Reflecting on My Divorce

Two months ago my wife got on a plane to go visit her mother in New Mexico. We drove to the airport in silence. I don't know what was going through her mind, but mine was a raging torrent of anger, sadness, and confusion. She had already made it clear that she was leaving me, and I truly didn't understand why. I loved her, she said she loved me, but for some unfathomable reason she had decided that we couldn't be together anymore. Perhaps I could have accepted this if we were just girlfriend and boyfriend, but we had been married for four years, and together for eight. In all that time we had been through ups and downs, like any couple, but the word "divorce" had never seriously entered my mind until she broached the topic mere weeks earlier. Even that morning, driving to the airport, I didn't truly believe what was happening was real.

In retrospect I suppose it was weird that I drove her at all. Looking back, two months later, that drive was one of the most painful moments of my life. Symbolically it feels like I was helping Jericha leave me, supporting her in her decision. When we arrived at the airport I took off my wedding ring and gave it to her. This dramatic gesture meant that our marriage was in her hands. But she had already decided long ago that she didn't want to be married anymore.

I'm not ashamed to admit that I cried on the way home. I loved my wife. I married her because I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her, because she was beautiful and smart and fun, and because she understood me and accepted me for the weird person I am. Yet here she was, unilaterally deciding to end a marriage that I had invested my heart and soul in, a marriage which I thought she, too, had invested her heart and soul in.

In the last year and a half I've lost a lot. My father committed suicide. His father - my grandfather - died shortly thereafter. My uncle Paul - whose cornicello I now wear whenever I go out - died of heart failure a few months later. My PhD advisor had a life-threatening and life-altering stroke. I decided to leave my PhD program all together. And now my wife was leaving me, but not before I attended and spoke at the funeral of her father - my father-in-law - towards the end of April. There's a kind of grim irony to the end of our marriage, surrounded as it was by the deaths of so many family members. I'll always remember that the last truly meaningful time I spent with my wife culminated in the Baha'i tradition of washing the body of her father and standing next to her during the Baha'i prayer for the dead.

The grim irony, here, goes beyond the parallels between death and divorce. The grimmer irony is that my wife's stated reason for leaving me is that our marriage was insufficiently spiritual, that I was insufficiently religious. To this charge I could offer no response. I spoke at her father's funeral and helped wash his body.* If that was insufficiently spiritual, insufficiently respectful of her faith, then perhaps I truly was incapable of being her husband after all.

* My mother told me of a conversation she had with Jericha's mother after the funeral. "Paul," my mother-in-law said, "is a keeper." My mother was bothered by this, and so am I. After four years of marriage and eight years in a relationship, hadn't we decided that I was a keeper already? Was I being tested so long after we had committed to each other? Why did Jericha marry me, and why did her parents consent to our marriage, unless they already knew I was a keeper? Adding ironies to ironies, this claim that I was a keeper came mere weeks before Jericha left me, proving that I was not, at least in her eyes, a keeper after all.

What bothered me about this was that our religious differences have been present since the beginning of our relationship. I have always been a kind of strange amalgam of agnostic, secular humanist, occasional Buddhist, astrologer, and sometime pagan (for example, I believe in Pele, the Hawaiian goddess of volcanoes). My metaphysical beliefs are hard to articulate and hard to pin down, and frankly they fluctuate with time. Jericha, on the other hand, has a steadfast and unshakable faith in the teachings of Baha'u'llah. Because I have always found most of the teachings of the Baha'i Faith sensible - with some notable exceptions - I never felt that my wife and I were incompatible on account of the Faith. We had a number of conversations, sometimes quite heated, in the early stages of our relationship about our metaphysical and spiritual differences, and before we married I was confident that we had found enough common ground.

