A growing number of couples — and lawyers — are deciding to do divorce differently
Julie Beun-Chown, The Ottawa Citizen
For years before his 1987 divorce, Mike Brown was a drinker — a bad drinker who could flip from popular jokester to angry bully in less time than it takes to down a beer. Even so, his wife Megan loved him, his big heart, his friendship and his wacky sense of humor. But after a few years, even those lovable traits weren’t enough. Megan, who had a daughter with Mike and another from her first marriage, asked for a divorce.
“When you’re trying to have a career, raise your children and deal with all that,” the 53-year-old Halifax woman recalls, “you get to a point where you think, ‘I can’t do this anymore.'” By anyone’s reckoning, their split should have ended in a painful, brawling divorce. Incredibly — no, miraculously — it didn’t. Each of them had experienced painful divorces before their own, so Megan and Mike were determined that this relationship would not ruin their family. The couple threw societal expectations out the window and did their divorce differently: They lived together as roommates in a three-bedroom townhouse in Calgary, so together they could raise their daughter Bethan. What’s more, the parenting partners — for lack of a better term — weathered stranger waters still when Megan fell in love with and married Mike’s brother Bill 12 years later. Throughout it all, the former couple maintained just one focus. “Mike and I were totally committed to our child. It was our number one priority,” says Megan. “We’d both been through bad divorces. From those experiences, we learned what we didn’t want. And we didn’t want our daughter to suffer.” Given the emotional maelstrom that accompanies failed relationships — hurt, guilt, grief, vindictiveness, remorse and anger — divorces that move beyond amicable into happily-ever-after seem impossibly rare.
HOW TO HAVE A DREAM DIVORCE1. “Sit at the kitchen table and talk about what matters most, which for most people is the happiness and stability of the new family structure,” says Cate Cochran, author of the new book Reconcilable Differences. “Talk about what you can and can’t do. Craft an arrangement that you can live with and never mind what the rest of the world thinks about it.”2. Get good advice on financial issues, which can be very complicated depending on your circumstances.3. Show some respect. “You can’t belittle or degrade the other person,” Cochran says. “Don’t fight in front of the kids or drag them into disagreements. We all slip and let our anger take hold, but you have to learn to apologize and start over.”4. Create an equitable schedule and division of financial responsibilities. “You have to figure out who’s going to pay for things like skating lessons. It’s pretty basic stuff. Draw up a list and keep talking to each other. Negotiate. The same goes for a work schedule and time off. We both had long-distance relationships, so we needed weekends off and we had to work around that.”
© The Ottawa Citizen