Who gets the dogs?
“You get the dogs.” She says as she takes a sip of her Hot Toddy, an unseasonably warm beverage to order poolside on July 4th in Southern California. Despite having an equally unseasonable cold in the middle of Summer a friend knows when not let your friends have a cocktail by themselves. This was one of those times.
I’d checked into a hotel just a few blocks from our home, where my three dogs, one cat, two garden beds and one ex-boyfriend were living. Maybe I kept the close proximity to avoid facing that this was the first time I took a step away, instead of towards him in a moment of anger. Away usually means leaving and until now, I didn’t think I ever would.
While friends of mine hosted joyful barbecues with their husbands and equally stable couple friends, I sat with two girlfriends trying to figure out how to unravel a five year relationship that up until a day ago I hadn’t accepted wasn’t going to end in marriage.
I nervously chewed the rim of a styrofoam cup and wondered what he’d say if he were sitting next to me- something about styrofoam being bad for the planet, maybe an irritable jab about my constant anxiousness that caused me to emulsify a styrofoam cup in the first place. When you know someone THAT WELL, you can hear them even when they aren’t there. The good and the bad comments. Their internal dialogue is interwoven into yours now after years of habit adjusting and communication molding in order for two people to fit like puzzle pieces that finally found each other. Mold, adjust, bend, shape, twist, surrender, repeat. The Make it Work Verbs as unofficially-officially written in every human brain that isn’t a quitter.
For months, interactions between us had been rocky, at best. Despite arguments being a natural and healthy element of all relationships, ours had turned into wars. The kind of war where neither had eventually switched teams, or changed voting status but rather a war that with two sides who had never not been an opponent. We were both in our 30’s now and halfway through my 30th year it clicked, this isn’t just a person I’m dating, this is the rest of my life and all of sudden, the rest of my life felt like it was going to be a battle neither of us had a chance of winning.
Truthfully, the majority of our relationship the future between us looked safe in many regards. I could see us settling in Ventura or Ojai, close enough to work and industry in Los Angeles but far enough to take ourselves seriously as “real grownup people.” We agreed one that. Ending up somewhere our future children would learn to surf and be the perfectly cliche SoCal picture of green juices and good vibes. That felt right to me, to us.
We’d open a yoga studio and settle into our usual evening routine where he fell asleep on the couch at 8pm, I’d attempt to shake him awake until eventually I gave up, curling into bed with the fur babies, slightly lonely and wide awake until we repeated it all over again.
Weekends were beaches, dinners were Mexican food (always Mexican, it was our favorite) and family vacations were particularly special. My sister’s boyfriend and him became great friends, my sister adored him, it fit, it worked, it was very safe. Other than the whole, “California is going to fall into the Ocean eventually,” statements that he made frequently enough to want to eventually move out of California. This alarmist perspective didn’t necessarily make me feel safe at all actually, especially considering we didn’t own a single shred of Earthquake gear if in fact said event occurred. Albeit, his belief that it would eventually happen was absolute, his follow-through however to ensure we would have reinforcements if/when we tumbled into the Pacific Ocean was nonexistent. It was something as subtle and hypothetical as this Statement vs. Action scenario that would run on loop in my brain for days…. “Wouldn’t I want my San-Andreas-Fault- Fearing-Husband to at the very least buy a few extra gallons of water or a fucking flare for the pantry?” I’d think. Eventually every inaction or lack of follow through felt like a warning sign: Your Future Husband Will Let You Fall Into the Ocean Without A Flare or Life Raft In Sight. Sidebar: He Knew It Was Coming. End Scene.
We both had unconventional jobs and spent more time together than the average couple who saw each other post-work, or on the weekends. Maybe this is what gave us the space to start taking one another for granted? To say the mean thing, to overlook the good. To stop trying all together to work through it. Maybe we shared too much; our space, our time, our things, our money…. Our hearts. I didn’t want to believe that partnership had perimeters we weren’t meant to cross. Wasn’t that the point? To me, that was part of the privilege of sharing your heart at all. This was partnership. What’s mine is yours, what’s yours is mine, material and immaterial.
“I can’t take the dogs. He’ll never let me do that.” I say through a numb Aperol Spritz buzz.
“The big dogs are his.” My other friend chimes in. A friend I can’t help but mentally note he never liked, despite her currently standing up for him. Come to think of it, he didn’t like most of my friends. I shake off the obvious red flag that hung over my head the entirely of our relationship to stay on topic, but as I spit another piece of styrofoam into what was once a cup, I cringe...knowing all of the “red flags,” I inevitably turned into acceptable norms. Can’t fix it? Accept it.
HIS rings in my ears. The word felt foreign and offensive. The big dogs were HIS?! I wanted to scream. The division of “US,” and “OURS,” felt like severing a limb. I didn’t even know what “ME,” or “MINE,” looked like.
Technically, they were “his.” When we met he had them, I wasn’t their “mom,” from the beginning but I became their mom. Had these two darling pitbulls not curled their dense, sensitive bodies next to mine every moment during the two-year depression that left me mostly home or on a marathon of “bed days,” that i’d only break for sustenance or a walk where I’d talk myself through panic one step at a time, I may not have actually made it. They were mine. They saved me. They were in my heart as deeply as a person could be, so doesn’t that make them mine too?
The third dog actually was “mine,” as far as semantics are concerned. I’d gotten her when my ex had moved away for a year for work. But I knew just as well as he did that she was his too.