In retrospect, I suppose we hadn't actually found common ground. Perhaps I didn't let Jericha express herself enough, or perhaps I didn't listen closely enough when she did. The truth was, the common ground I felt we had was insufficient for her. It was not enough that I support her service and respect her faith; I had to join in her service and practice her faith, or else she could not be happy with me as her husband. The first letter she ever wrote to me, at the beginning of our relationship, ended with the line "help me worship God." I thought, in my own way, I did exactly that. I offered insight into how to better teach the kids in her junior youth group. I let them use - sometimes begrudgingly, I'll admit - our apartment for their meetings. I supported Jericha's decision to do full time service to her faith (with a paltry, for the Bay Area, stipend) instead of getting a normal job. I agreed to move into a neighborhood I never would have chosen myself in order to support that service further. To me, this was helping her worship God. To me, this was the meaning of love and marriage: there was little I would not for her do if she asked.

What I could not do, though, was be a Baha'i. I never understood that what she meant when she said "help me worship God" was actually "worship God with me." However far I was willing to bend for her, my fundamental disagreements with the metaphysical teachings of the Baha'i Faith - and some of the physical ones, as well - made it impossible for me to engage seriously in Baha'i prayer with her. In her own words, I "neutralized" her spiritual energy, because when she would come home full of that energy she felt she could not share it with me. Of course, that easily becomes a vicious cycle. She can't share her faith with me, so she doesn't try, so she can't share her faith with me. Add in to that the emotional and spiritual turmoil that I've been going through for the past year and a half, and you have a recipe for disaster.

So she ran from me. Ever since she started her full-time service, Jericha has been working more than full time. We had little time together even when I was a PhD student, but in 2014, while I embarked on my streaming experiment, Jericha redoubled her service work to the point that we saw each other for perhaps a few hours a week at most. Most days, including weekends, she left the apartment by 8 or 9 in the morning, and didn't come home until 10 or 11 at night, promptly going to bed. We would share a meal together once every week or two, and she would often spend that meal reading and responding to text messages from fellow Baha'is. By my estimation she was working between 80 and 100 hours every week, and, what's more, she took our car with her wherever she went, so I was stranded at home. Realistically, streaming was the only "job" I could have done for those five months.

I have no doubt that I didn't do enough to keep us together during this time, but I'll excuse myself on two accounts. The first is that I had no idea that Jericha was thinking of divorcing me. Had she given me any indication, I would have worked as hard as I could to salvage our marriage. But the moment that she first said the word divorce was mere weeks before her actual leaving me. The second is that I was still working through my own emotional issues surrounding my father's suicide and my decision to leave Stanford. I suppose I cannot blame my wife for finding me an unfit partner through 2013 and early 2014, because I truly was at an emotional and spiritual nadir. What bothers me, though, is that rather than being there for me and trying to lift me up, she summarily declared me insufficiently spiritual and left me. Marriage, to me, is not only about enjoying each other's company in the good times, but also about helping each other and sticking together through the bad.

In contrast to Jericha, I see my mother, who stuck with my father through infidelity and a lifelong battle with alcoholism. At his best, my father was a kind, caring, and intelligent man. But he was rarely at his best. Often he was at his worst, and his worst was dark, delusional, cruel, deeply irrational, angry, and consistently drunk and high. In short, his worst was far, far worse than my worst, which is a little sullen and moody, overly cynical, and perhaps a bit too sedentary. Once depressed, it takes a little effort to pull me out of my shell, but I don't have any chemical dependencies and really only want to spend time with someone I love.

In 2013 and the first half of 2014, I spent almost no time with the person I loved most, at a time when I most needed to spend time with someone I loved. And yet not once did I believe I would divorce Jericha. Not once did I actually think that our marriage was doomed. Not once did I realize that she was in the process of leaving me already. I believed that her commitment to me was as strong as mine to her, and I believed, moreover, that her service was so important to her that I dare not impose on it overmuch. If service made her happy, let her do service.

