Ken Solin

For most men, the only thing worse than going through a divorce is experiencing the death of a loved one, which makes sense since divorce is the death of a relationship.

There’s the legal aspect of divorce that’s enormously painful. Having to pay hard earned money to lawyers, simply to make a deal over the death of the marriage is financially and emotionally devastating, and it’s not surprising most folks see divorce lawyers as scavengers or buzzards, who hover over death for personal gain. If you’re a divorce lawyer, perhaps you should have considered another area of law that doesn’t prey on men and women who are grieving. That’s my opinion, and not necessarily everyone’s view of divorce lawyers.

There’s also the child custody, child support, and visitation issues, that keep the vengeful fires of discontent burning hot. I’ve never understood why any rational person would use divorce as a method to punish an ex-mate by trying to keep them from their children. Rational person is the key in this argument, because rationality goes out the window as soon as a couple split up.

The loss of friends after divorce is not uncommon. People take sides and someone is left without a chair when the divorce music ends. For a man who didn’t have any close friends, the loss of friends who abandon them after divorce stings deep.

There are so many useful lessons to be gleaned after divorce, and it’s sad how few men pay attention to those lessons. What typically follows divorce, for men, is anger, and this anger overwhelms rational thought and common sense. The notion of punishment is powerful and prevents men from focusing on the valuable lessons that might help them avoid making the same mistakes again. I know this is true, because for men, second marriages end in divorce more frequently than first marriages. That’s because men haven’t paid attention, listened to their inner heroes, or been able to focus on their part of the failed marriage.

Here’s what I know to be true. Divorced men who share their pain, anger, disgust, disbelief, and contempt, with other like minded men, reap the rewards. I don’t mean that a man suffering a divorce needs other men to agree with him about his ex-wife or her part in the failed relationship. I mean that a man going through the pangs of divorce can benefit from getting his story out and then listening to other men who’ve shared his experience. The benefit for a recently divorced man is that he can look at his part of the failure and hopefully take ownership long enough to want to change his behavior so as not to repeat it. Angry men can learn how to drop their anger. Cheating men can figure out the real reasons they cheated. Men without emotional awareness can begin to listen to their inner heroes because that’s where a man’s heart resides.

The worst mistake a divorced man can make is to ignore his pain and let his anger govern his behavior. Using women for angry sex isn’t part of the healing process, and actually prolongs the agony since the root causes of a man’s failures have been pushed aside for immediate satisfaction, instead of gleaning important lessons. No single woman in her right mind would ever date a recently divorced man. That would be committing emotional suicide and a guaranty for pain.

Men need to stop suffering all alone in the dark. Too many men have no real men friends to counsel them and help them see beyond their immediate pain. Joining with other men in a small, confidential group can be a real lifesaver for a lot of guys. Men who have no friends will establish friendships that can last his lifetime. Men who’ve suffered their issues for decades can learn to leave them behind. Men who keep missing the mark in relationships can learn from the men who have worked through similar issues and make the changes necessary.

This is a guarantied win for men. There’s no downside. There’s only blue sky.
Act like a man!

Nothing I had ever experienced prepared me for what came after my divorce. The only thing about myself that was clear to me was that I was angry. Not just angry, but outraged. My ex-wife was an alcoholic who insisted at the end of our marriage that I was 100% responsible for the divorce. She insisted she had done nothing wrong.

I didn’t focus on the obvious, which was that it takes two to make a marriage work or end in divorce. I was focused on the notion that a woman had hurt me and done me wrong. My outrage was being left with children to raise and no acknowledgement that was going to prove difficult. I think I hated women with such passion and resolve that I dated for a long while as a way to get back at women. Sex became angry sex, and my out of control anger infested each relationship I became involved in until it spun out of orbit and crashed on the trash heap.

Sadly, what I’ve noticed over twenty years working with men is that few travel a different road than the one I chose. It’s easy to see how another man is ruining his life by allowing his divorce to influence every relationship after his divorce.

I remember vividly a time soon after my divorce when I met a woman and after a while asked her out. She said as kindly as possible, but firmly, “Call me in a year when you’re over your divorce.” That statement made me feel awful enough to consider its validity. Of course, she was right not to want to be with an angry man who was living in the past and couldn’t let go. But I also wondered where that left me in the dating world.

