Love is Like a Greyhound Bus (Or How to Talk to a Divorced Person)

Love is a lot like a Greyhound bus!

So, I have been pondering relationships lately. I have previously discussed my horrible relationship choices in the post My Picker is Broken Part I. Read it for some laughs! I was having dinner with a friend a couple of nights ago, and we were discussing the fact that I am divorced, plus how stupid my ex-husband was. Now, in case you have any friends who are divorced, let me give you a couple of pointers about how you should talk to a divorced person when the subject of his or her ex-spouse comes up. First, please be sure to comment about the sheer lunacy of the ex-spouse for giving up a marriage to such a wonderful specimen of a person. Even if you know that maybe part of the reason for the divorce was your friend’s creepy Marie Osmond doll collection, you should still emphasize the fault of your friend’s ex in the matter. The second thing you need to know about talking to a divorced friend is that it is good to blame things on that friend’s ex-spouse whenever possible. It is really just good for the soul to do so!

For example, I have a screened-in porch that has leaked for quite some time. The reason it started leaking is that, several years ago, a really large branch fell on top of it and tore a hole in the roof. My then-husband and I had to replace the roof, which we did ourselves. The roof was made of really long, corrugated metal sheets that spanned the whole length of the porch. Now, when we replaced the roof, we could not find sheets that were long enough to span the entire length of the porch, so we used several smaller sheets to cover it. But, after the roof was replaced, the porch leaked even more than it had previously, because water was running down from between where the sheets came together! Well, my ex-husband just left it like that and did not attempt any additional repairs, and I have the mechanical abilities of a two-month-old baby, so I didn’t dare try to fix it myself. Plus, we couldn’t ask my dad, who is a real Mr. Fix-It, to help, because that would have been a blow to my ex-husband’s fragile ego.

The porch continued leaking up until I kicked my ex-husband out and we got divorced. My dad examined the porch after the ex was gone, and determined that he (the ex) had actually put the corrugated metal sheets on upside down, which caused the water to pool on top in the wrong way, which caused the leaking. I was delighted! I could now blame my leaking, moss-covered porch on someone who I already got great glee out of hating. But, after my dad fixed the error, the leaking continued. Recently, my dad reverse-engineered the whole porch construction and discovered that the porch was actually built with the roof sloping at the wrong angle, causing the water to pool and, thus, the leaking. Now, even though my dad has definitively decided that my ex-husband was not the cause of the leaking, and even though my dad has fixed the porch and made the leaking go away, he still has the decency to blame the whole debacle on my ex-husband because, you know, that’s just what you do for family!

Another thing you should know when talking to a divorced person is that we tend to be pretty jaded about love. We may, for example, not believe in things like love at first sight, or that two people are destined to be together, or even that two people can successfully choose a program to watch on Netflix together that they will both enjoy. I, for example, do not believe that there is one true love for every person. I think that love is a lot like a Greyhound bus: If you catch one bus, and then discover that it has a drinking problem, or that it likes to date other women behind your back—well, you can just go back and hang out at the bus station, and eventually another decent bus will probably come by. You may have to wait awhile to catch it, but there is no shortage of buses in the universe if you are willing to wait long enough.

Since being divorced, I have also developed an idea about love that you may find your divorced friends sharing, and that is that love is a real crap shoot. I used to believe that how long the members of a couple knew each other before getting engaged or married really made a difference in said couple’s long-term success, but now experience has taught me otherwise. I have known couples who dated for a month before getting married who have gone on to have blissful, fifty year relationships, and couples who dated for ten years before tying the knot who fizzled out after only six months of holy matrimony. Basically, time is not a determinant of a couple’s happiness or compatibility, because love, like boxes of chocolates, features a variety of surprising possibilities, and you really, truly never know what you are going to get.

I mean, you could think you have a really delicious dark chocolate covered coconut confection. You put it up to your nose and smell it, and it kind of doesn’t smell like coconut, but then again, it kind of does. And you’re not sure if you should eat it, because what you really want is coconut, and this might not be coconut. But you already have the damn thing almost in your mouth so, with slight reservations, you bite into it—and you discover that it doesn’t have coconut inside after all, but that it actually contains that sickly-sweet strawberry mess that is usually inside the last chocolate left in the box! However, because of its skill at camouflage, it got you to pick it over even the one that had almonds inside! Yeah, love is kind of like that.

Which brings me to a little-known fact about divorced people. You may not know this, but your divorced friends may actually have had second thoughts before their weddings. But, because of expense, or convenience, or just difficulty in discerning the seriousness of the situation, they may have gone through with it anyway. In fact, a study by UCLA psychologists found that wives who had premarital doubts about their weddings were two and a half times more likely to divorce four years later than wives who did not have such doubts. I know this was the case for me.

My ex-husband, like NBA player Anthony Davis, needed
to clean up his unibrow.

Granted, I can now spot many instances of times when my ex-husband’s behavior should have given me pause. Like when I noticed that he kind of had a unibrow, but he didn’t realize he needed to clean it up, and so I had to clean it up for him; or when I found out that he did not like to read books; or that time after my shoulder surgery when, instead of offering to do the laundry, he told me I could just do all of the laundry after my shoulder healed. In reality, only one incident out of thousands of possible candidates raised a red flag for me. A week before our wedding we were painting the house we were going to move into after we got married, and my parents were helping us. In the middle of the painting, my ex got very frustrated by something and yelled at my mom, including using a curse word! We all blamed it on the stress of his divorced parents both coming to the wedding when they hadn’t seen each other in ten years, when, in reality, we should have blamed it on his being a jackass!

You may have the idea, after reading my thoughts on love, that I am bitter, or that I am not open to love, or even that I hate men. I can assure you that none of these is the case. Now, two and a half years after my divorce became final, I am really coming to terms with what happened in my marriage. I understand how my lack of confidence and lack of belief in myself really contributed to creating the fiasco that was my relationship, and especially how my ex-husband’s lack of belief in not being a jackass was the big determining factor. In spite of his shortcomings and lack of remorse for certain behaviors, I think I have actually forgiven him. However, if you talk to me about him, then, just for the sake of decency, please be sure to blame it all on him. In the meantime, I will just hang out at the bus station, and, should the right bus happen to come by at the right time, I might even consider getting on it.

Greyhound bus image courtesy of http://www.ktvb.com

Anthony Davis image courtesy of http://sandrarose.com/