One of the things she told me after she left me was that she considered my desire to spend time with her selfish. Of course, people going through a divorce say many hurtful things to each other, but this particular barb still sticks with me, because I disagree with it so fundamentally. Is it truly selfish to want to spend time with your spouse? Is it selfish to ask your spouse to love you just a little bit more than she loves other people? Is it selfish to want to be the most important person in your spouse's life? For my part, I married Jericha because I loved her not just a little, but a lot more than anyone else. I married her because I wanted to spend time with her, to play games with her, and to travel with her. I wanted to support her in what she did and to make her happy. I wanted to be there for her when things weren't going well, and for her to be there for me. To be told that all of that is selfish was shocking and painful. To be told by your spouse that she loves you, but no more and no differently than she loves all of humanity is worse than being told that she doesn't love you at all. I'd take her hatred over her ambivalence, any day.

Ambivalence is what I have received, however, and it still puzzles me to no end. It puzzles me because she married me, and because she maintains that getting married was a good decision. I find that baffling. If divorcing someone is the right decision, aren't you admitting, tacitly, that getting married was a wrong decision? The astrologer in me says, "Ah yes, Paul, but Jericha is half-Sagittarius, and this is how Sagittariuses think; they love you and leave you and don't see how you could possibly be upset about it." The cynic and critic of repressive religious teaching in me says, "This is how Bahai's work; they marry young to assuage their sexual guilt (they aren't even supposed to kiss before marriage) and eventually realize that they married the wrong person."

On this later point I offer a further thought. Baha'is, I learned after some digging, actually have a significantly higher divorce rate than the general population, despite quite explicit condemnation of divorce in their holy texts. I believe this owes to their extremely repressive sexual ethic. Even in marriage, sex is looked down upon at best, which means any sexually active Baha'i must needs cultivate a continuous sense of guilt. Furthermore, the Baha'i teachings on marriage paint the experience of being married in such glowing, impossibly magical terms that it's no wonder a Baha'i might easily find fault in their spouse if their marriage is not continuous bliss and mutual service. Baha'u'llah's expectation for the Baha'i husband and wife is so high that living up to it is nigh impossible, even for the faithful (much less for the heathen like me, who believes with Whitman that the body and the soul are not separate and that sex is as holy as prayer). So a Baha'i couple has to live with a continuous sense of inadequacy - especially if they have sex sometimes - that is crippling to the kind of self-confidence and comfort that I think is essential to a successful relationship. It's hard to have a sense of humor about your marriage when God is always judging you inadequate. And if God is judging you inadequate, how long until your partner does the same? Perhaps four years?

For my part, continuous judgment and perpetual inadequacy was a part of why I left Stanford: it's a part of the Silicon Valley world where wild success is expected and anything less is considered abject failure, leading to a lot of over-stressed and unbalanced people. I can't imagine applying the same kind of standard to my marriage. Relationships take work, sure, but they shouldn't be a perpetual job or chore. What I wanted out of my marriage was safety, security, and love. I wanted a friend who would spend time with me. I wanted a partner who wasn't afraid to try new things and who didn't feel guilty about being in love with me. I wanted to be loved and committed to in the way that I loved and committed to my spouse. As it turned out, what Jericha wanted was something very different, and she didn't tell me until after she decided to leave. I think that is the bitterest pill to swallow, and the one I'll have to fight with for longest: I was never really given a chance.

Which takes me to today. I've moved to Huntington Beach, just south of Los Angeles, for a job teaching middle school English at LePort, a small but growing network of private schools. The past two months have been emotionally difficult, of course, but also life-affirming. In Jericha's leaving I found strength that I had forgotten. My marriage was, in truth, a miserable one, in part because I was not at my best, and in part because Jericha truly left me two years ago, but waited to tell me until this May. In that time I had lost track of a lot that I cared about, things that I have rediscovered in the interim. I have started hiking again, and meditating. I have begun cooking for myself for the first time since I was a Master's student at Stanford. Since I arrived in Huntington Beach I've been regularly waking up and running first thing in the morning (I hope to surf again soon, too, but I've got to get into surfing shape first).

