Over the last few weeks, a friend of mine has been bugging me to watch a movie that he really enjoyed. The movie, "Marriage Story," is a Netflix original and has a great cast with Adam Driver, Scarlett Johansson, Laura Dern, Ray Liotta, and Alan Alda. It's hard to argue with those heavy hitters who have been in some of my favorite movies over my lifetime.
Maybe it was the wrong time of night to watch this movie, or the wrong time of the month. The height of winter, especially February, does strange things to my emotions. I generally stick to crime shows that are predictable and standard. Nothing sneaks up on me. Especially not...feelings. So there I am at eleven at night watching this movie on my phone. There is a TV on my wall, but for some unknown reason, I chose the five inch screen over the thirty-six inch one.
I don’t want to give the movie away, but it is about divorce and that painful process. For anyone who has ever had to go through this, no matter how well it was handled, it takes a toll on your heart and mind. The thing that crushed me the most were the letters each of them had to write for a divorce mediator which outlined all the things they loved about the other. Scarlett Johansson’s character decided she didn’t want to read the letter because she didn’t like what she wrote, so neither of them hears the other’s thoughts. As a consumer of the film, we get to know what the letters contained.
What struck me most ,at the end of the movie, was that if they had read those letters to each other it could have mitigated all the painful actions in between. It showed me how far away we get from the reasons we fall in love in the first place. This can happen outside a marriage, in any relationship that starts to turn sour. When we begin to push away from our partner it is as if all those joys and idiosyncrasies that made the person attractive become the bullet points for an argument against.
My separation was a long time ago and the divorce followed slowly as we tried to be nice to each other and I fretted over paperwork not wanting to involve lawyers. A year or so ago we actually talked about the divorce for the first time. It had been twelve years. What we found was that neither of us knew what the other had felt or thought about the whole process, and lack of communication on both sides had destroyed the marriage. There were some great lessons learned through that conversation, but I’m not sure it would have saved the relationship at the time. It would have made the parting better for all parties, including our five year old.
After the separation and divorce, I had a series of unsuccessful relationships, each ending worse than the one before until the last one left me feeling like love was never an option again. Love is hard. It feels great but it is work and communication mixed in with all the mystery and wonder of meeting a new human. For me, love is always laced with fear. I do a lot of waiting for the other shoe to fall, and I know this makes me less likely to enjoy those moments of heart flutter and smiling.
“Marriage Story” is a great movie, but be warned that it can be triggering. It isn’t to say that I didn’t need to look at these things in my life and inspect why I react this way to love and the end of relationships. Grab a tissue...a box of tissues. Buckle yourself in. Have a friend on standby.
