Separation and Divorce

Separation and Divorce

We moderns think we are so smart, yes, smarter than God! God told us marriage is for life, but some of us endure only thirty-day wonder marriages. Come together in lust and depart in boredom. We married to get a nut, that's all. We hardly knew each other, but in the moment of passion convinced each other we were in love, while we were simply in ignorance, so the marriage soon fell apart as it should have.

But we think the elders had it right, we in this to the end, for better or worse, sickness and health. Ain't nobody going nowhere. When problems arise, we'll process them until we get to the final product, a successful marriage. The money problems, the sexual problems, we'll work out, for surely after difficulty comes ease. The bad times don't last forever and we never believed life was a bowl of cherries. Mama never told us this. Mama told us to hang in there. Stay together, don't have such thin skin, even though mama and daddy may have had problems themselves.

Today we run at the slightest hint of trouble. We separate and then divorce, mainly thinking of ourselves, not the children, but ourselves. In total selfishness we throw in the towel and run into the arms of another, yes, another stranger, who is actually the same person we just departed from, only they have a different name.

And we repeat the same ritual after a short time because we learned nothing from the first marriage. Maybe there was physical, emotional and verbal abuse from the first marriage, yet somehow we see the same situation developing in our second marriage. There may have been drugs involved in the first, yet we hook up with another dope fiend, so obviously we learned nothing from the first mate. And it goes on and on.

Or maybe we think our first mate wasn't intelligent enough, but why didn't we take time to educate the mate, since we're so smart. No matter the problems between Amina and Amiri Baraka, she will tell any and everyone her husband educated her and she loves him for this, if nothing else.

Life takes long patience, sometimes long suffering. No cross no crown, the Christians say. But again, we moderns think we so damn smart, yet we can't figure out our asses from a hole in the ground!

If 50% of marriages end in divorce, there must be something people are doing wrong. A friend of mine says most of us have never done anything right in our life, yes, everything we've done was wrong! He might be a bit excessive, but the truth is that we come into relationships with unresolved grief and trauma that it is only complicated because more than likely we connect with a mate who is also suffering unresolved grief and trauma, so it is not surprising things don't go right and at the slightest problem we run out the door. Again, only thinking of ourselves. I certainly was guilty of this. My parents were my model and they separated and eventually divorced, so that's all I knew. Staying together meant nothing to me, it was not part of my language.

But looking back, I could have and/or should have stayed with any one of the women I connected with because every one of them was angelic as I say in the poem When I look at the Women in my Life. They were all beautiful, righteous women. Yes, they had issues, but don't we all? I certainly had mine and maybe we could have worked things out together, even though it would have been a long process, but what the hell is life but a long process until we get the product, until we get it right, and sometimes that doesn't happen until near the end. Well, he finally got it right, they will say. Of course everyone isn't meant to be married, understand this, as my mother told me.

But common people using common sense should be able to hang, and many do, in spite of everything. We are not suggesting people should suffer in eternal hell as some do in these marriages that should have been aborted from the beginning. Why should people suffer for thirty years in a rotten marriage where people are simply not meant to be together? Yet in most cases people are not so complex they can't get along. Most people are common and with a little effort they can make it. Please try, for yourselves and most especially your children. For just as I did, the children will repeat what they have seen, leading to a society of people suffering issues of abandonment, abuse and neglect.

Finally, we have suggested that our problems arise from the mythological foundation of Western civilization that is bound to cause suffering with its notions of domination and ownership. Hence we must at least realize radical thinking is necessary to make our relationships work, radical thinking and radical action. Issues of domination and ownership must be discarded in order that holistic relations can grow and flourish, and we can truly arrive at a state of joy, happiness and bliss.

--Marvin X
10/25/10

from Mythology of Pussy and Dick, toward Healthy Psychosocial Sexuality, Marvin X, Black Bird Press, Berkeley, 400 pages, 2010.

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