Would I have rediscovered these things in my marriage? It's hard to say. I believe I could have if my wife had actually loved me for who I was and been there for me in my darkest hour. I am recovering not just from a failed marriage, but from the grief of losing a father and a grandfather and an uncle and an imagined career as a researcher and the mentors and friends that went with that career. It hasn't been an easy recovery, but it's a recovery I believe I would have made even in my marriage - or even faster in my marriage - had my marriage been healthy. But I truly am recovering. I still have moments of sadness and still feel a great deal of anger at being mislead and abandoned by a woman I loved dearly, but recently I have also felt a joy and hope and excitement that I hadn't felt in years. I run when I wake up because I wake up with energy and optimism, and it feels good.

I still have my insecurities and fears. I've never been a socialite (I'm deeply introverted), and it's intimidating being in a city where I know almost no one. I have to make new friends, as part of this new life, and that's never been easy for me because I've always been a man of a few close friends rather than many acquaintances. I also know little about how to meet women or date. I've been in my relationship with Jericha since I was in college and have never been both single and an adult before. But I have faith that my honesty, intelligence, and enthusiasm for life - an enthusiasm which I had all but lost - will suffice to keep me happy in the coming months and years. I will be an excellent teacher, an excellent friend, and an excellent partner in a relationship when the time comes. Above all, I will be true to myself as I explore my latest unexpected path, and I will rejoice in its particulars. And so my blog's (somewhat pretentious) title and tag line prove themselves again: "Oh friends, not these tones. Let us sing yet more joyfully."

Wedding Script

The following is the script for the wedding last Sunday. Some quick background... Jericha and I lost our officiant to personal matters a few weeks before the wedding, which meant we had to re-conceptualize the entire ceremony. While we of course still had someone to sign our official papers, we decided to essentially run the wedding ourselves, along with our four-person wedding party (my brother, my college roommate, his girlfriend, and one of Jericha's friends from work). For good measure, and to make sure we were "pono" (the Hawaiian word for doing things the right way) we added in my friend and teacher, Kumu Keahi Renaud. The result was something a little different, which hopefully I can convey at least in part by posting the script.

Underlines indicate people's instructions, bold indicates things that were read. Italics represent non-verbal instructions. I have not attempted to recapture the stories that were told or the extemporaneous speeches here. You'll just have to imagine.

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Guests enter and mingle. At as near 12:30 as is reasonable, Jericha enters as Keahi chants, letting everyone know that the ceremony is about to start.

Joe and Monika; then James and Sagen, walk down aisle and set up.

Keahi chants, leading in Paul and Jericha.

Keahi gives brief introduction and describes his chant.

Paul does brief introduction of ceremony.

Paul reads:

From 'Song of Myself,' by Walt Whitman

All truths wait in all things.
They neither hasten their own delivery nor resist it,
They do not need the obstetric forceps of the surgeon,
The insignificant is as big to me as any,
(What is less or more than a touch?)

Logic and sermons never convince,
The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul.

(Only what proves itself to every man and woman is so,
Only what nobody denies is so.)

A minute and a drop of me settle my brain,
I believe the soggy clods shall become lovers and lamps,
And a compend of compends is the meat of a man or woman,
And a summit and a flower there is the feeling they have for each other,
And they are to branch boundlessly out of that lesson until it becomes omnific,
And until one and all shall delight us, and we them.

Jericha introduces the prayer she will read.

Prayer from Abdu'l-Baha

Jericha reads:

O God! Refresh and gladden my spirit. Purify my heart. Illumine my powers. I lay all my affairs in Thy hand. Thou art my Guide and my Refuge. I will no longer be sorrowful and grieved; I will be a happy and joyful being. O God! I will no longer be full of anxiety, nor will I let trouble harass me. I will not dwell on the unpleasant things of life.

O God! Thou art more friend to me than I am to myself. I dedicate myself to Thee, O Lord.

pause

Paul introduces the passage.

From “The Restaurant at the End of the Universe,” by Douglas Adams

Paul reads:

“There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.”

Paul introduces Joe's passage and story.

