw that he had not been thinking about how he would be a husband, or what that role might do or demand of him. He had needed to ignore the way he felt about his own work, and had been unprepared to find himself in some classic, awful clichés: the man with a pretty good career who was still jealous of his wife’s success, for example. The husband learned late that competition and desire want each other very badly. That they are perhaps almost alike.
I waited for him to say more. I like when husbands talk to me about their marriages. He waited too. I realized he was pausing because he was implying something about the story he had heard me tell.
“I know what you’re thinking,” I started, his face patient and still half resting on the pillow. “And I appreciate it, I really do. But you’re wrong. That’s not what happened. That’s not why our marriage ended.”
“Are you sure?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “Very sure.”
Weeks later, I would be in the shower and this conversation would come back to me, hot and bright behind my eyes. I spat water at my feet. Oh my god, I thought. I wasn’t sure at all.
Could it really be that simple? My uncertainty made me more susceptible to other people’s certainties; even resisting such straightforward descriptions deemed, in itself, a cliché. Of course I would deny any reason offered; of course I would deny any reason at all, I imagined people thinking as I explained why they were right about almost everything, just wrong about what happened to me.
Later (too late), I would learn that the people most certain that they knew how other people should live were those least certain of their own lives. Their convictions were often seductive or charming. Still, not all of them were wrong, and some of them were doing exactly what I had sought in narratives first and therapy second: like my friend’s husband; listening from the couch, their perspective was their generosity and my defensiveness was just that, a wall put up to avoid seeing what they saw so clearly.
Of course I thought of my marriage as something beyond understanding, my divorce too unique to fit into another story. I knew it was true that something between my ex-husband and me had shifted when I got a job that was more like the one he had; it was true much of the identity of our relationship rested in us both believing that he took care of me, in many different material ways; it was true that by the time we left each other, I had begun to wonder if changing so much of my life had changed the way we saw each other. “I don’t want to be with you because I need you,” I told him often in our last year of living together, “I want to be with you because I want you.”
I was trying to reassure us both. I was admitting more than I knew.
In August of the only year that I was married, my husband and I flew to the West Coast for a wedding. I was distracted; I didn’t plan. Not understanding either Canadian geography or seasons, I had packed for what I considered to be August weather. I spent the entire time both cold and cursing myself for my missed opportunity to wear sweaters and jackets. The dress I brought was too big, and so were my shoes. But it was a beautiful wedding. I guess they all are.
The bride’s father, a carpenter, made the pews for the ceremony and the tables and chairs for the reception. The sun stayed on the water, and we traded blankets back and forth when the wind blew. At night, we drank and cried too much. I had already said goodbye to these friends so many times before: when I had moved, when I came back to visit, and now when I would get back on a plane to fly to a different city than the one we grew up in together. “It doesn’t get easier,” one friend said through his tears. I held my hand on his cheek without wiping them away.
The day after the wedding, I did some work, almost, while my husband and another friend rented a car. I had woken up in the morning with the idea that I wanted to go to nature. “I want to go to talk to some mountains about my life,” I said, and my husband had laughed, but I was only kind of joking.
In the afternoon, we started driving until the mountains started to look less like they were on the horizon and almost on the windshield. I pointed at the snow on the tips, and the cloud puffs above them with the water below, and the people walking by in appropriate hiking boots. I did not have appropriate hiking boots, but we walked anyway, carefully, not really talking but murmuring every so often. The trail we were on seemed to be coming to an end. The scene where it stopped was like a painting, two mountains overlapping behind a lake and under a blue sky, one small white cloud hovering between them.
Back in the city, the season was more appropriate to what I expected and hated: airless, choking heat, sunlight that seemed to burn without warmth. Steam lifted off the sidewalk. The hours were slow and were gone before I could count them. The feeling of August was as uncomfortable as the weather. Enough time had passed to know what this summer would be, but there was enough time to convince myself I might still be wrong. It was only four months before my husband would pack the suitcase and move out. On those nights, humid memories of the day kept me awake behind my closed eyes. I read letters that writers I loved wrote to the people they loved, and I circled the ones that felt important even if I couldn’t say why. One I kept with me for a long time, waiting to understand how I knew what it meant—on August 12, 1971, Elizabeth Hardwick had written to Robert Lowell.
I have had a really fine summer, strange in many ways, in others exactly the same. In the afternoons, the light drops suddenly, the day waits, and you feel a melancholy repetition, as though you were living moments before, maybe long ago by someone else.
In September, she wrote to say that she had started divorce proceedings.
In a letter to Lowell, Rich said that her memories of her friendship with him and Hardwick during their marriage were some of her happiest, most cherished. She loves remembering them as they were as a couple. Still, she doesn’t mourn the change, exactly. She admires, she says, who Hardwick is becoming. “Women are more interesting now than they’ve ever been, and even women like E. Who were always interesting have become more subtle, more searching,” she contemplates. “So many of us through one thing or another—choice, divorce, suicide or death, chance of some kind—are living more autonomous lives, and it’s like a second youth, only with far more sense of direction, of one’s real needs and longings, as opposed to the heady confusion of first youth.”
Is she right? Can an experience like divorce, and the decision to live not only through it but also beyond it, inspire not just a graceful ending but something actually new? Can we find that quality in our days, then recognize it in what we read and, finally, create it all over again in our own words?
Excerpted from No Fault: A Memoir of Romance and Divorce by Haley Mlotek. Copyright © 2025 Haley Mlotek. Published by McClelland & Stewart, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.
