UNLOVED, UNENGAGED, UNMARRIED
Women are much unhappier in marriage than men. They do the majority of care work and often have to forgo their own wishes and needs. Divorce can be a solution. Not an easy path. The author Karina Lübke has taken it after twenty-two years of marriage and two teenage children. A text about the courage to return to one's old life and to begin a new one.
By Karina Lübke
It was one of the most beautiful days of my life: My bridesmaids, who are my oldest friends, sat in elegant dresses to the left and right of me at the set and decorated table. I smelled their familiar perfume, enjoyed their closeness and love. They had brought gifts and bouquets of flowers. From a cloudless, ice-blue winter sky, the sun shone bright blonde through the windows of the fully occupied Café Paris, located just one street away from Hamburg's town hall. Even the dust particles glittered festively in its spotlight beam. In the background, the clatter of dishes, laughter, and a babble of voices.
We raised our glasses of cold Crémant: "Good luck! To you!" said one. "Yes, to us! Thank you for being here," I replied euphorically and touched at the same time. We clinked glasses and drank. The feeling of ecstatic lightheartedness was not only due to the unusual alcohol intake in the morning. A hopeful future unfolded, and fresh wind blew to me. Everything was a new beginning, back to the big win! I felt like I was in my early twenties again, as if everything in life was still possible for me – no, better: as if I had already made the really important decisions – career, children, friends – correctly and now the rest of my life was mainly a playground for me. Between silk painting and sex, everything would be possible in the future.
Hungry, I bit into the buttery croissant and took a big sip of café au lait. From the nearby town hall tower, the bell struck twelve. The sculptural bronze clock above the entrance portal represents the beginning and end of life; the child on his mother's lap strikes the quarter hours, then death strikes the full hours. How fitting! The court appointment had been at 10 o'clock. For two hours I had been a divorced woman. Once I wore a big white dress and saw black, today a little black dress and looked through rose-colored glasses at my new independent life. After twenty-two years of marriage and two teenage children, I felt like I had finally returned to myself. To recognize myself again.
Yes, the years before the separation and the then endlessly drawn-out divorce process after so many years together, accounts, and children were terrible and extremely painful. No, I also once did not want that; I had married out of love and after its end fought for her, argued, cried, and mourned. But now I was glad to have made this decision. Better to downsize the lifestyle than to keep belittling oneself, because between the death of a marriage and real death can lie a felt eternity. Seriously: How many old couples do you know where you believe they are still happy together and do not maintain their mutual dislike as their greatest commonality? Yes, those you assume or even know still have sex, and even with each other? I personally know three - and I know many people!
Very few women who are not Britney Spears marry on a whim because they just stumbled drunk past a wedding chapel in Vegas. However, probably no one marries to increasingly lose their own life while alternatingly working harder and harder at the job, household, and relationship. A good wife is still supposed to function like a Thermomix today: a one-time expensive basic purchase into which everyone then throws a bunch of demands, tasks, and expectations daily so that it conjures something nourishing for body and soul. When children come along, the care never ends.
The "Fathers' Report 2016" from the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs concluded that only 14 percent of parents actually live a partnership-based family model. The "Fathers' Report 2021" now revealed, surprise: 92 percent of working fathers with children under ten years old work full-time jobs. The following note in the study is probably meant to console: "But not even half of the men think that's good." Theoretical, indeed! Sociologists call this verbal openness combined with widespread behavioral rigidity. You can only guess who takes care of the children together (besides a part-time job without promotion prospects and usually parked in the fool tax class 3 due to the outdated spouse splitting). Studies on the "Equal Care Day" also confirm every year that, unlike mothers, modern fathers generally lose neither sleep nor career: The "gender gap" begins at birth. The man moves on and continues his well-paid (work) life, while the well-educated and until then equal mother stays "for now" at home, doing unpaid care work for the future pension contributors on which the entire economic system is based. From potential millionaire to dishwasher. Out of love. You get so much back! Just no money, no retirement provision, no respect, and no kindergarten place anyway.
In recent years, I have often seen women look ten years younger after losing 90 kilos of husband.
