Relationships and Marriage

Divorce is my blood.

My mother got her first divorce while I was still in her womb (and he wasn’t the father). She went through relationships like water. I can’t even recount how many men we lived with before I turned eight. Then she remarried when I was nine—and split again when I was fifteen.

My aunt and cousins have all been divorced at least once, several of them more than once. I’ve attended so many weddings that later ended in divorce, I used to wonder if I was a walking curse to matrimony.

This is the world I came from. Divorce wasn’t just common—it was expected. Normal. I grew up assuming nothing lasted.

Our society seems obsessed with breakups. Stand in line at the grocery store and you’ll see tabloid covers filled with cheating scandals and divorce rumors. But you’ll never see a cover that says “Couple Still Married After 27 Years.” Nobody gossips about lasting love.

Even from childhood, divorce was just in the air. The Brady Bunch was a blended family. One Day at a Time, Kate & Allie, Who’s the Boss—all centered around divorced characters. Kramer vs. Kramer won Best Picture when I was nine. Most of the kids I met at school came from broken homes.

So by the time I got down on one knee to ask my girlfriend to marry me, I wasn’t just proposing. I was making a declaration: this cycle ends with me.

During our engagement, we used to joke that staying together would be the ultimate F.U. to our parents, none of whom could hold a relationship together. But as the years passed, and I watched more friends, family—even celebrities—fall apart while our marriage stayed strong, I started wondering:

Why is marriage so easy for me when it’s so hard for everyone else?

Two conversations, years apart, eventually unlocked the answer.

One was with a friend going through a divorce. I’d known both of them since they met. He told me, “I knew she’d get mad, but I never thought she’d actually leave. That just wasn’t how I was raised.”

The second was with a man in an arranged marriage. I couldn’t wrap my head around the idea of letting your parents choose your spouse. But he was so happy—and so committed. He couldn’t understand why I waited to find a wife. We agreed to disagree, but I never forgot that conversation.

One day, years later, driving to a job, those two conversations collided in my head—and it clicked.
It explained every divorce I’d ever seen.
It explained how I’d dodged a fate that felt inevitable.
And it clarified what no one ever teaches us about staying married in a world that tells us how to quit.