It wasn’t just animals that were caught in the division of our assets it was everything; family, friend groups, restaurants, social gatherings, furniture, debt, phone plans, vehicles, concert tickets.
“What will you do with ‘The Van’?”
During a particularly potent period of wanderlust we had purchased a 1984 Westfalia Vanagon that we had pimped out in all its hippie glory; vibrant Magnolia wallpaper on the ceiling, Shibori throws, distressed wood flooring, stickers from each pitstop/pee-stop/picture-stop and at least ten grand of mechanical work. While it was costly it was an investment at the time that was for the long term. A freedom vessel we could jump in and drive up the coast, away from reality into an incense soaked haze. A place “our kids” would eventually create their favorite memories, just like we had. Sunny, Penny, Daisy…. They would have had names like that, our “kids.”
So how could we have all of this and have it still end? Sometimes, I wonder if we would’ve gotten married earlier if we would’ve transcended this rocky period. Had more willingness to “figure it out,” and make the compromises we needed to make. Had we shared more of our individuality and less of our “things,” would we still be dividing them? Had we surrendered for the sake of compromise and compassion, versus winning and victory would we have remembered to love each other above all?
“We’ll have to sell it.” i said. Hoping it would be true, knowing full well he’d keep it….he’d make memories with someone new named Amanda or Lauren in it. Someone who would sit shotgun and take selfies, with her pink toes on the dash. Always pink, that Amanda. Someone who didn’t care much about “van life,” but had a beautifully curated Instagram feed and a Pure Barre teaching certificate. Someone who didn’t know I’d had a panic attack on the floor in that van somewhere in the Santa Ynez valley. That I’d drawn photos in a journal of Eucalyptus trees, next to prayers and dreams all of which included this van and this life. That I’d knocked over a Venti cup full of pee once somewhere on highway 33 reaching for the fan we’d purchased so that we; the dogs and us didn’t die of what I was convinced was a gas leak as we chugged up a hill. That i’ve never laughed or cried or caused as much of a fit as I did that day to-date. Amanda/Lauren will never know the origin of most of it...just as my Justin/Chance won’t.
The reality of how deep the entanglement of two lives combined into one is spooks me enough that for a moment, I consider running home and working it out. Calling a truce. It’s too much. We’ll settle. We’ll allow all the bad to be good enough to get through and we’ll function. We'll be good again, god damnit, I'll will it to be.
Then my friend said it, in her gravely straight shooting Chicagoan drawl, “It’s the Millennial Divorce.”
She was right. It was THE MOTHER EFFIN MILLENNIAL DIVORCE.
Statistically, about seven-in-ten Millennials (68%) have never been married, and those who are married have put marriage off until their later adult years. Which means longer, deeper adult relationships, more time to merge lives and almost more time to spend learning who you are and what is or isn’t going to make you happy for the remainder of your life. Career is more established by the time you’re in your late twenties or early thirties, you’ve likely been on enough dates in your twenties to weed through the BS you don’t want long term and now, you’re pickier, relatively stable emotionally and financially and without a legally binding contract that says, “this will be hard to divide, so work it out.”
The decision to “divorce,” the relationship is equally thought out while arguably being the easier way out of what our parents generation would’ve muscled another ten years through, had a few kids until ultimately it ended in a messy, expensive farewell, fueled with resentment for it taking fifteen years longer than they hoped it would to say goodbye.
So instead, The Millennials are jumping ship before walking the aisle. At the same time the endings of these relationships possess a depth that perhaps our parents relationships didn’t at this age and phase of their lives. More time together, less time tending to children and coming together at an older age when our sense of self was stronger and more certain than they may have if we had married at 23 and divorced at 31.
Unlike legal divorces, many of The Millennial Divorces end civilly, respectfully and sustained by an undercurrent of bittersweet reluctance to let them go.
“He’ll keep the dogs.” I say. I know a joint-parenting option would be on the table, because not only do we both know that we love those sweet angels but we also love each other. Maybe not like we once did. But I liked to think we loved each other enough to want happiness for one another, even if that means away from each other. But realistically, I know how this washes out. One of us begins dating. Another takes a job in a different city. A few months go on and the thoughtful attempts to stay connected to the pieces of our lives that we once shared together begin to dissolve. Because unlike a legally binding divorce, there is no judge to rule that we must continue serving each other's needs. No mandatory visitations, no bi-weekly meetings where we exchange niceties and keys to the “The Freedom Vessel,” swapping weekend getaway plans.
The intention to merge our lives into one, while maintaining our sense of autonomy served our trepidation towards long term commitment and in the end left little but TimeHop photos on Facebook to remember a once happy and loving life together. One that I’d mostly only remembered in photos by the time it all ended.
Not a shred of physical evidence was left that we were once building a life together. That all I am now, is also a result of all I became because we were becoming as individuals together at one time.
There’s no alimony. No couches that we once made love on being shifted from one rental to another. He’ll get the place if he wants it (he didn’t.) I’ll get the cat. He’ll get the plants. “Gypsies shouldn’t have plants,” he said once and of the many insults that were wrapped in charm that he and I slung at one another towards the end, that one was correct. Plants need roots, gypsies don’t.
And while the Millennial Divorce leaves you in the end with virtually nothing, the indelible impression of a person who shaped you enough to give you the courage to leave and become exactly who you want to be sticks forever.