There is this cool rock 'n' roll motto: "It's better to burn out than to fade away." Long-time wives and mothers easily manage both: having a burnout and at the same time fading away more and more. Of course, they keep functioning anyway. They absolutely want to keep the pack together, at least until the children move out of the parental home. Corona has further intensified the imbalance and the gender care gap – after all, it was primarily women who stepped in everywhere and took on (even more) caregiving tasks; who had to forcibly qualify themselves as teachers for their schoolchildren in addition to household and home office. No wonder that after the first lockdown, despite fear for jobs and the future, the number of separations increased. Nowadays, every third marriage ends in divorce, most after an average of 15 years. Separations often happen when children arrive and then again when the children leave. Because it is true that women, after a certain age and a long period of love service, simply can no longer do many things: admire men for their sheer maleness, laugh at sexist or unfunny jokes, tidy up after their partner, organize vacations and social life, and be sexually available despite lack of desire. Seven out of ten divorces are filed by women, some even after 35 years. And that, although in Germany, after the completely misguided and poorly executed "maintenance reform" of 2008, wives who have long held back professionally in favor of child-rearing and unpaid and unappreciated family work have significantly worse financial prospects.
Since women more or less consciously see a happy partnership and family as their task, a separation or even divorce often feels like personal failure to them. They therefore constantly work lonely overtime in relationship work. Only when their needs for loving connection, support, and emotional understanding have been hopelessly frustrated and eroded over many years do they eventually think like the ex-wife of "Spiegel" editor Jan Fleischhauer, who named his marital processing book after his wife's final sentence: "Anything is better than one more day with you." And while husbands, masters of magical wishful thinking, even after decades full of arguments, pleas, silence, tears, and therapy attempts, "did not see the final separation wish of their wife coming at all" and after the first shock look for a replacement for their wife to avoid moving into assisted living, ex-wives find their dream woman after separation: themselves! A nice surprise.
According to a survey by American couples therapist Jennifer Garvin among divorced women, one in three already doubted before marriage whether this was really the only "right" man among the currently available 4 billion men worldwide. When women think no but say yes, it’s due to the panic of the closing gate, the expectations of their social environment, the desire to wear a beautiful wedding dress like their friends, and a biological clock showing five minutes to pregnant. You shouldn’t let the yes-word be dictated by fear of loneliness: "If you have doubts, don’t do it," advises the expert. Fortunately, it’s never too late to stop.
A while ago, I was at a mothers' class reunion. We all met when our first children were enrolled together in class 1b 15 years ago. Back then, we were a homogeneous, privileged group with husbands, one to three children, a second car, and a dog. There were only two single mothers among us, exotic cases who mostly kept to themselves, as if it were contagious. The first divorce hit in grade 2 like a tsunami in the family paradise, washing away, among other things, a weekend house, a condominium, a wine cellar, a pony, and a Porsche. The rest of the group watched in horror and vowed never to let it come to that. Now, 15 years later, well over 70 percent were divorced or separated. Many had come by bike or bus—more for economic than ecological reasons. At first, I didn’t even recognize some of them, but in a positive way: although almost all were short on money, they had gained an abundance of joy of life, attractiveness, and charisma. Our children were on their way to their own lives—and so were we.
In recent years, I have often seen women look ten years younger after losing 90 kilos of husband weight. Once you have a marriage behind you, fear of being alone is no longer an issue. Most divorced women are resourceful, independent, crisis-tested, practical, socially much better networked than men, and know from painful experience that you can never be lonelier than in an unhappy marriage. Unlike previous generations of women who had hardly any alternatives to enduring and tolerating an unhappy marriage, the generation of women between 40 and 60 knows a different life. They still remember well the pre-marital independence, the travels, the career, their ambitions, dreams, their own money, freedom. All of this is stored on their hard drive; they just have to find the folder again. If that succeeds, you live on as an updated, future-proof version of yourself.
But even though divorces are currently considered in books and films as the ultimate reinvention in midlife and the before-and-after effects are remarkable in many ways: hardly anyone enters the bond of life with the intention of divorcing again for whimsical lifestyle reasons. People have loved, married, hoped, and suffered to the utmost. Women move slowly – but powerfully. Yet for them, divorce is not a failure.
But rather – as for me here on this day – an alternative happy ending. A reason to celebrate.
Karina first studied design, earned a diploma in fashion, and then attended the Hamburg Journalism School with Wolf Schneider. She then became an editor and columnist at TEMPO and later wrote freelance for several magazines. Her monthly column "Bitte recht feindlich" in the magazine BARBARA has a large fan base and has been published as a book. In between, she got married and raised a daughter and a son. You can learn more here.
Her new book "Bitte recht feindlich" is now available in bookstores. It's about guys and kids and childish guys, about politics, society, money, and good words. And about love – despite everything. This book compiles her best columns from the magazine BARBARA and contains new, previously unpublished texts.