Jean Paulhan on Love; and Joe will tell a story.

Joe reads:

"For today we hear seemingly normal people, even those with a level head on their shoulders, blithely speaking of love as though it were some frothy feeling of no real consequence. They say it offers many pleasures, and that this contact of two epidermises is not completely devoid of charm. They go on to say that charm or pleasure is most rewarding for the person who is capable of keeping love imaginative, capricious, and above all natural and free. Far be it from me to object, and if it's all that simple for two people of the opposite sex (or even of the same sex) to give each other a good time, then indeed they should, they would be crazy not to. There are only one or two words in all this which disturb me: the word love, and the word free. Needless to say, it is quite the opposite. Love implies dependence - not only in its pleasure but by its very existence and in what precedes its existence: in our very desire to exist - dependence on half a hundred odd little things: on two lips (and the smile or grimace they make), on a shoulder (and the special way it has of rising or falling), on two eyes (and their expression, a little more flirtatious or forbidding), or, when you come down to it, on the whole foreign body, with the mind and soul enclosed therein - a body which is capable at any moment of becoming more dazzling than the sun, more freezing than a tract of snowy waste. To undergo the experience is no fun, you make me laugh with your entreaties. When this body stoops down to fasten the buckle of her dainty shoe, you tremble, and you have the feeling the whole world is watching you."

Joe tells story

pause

Jericha introduces her passage.

From Baha'u'llah

Jericha reads:

The hearts that yearn after Thee, O my God, are burnt up with the fire of their longing for Thee, and the eyes of them that love Thee weep sore by reason of their crushing separation from Thy court, and the voice of the lamentation of such as have set their hopes on Thee hath gone forth throughout Thy dominions.

Thou hast Thyself, O my God, protected them, by Thy sovereign might, from both extremities. But for the burning of their souls and the sighing of their hearts, they would be drowned in the midst of their tears, and but for the flood of their tears they would be burnt up by the fire of their hearts and the heat of their souls. Methinks, they are like the angels which Thou hast created of snow and of fire.

Jericha introduces Monika's poem.

A “Rima” from Gustavo Aldofo Becquer; and Monika will tell a story

Monika reads:

¿Qué es poesía?, dices mientras clavas
en mi pupila tu pupila azul;
¡Qué es poesía! ¿Y tú me lo preguntas?
Poesía... eres tú.

Monika tells story

pause

Paul introduces his quotation.

From “Beyond Good and Evil, ” F. Nietszche

Paul reads:

Supposing truth is a woman - what then? Are there not grounds for the suspicion that all philosophers, insofar as they were dogmatists, have been very inexpert about women? That the gruesome seriousness, the clumsy obtrusiveness with which they have usually approached truth so far have been awkward and very improper methods for winning a woman’s heart?

Paul introduces Sagen's poem

I Have Five Things to Say – by Rumi; and Sagen will tell a story

Sagen reads:

The wakened lover speaks directly to the beloved,
“You are the sky my spirit circles in,
the love inside love, the resurrection-place.

Let this window be your ear.
I have lost consciousness many times
with longing for your listening silence,
and your life-quickening smile.

You give attention to the smallest matters,
my suspicious doubts, and to the greatest.

You know my coins are counterfeit,
but you accept them anyway,
my impudence and my pretending!

I have five things to say,
five fingers to give
into your grace.

First, when I was apart from you,
this world did not exist,
nor any other.

Second, whatever I was looking for
was always you.

Third, why did I ever learn to count to three?

Fourth, my cornfield is burning!

Fifth, this finger stands for Rabia,
and this is for someone else.
Is there a difference?

Are these words or tears?
Is weeping speech?
What shall I do, my love?”

So he speaks, and everyone around
begins to cry with him, laughing crazily,
moaning in the spreading union
of lover and beloved.

This is the true religion. All others
are thrown-away bandages beside it.

This is the sema of slavery and mastery
dancing together. This is not-being.

Neither words, nor any natural fact
can express this.

