Elegy for a Marriage

a love of story and a story of love

I started this Substack by writing about my love of stories. My current job title (Chief Storyteller) reflects my love of stories. I use stories to enchant, to communicate, to provoke thought and feeling. At their finest and most sincere, stories gesture towards the purity of that which cannot be reduced to words. Stories are valiant attempts to capture raw experience and sensation.

This post is different. It is a story about where stories fall short: where they can feel limiting, corrosive, even harmful. But above all, it is a story of love: a story that seeks to humbly honor love in all its messy glory.

Once upon a time…

Photo Credit: Julia Kathleen Photography

… I met Mark for five minutes at a gym in Brooklyn in 2017. From that brief encounter, I knew he was special: as a human, and to me. What followed was a journey of fierce love, deep intimacy, and mutual self-discovery. 

Mark and I decided to separate in the fall of last year, after approximately six years of partnership. While we were still in love, we had begun to see that our respective passions, life dreams, and values had evolved over time: carrying us closer to our fullest selves and farther from a shared vision for the future.

Our ending was a gradual and intentional one: we lived together for a month after making the decision, and peppered our remaining weeks with couples therapy sessions, final date nights, and raw conversations. On our last night as a couple, we slow-danced to our wedding song and ritually removed our rings. It was a chapter of immense pain and relatively little suffering: we each felt the inherent rightness of the decision, but our sense of clarity didn’t lessen our heartbreak.

In this piece, I will not unpack the intricacies of our marriage and its dissolution, for the reasons expressed below. Goodness knows I have been unconscious, inconsiderate, and challenging at numerous points throughout our love story— in its formation, its evolution, and its conclusion. Instead, I intend to honor this moment of grief as the ripe learning opportunity it represents: a chance to blister my heart more alive.

In my experience, the most difficult aspect of the breakup has not been my relationship with Mark, but my interactions with others. I’ve written a few pieces about death here and here, but this experience of divorce has reinforced my sense that many of us tend to feel discomfort around endings. While those closest to us weren’t surprised by the separation, many of our acquaintances expressed— without invitation— a sense of shock and judgment. The news of our divorce seemed to destabilize their beliefs about love. More than anything, people wanted us to spill. the. freaking. tea.

When viewed in the most generous light, this hunger for story can be understood as a means of addressing confusion, seeking comfort, or eliciting reassurance about the nature of love. At first, I did my best to explain our reasons for separating. People were inquisitive and surprised, and I felt compelled to provide clarity. But I left every single one of those interactions feeling hollowed out and lonely. It took me some time to realize that these people simply wanted to extract story without exhibiting any compassion or true curiosity. Moreover, by reducing our divorce into a story, I lost access to the fullness and depth of the experience. I felt like I’d cheapened something so extraordinary, complicated, and dynamic by contorting it into a truncated sound bite.

The most painful aspect of the entire transition has been this disconnect between my inner landscape and the simplified story mapped onto it. I am so grateful for the astute and whimsical observations of my friend Kir, who described this gap in the following way:

“It’s like you say: ‘I’m a little heartbroken,’ and they respond by saying ‘You’re a banana!’ Or you say: ‘I am this complex emotion,’ and they respond by saying ‘Here, wear my hat!’”

I am, most unfortunately, not a banana, and I am not available to don any hats at present.

My divorce feels… immense. I cannot place a value judgment of Good, Bad, Happy, or Sad onto this experience. Instead, the best I can offer is: Ripe. Swelling. Billowing. As someone who finds solace in the haven of a story or the familiarity of language, I’m learning to honor that which refuses to be tamed by being named.

Meanwhile, the legal divorce process itself suggests a story of acrimony and opposition. As Mark and I read through our divorce paperwork, we were unsettled by the various “versus” and “against” words littered throughout. In order to make divorce a collaborative exercise, we had to overlook the language of division embedded within it. I don’t want to say negative things about Mark, because I think he is, truly, the kindest human I’ve ever known. These social and logistical considerations— these cries for compact stories— diminished what otherwise felt monumental and sacred.

In my favorite podcast interview, the late Roland Griffiths describes his difficulty discussing his terminal cancer diagnosis with friends and loved ones. Griffiths felt that his death sentence was a spiritual gift: one that lent life a beauty and immediacy he wanted to celebrate. His jubilation challenged others’ beliefs about Death as a solemn, saddening, and scary process.

Throughout this divorce, I’ve felt a similar alienation from those around me. Several people have made comments like: “I thought you two were so in love!” We were so in love: a divorce doesn’t change that fact. In my view, the ending itself can be evidence of the health of the relationship. In our case, this divorce is, without question, the most loving thing either of us have done for ourselves or one another. My friend Court describes her divorce as one of her favorite things about herself: “it’s proof that we created the conditions to help one another actualize.”

