My mom and dad had what most people would call a solid marriage. For more than 37 years, they were together until my father was taken from us by cancer in 2002. If that horrible monster hadn’t entered our lives, I believe my parents would still be committed to the vows they took when they were high school sweethearts. After my father died, my mother never remarried. As much as we all loved Dad, we still wished Mom had found happiness instead of being alone all this time … but that was never going to happen. At least not for my mother whose love for her man endured, along with her grief. 

“But what is grief if not love persevering.” I heard that quote once and understood it immediately. See, my father was an all-or-nothing kind of guy. He worked hard. He played hard. And, man, did he love hard. He also taught me the same thing. He had a “shout it from the rooftops” way of showing his love for Mom and my brother and me. He told me to live my life that way and practically preached it my whole life. He told me on more than several occasions that love is hard. You just have to work harder than the forces that try to tear it down. He told me if you love without a net — without a parachute — you can’t fail, that the world wouldn’t let you. I believed him. I even wrote about how easy marriage could be if you lived by those ideals in the second column of this magazine over five years ago, and I have touched on the topic a few times since. 

But then something I never thought possible happened. I got a divorce. Me. The guy who loved as hard as he could. The guy who shouted it from the rooftops just like my dad instructed. The guy who wrote his wife poetry on the regular and cooked dinner and stayed on top of the doctor and dentist appointments for the kids. Don’t get me wrong, I never thought I was perfect. Not even close. Everyone falters and there isn’t any such thing as a perfect husband — or wife. I also knew at the time that our marriage was going through some serious trouble. But trouble could be handled. Trouble was part of the deal. But a divorce? That was something I never saw coming.

And I think maybe that was the problem. I never saw it coming. So, what else was I not paying attention to?

That was four years ago. And for quite a long time, I simply closed up shop. I flipped the sign on the door of my brain from open to closed and focused on my kids and work. I wrote what I think is my best novel to date during those past few years. But it still bothered me. Was my dad completely wrong? Had I not followed his love-hard way of life to a tee? So, I did an inventory of my circle of friends — a small circle, but a solid one. Then it dawned on me that all of them, save my best friend from college who was stunningly happy, had either been divorced or were stuck in what they referred to as a terrible marriage. They were in it “for the kids” or “it’s just easier than starting over.” I understood some of that. I had to start over at 48 years old (even during a pandemic). It’s not fun. It was hell. But still, how could it be possible that everyone I knew was unhappy? How did we all fail at something as effortless as love? Dad really called this one wrong. I started to resent his rooftop philosophy. I began to think that climbing up on the rooftops only gave the snipers a clearer target to shoot. 

… they’d talk about it … nothing went unsaid.

Then something else happened. Remember I mentioned my best friend from college a minute ago? The sole family man with the blue-ribbon award-winning marriage? He called me to tell me his wife of 25 years and the mother of his three grown children wanted a divorce. What? I was stunned. So was he. He told me something that sounded really familiar. He told me that he never saw it coming, that her mind had been made up years ago. Nothing was going to save it. And there were those words again: “I never saw it coming.”

So, I went to talk to the one person who claimed to have it all figured out — my mother. The woman who loved and believed in her marriage to my father, who, 22 years after his death, couldn’t see herself with anyone else. And I asked her the question. What was the key? How did they make it work all that time and continue to be happy through it all?

She laughed. I mean really laughed, with her whole belly. And she hugged me as if I was still in high school trying to figure out love for the first time.

What she told me was as simple as you might expect. They weren’t happy all the time. In fact, sometimes it was pure madness and she’d thought about leaving him several times. I was shocked. I’d never even witnessed an unkind word between them growing up, much less a total collapse. But she also told me something else that I needed to hear, something that anyone in a rocky marriage needs to hear. My father ALWAYS saw it coming. So did she. They made it clear to each other when that anger or resentment started to boil over, that they’d talk about it. Right then. Every time. Nothing went unsaid. Nothing was internalized for a war to pile up and break out later. 

They both saw it coming. Every. Single. Time. Neither of them was ever blindsided or confused about where the other stood.

Do I still question my father’s hopeless romantic advice? Sure. Do I think too many people get married these days and go in as if divorce is always a viable option? Yes. It’s a different world than it was when Mom and Dad exchanged vows. But I also believe he was right in a lot of ways. Because when he got up on those rooftops to profess his love, he wasn’t just telling the world — he was telling her, and he was listening for her response. 

So don’t throw away your bullhorn just yet, you romantics out there. Just turn it off sometimes and hear what your partner has to say back. Loan the bullhorn to them. And I can promise you, you’ll never have to say that you never saw it coming.

Seen in the June/July 2024 issue of Augusta magazine.

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