I know these dancers.
Day and night I sing their songs
in this phenomenal cage.

My soul, don't try to answer now!
Find a friend, and hide.
But what can stay hidden?
Love's secret is always lifting its head
out from under the covers,
“Here I am!”

Sagen tells story

pause

Jericha introduces her passage.

From Baha’u’llah

Jericha reads:

In this journey the seeker reacheth a stage wherein he seeth all created things wandering distracted in search of the Friend. How many a Jacob will he see, hunting after his Joseph; he will behold many a lover, hasting to seek the Beloved, he will witness a world of desiring ones searching after the One Desired. At every moment he findeth a weighty matter, in every hour he becometh aware of a mystery; for he hath taken his heart away from both worlds, and set out for the Ka'bih of the Beloved. At every step, aid from the Invisible Realm will attend him and the heat of his search will grow.

One must judge of search by the standard of the Majnun of Love. It is related that one day they came upon Majnun sifting the dust, and his tears flowing down. They said, "What doest thou?" He said, "I seek for Layli." They cried, "Alas for thee! Layli is of pure spirit, and thou seekest her in the dust!" He said, "I seek her everywhere; haply somewhere I shall find her."

Jericha introduces James

James will tell a story and then lead us in a song.

James tells last story

James instructs audience to stand, leads everyone in singing “Simple Gifts / Lord of the Dance / Ode to Joy:”

'Tis a gift to be simple, 'tis a gift to be free,

'Tis a gift to come down where we ought to be,
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
It will be in the valley of love and delight.

When true simplicity is gain'd,
To bow and to bend we will not be asham'd,
To turn and turn will be our delight
'Till by turning, turning we come round right.

The moon in her phases and the tides of the sea
The movement of the Earth and the seasons that will be
Are the rhythm of the dancing and a promise through the year
That the dance goes on through our joy and tears

Dance, then, whoever you may be
I am the Lord of the Dance, said he!
And I'll lead you all, wherever you may be
I will lead you all in the Dance with me.

I danced in the morning when the world was begun
I danced in the moon and the stars and the sun
They buried my body and they thought that I had gone
But I am the Dance and I still go on!

Dance, dance, whoever you may be
I am the Lord of the Dance, said he!
And I'll lead you all, wherever you may be
I will lead you all in the Dance with me.

A moment of joy is a spark divine
When you drink it in your soul begins to shine,
And you'll find yourself full of peace and light,
At last in the valley of love and delight!

Love, peace, and joy will bring
The world's men and women under their wing
And together we will dance and together we will sing
And all through the valley our joy will ring!

Audience cheers, James signals them to sit down. James introduces vows.

Paul and Jericha turn towards each other.

Paul reads to Jericha:

O me! O life! Of the questions of these recurring,
Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill'd with the foolish,
Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)
Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the struggle ever renew'd,
Of the poor results of all, of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me,
Of the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest me intertwined,
The question, O me! So sad, recurring – What good amid these, O me, O life?

Answer.
That you are here – that life exists and identity,
That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.

Jericha reads to Paul:

Our union is like this:

You feel cold
So I reach for a blanket to cover
Our shivering feet.

A hunger comes into your body
So I run to my garden
And start digging potatoes.

You ask for a few words of comfort and guidance,
I quickly kneel at your side offering you
A whole book--
As a gift.

You ache with loneliness one night
So much you weep

And I say,

Here's a rope,
Tie it around me,

I
Will be your companion
For life.

Paul and Jericha pass books to Joe and Monika.

James and Sagen present rings and leis.

Paul takes Jericha's ring and lei.

Paul says final line:

We will all, verily, abide by the will of God.

Places ring on her finger, and lei around neck.

Jericha takes Paul's ring and lei, turns and says:

We will all, verily, abide by the will of God.

Places ring on his finger, and lei around neck.

Paul and Jericha kiss.

Keahi closes ceremony with brief statement, then chants leading Paul and Jericha off, followed by James and Sagen, then Monika and Joe.