In this new chapter, I want to celebrate my love with Mark. I want to celebrate the love for his being, and mine, that transcended our attachment to the container we built. I want to celebrate the two beings who shared an abundance of love but a lack of compatibility—a lack of compatibility that became apparent only because we encouraged one another to grow into our most authentic, empowered selves.

The truth is, I have never chosen myself so fully. This Life is the only draft I get to make, the only song I get to dedicate to the world. I want to know my Self, and I want her to be deeply seen and known and felt. This decision to end a marriage with a loving partner, in the name of honoring that Self, feels like an epic trust fall with Life.

Like Griffiths’ description of Death, my encounter with this (smaller) ending has generated so much love and gratitude within my being. I am so lucky to have loved and to have been loved. I have loved the best I can; the best this spirit knows how to love. I did so clumsily and confusedly at times, but I do know that I loved. Last year, I wrote this poem about loving with abandon in the face of endings, but it feels even more potent to me now.

In this spirit, I also want to celebrate the new love in my life, which is a soaring affirmation of all the questions my soul has ever asked. Perhaps one might say that new love has no place in this story… but I want a story supple and wide enough to accommodate the fullness of feeling. At the same time, I recognize how difficult it is to weave together old love and new without creating pain through creative constraints. Placing all that love, all that history, all that complexity inside a story this compact would be like trying to force my foot into an ill-fitting shoe.

So, I will only say this: divorce has taught me to value and voice my needs. I know more about Ilana than I ever did before, and as a result, I am now being loved in my own language. I am being met, held, nourished, delighted, challenged, and championed in the fullness of all that I am. In this new now, I feel a sense of non-attachment completely unmoored from outcome: I simply want to love as fully as I can for as long as I can. This is another gift I credit to the divorce: it has given me access to purer, most disinterested registers of love. I am choosing partnership with all of my being, and all of my being must be present in partnership.

All the love, freedom, and fulfillment I feel— much like the similar expansion I witness in Mark as he cultivates community, purpose, and home in Mexico— is not an undermining of our past love, but an honoring of it. We would not have separated for anything less than our complete actualization and aliveness. Now, I feel the mosaic of my previous loves informing how I show up to Love and Life… and it’s exhilarating.

To conclude: Love is a gracious and eternal teacher.

For those going through divorce, there is so much to grieve in what you will no longer have, and so much to celebrate in what you got to share. You are about to undergo a form of spiritual bootcamp, and like all epic crucibles… you want what’s on the other side of this leap (trust me).

For those watching someone go through divorce, do your best to dignify and humanize the vastness of what might be transpiring. Many years ago, a local community leader and his wife separated. When addressing news of their divorce publicly, he said: “Whatever you’re thinking… that’s not it.” I love the enigmatic nature of this remark; its implicit invitation to resist story in the name of complexity.

For that tender and powerful man who married me, thank you for your goodness, your discipline, your earnestness, your generosity, your sentimentality, your simplicity, your sincerity, your strength, your entrepreneurial spirit, and your noble heart. Bless your love of a deep conversation, your weird eating habits, your love of all things unreasonable (#Gostoso), your insatiable thirst for personal development, your support of my creative projects, and your care for my family. I love that you are kind without being nice. I love that you know who you are and what you like. I love that you took the first opportunity to escape New York City to courageously answer the call of your heart. I love your non-traditional spirit of adventure: in everything from our unconventional names to your encouragement in envisioning a lifestyle beyond the bounds of my limited imagination. I love the care and attention you place on your body and the way you revel in the Great Outdoors. I love your intuition. I love how much you grew in the things that mattered to me, because you knew they mattered to me: being on time, being tidy, leaving love notes around the house. Thank you for making me feel so confident and safe and treasured, and for making me such a priority. Thank you for your commitment to integrity, which has anointed every step of this separation process. Thank you for teaching me about alignment and listening to my inner truth; I never would have conceived of taking this kind of trust fall without your guidance and insight. You exemplify so much of what I imagine a marriage to be: groundedness, warmth, protection, enthusiasm, support. You are a beacon for me and always will be. When I think of this fraught and fractured world, I summon your essence and feel a deep sense of peace and comfort. Keep teaching people about the magic of alignment, and— more importantly— keep embodying it. I love you, O Great Wave: still and always.

If you enjoy my writing, go wild and click the ❤️ or 🔄 button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack. Thank you to Andi, Anneke, Athena, BD, BK, Cristina, Ezzie, Julie, Kir, Mal, Max, Natalie, and my family for holding me so exceptionally in this process.