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So what are the main lessons that I learned from my divorce? There are probably three things.
The first lesson is don’t engage.
And when I say that, I mean stop arguing with your soon to be ex. I’m not going to respond to those all CAPS texts that show up at midnight. It doesn’t matter. I’m not going to win. And I’m trying to end my marriage anyway, so who cares? The interesting part about this is when I stopped engaging, pretty soon afterward, my ex wife stopped engaging. So were able to focus on what really mattered, which was getting the divorce done, ending the marriage, and moving on with our lives.
The second lesson that I learned in my divorce is win the war, not the battles.
We were literally arguing about Tupperware during my divorce process. It wasn’t about the Tupperware itself.
It was about winning. Didn’t matter. Personal value, financial value, wanted to win. Toward the end of the divorce process, my lawyer said, hey, Dave, if you could pay $5,000 and get out of your divorce now, would you? And I was like, yeah, absolutely. Well, it turned out that if you added up everything that were fighting over, it was less than $5,000. So as soon as I realized that, I started focusing on what was really important. Getting the agreement done, ending the marriage, moving on.
So the third lesson learned is don’t keep score.
And actually, this is the lesson that I still use today and I still share with friends that are having marital challenges. So what does don’t keep score mean? I’m cooking dinner every night for the family. My spouse never says thank you.
So the next time my spouse does something nice, I’m not going to say thank you, because that way I can get even. Well, that’s wrong. But that’s what I was doing in my previous marriage. I learned along the way, with the help of some therapy, that you can’t do that. Marriage is not a balance sheet. There are no transactional debits and credits. So once I learned that, I started to focus on things that I wanted to do that made my marriage better, that helped my spouse feel better instead of trying to do something just to expect some sort of a response. So you need to do things because you want to, not because you expect a response.
And when I follow this advice and I don’t keep score, I find that I feel better about myself.
My wife certainly feels better about me, and our relationship gets better because of it, gets closer because of it. So it’s something that I literally have to think about every day. But when I follow it works out really well, and the marriage is better because of it.