I brought my dilemma to my men’s group to discuss and found that every single man who had gotten divorced, behaved similarly. All of the men talked about angry sex and the desire to punish women for what they felt their ex-wives had done to them. But each man had figured out that his temporary blindness towards women was just that, temporary. A few of the wiser men decided to take a time out from dating until they’d struggled with their divorce demons and won.

I had always had a woman in my life since I was a teenager. I’d never taken a break from dating or being in a relationship. So I decided to follow what appeared to be wisdom, and stayed home until I no longer felt I was on a mission to take revenge on womanhood. It took several months to become self-aware regarding my “issue” with women, and a few months more to realize how wrong I’d been about any woman being responsible for my anger or grief.

I’ve written many blogs about angry men and men who seem oblivious to the emotional aspect of relationships. I’ve read many responses to my blogs from men who contend that women don’t deserve or need any emotional connection because all they want is sex too. They further contend that if and when a woman mentions the word emotional, that they want to run away as fast as they can. This type of disrespect for women is pervasive and troubling. That’s fact. What’s not written yet is whether or not enough men will take the bull that is their issue with women, by the horns, and wrestle with it sufficient to let go of their anger.

There’s another aspect of divorce that seems to throw a steady stream of gasoline onto an already raging blaze. It’s about children, child support, custody, and visitation rights. For many men, not paying child support is a method for getting back at an ex-wife. I understand that feeling of being seen as just a checkbook and not a man. But the child support a man pays to his ex-wife typically doesn’t begin to cover the true cost of raising children. I have rarely met a woman who was living high on the hog because she received child support.

Those children are the product of a man’s best intentions gone astray. A man who can let go of the notion that he can get back at his ex-wife by denying her child support is a man who will rapidly let go of his anger and move on. While I was mostly a single dad, there were times when my children lived with my ex-wife, and I recall how used and abused I felt writing her a check each month, and being asked to buy my boys new sneakers or clothing on top of what I sent.

These are your children, guys, and the more involved you remain, the better your relationship will be with them as they grow up. Write the check each month, mail it, and let your anger go at the mailbox. Don’t remain angry because it will preclude you from ever being in a good relationship again. Look at your anger and the causes for it, preferably with other men who’ve gone through your drama and come out the other side intact. A man doesn’t punish his children through his ex-wife. He recognizes his part of the fiasco and tries to do better the next time. An angry man who marries while still angry will only inflict pain on his new wife and himself.

The woman who declined dating me until I’d spent a year working through my divorce was right on the money. A woman who dates a man who recently divorced is only going to get his leftover anger and disappointment, not his heart.
Act like a man!

The deepest, most emotionally intimate relationships stumble when one or both people fail to manage their stress during periods of intense pressure in their lives.
This out of control stress affects people in every type of relationship.
Men and women frequently feel strangled with strife when one or both partners is feeling more stress than they are able to manage, and it can also occur between men in authentic friendships.
Any relationship in which love and concern exist has the potential to go off the tracks because it is only in those intimate relationships where a concern for the truth sometimes overrides better judgment. In other words, sometimes it’s just impossible to remain silent while someone you care for is incapable of seeing how their behavior is causing them pain. This is a particularly touchy moment, and if engaged, has the potential to blow up in your face.
There was a long period in my life when I rejected anything anyone shared with me about my behavior and I often felt I had to kill the messenger too, just for delivering his or her truthful, heartfelt message. I couldn’t control how my internal conflict of the moment was viewed by those close to me because I hadn’t developed the resources yet to actually “hear” what they were saying. I always listened, but rarely heard what those who loved me were saying. I had a long list of reasons why I couldn’t hear them. I didn’t like their tone of voice, I didn’t believe they were being truthful, or when other excuses were used up, I just didn’t like being lectured to by anyone, whether they loved me or not.
This was my behavior in relationships with women and my friendships with men. Perhaps the problem was my ego not wanting to be taken out back and having the shit beat out of it. Perhaps it was just that I wasn’t ready yet to face my demons, sort of a “no wine before its time” scenario.
What I learned when I decided to finally bite the bullet and listen, was that women I was dating and men with whom I was friends were mostly, if not always, right about my behavior, and that I hated hearing about my behavior because I hadn’t figured out yet how to change it. The reasons they were right, incidentally, was that they shared what was in their hearts about me, and when anyone shares his or her emotions, what they are sharing is their absolute truth.
There was a huge difference between the women in my relationships sharing how they felt in their hearts about me, and a casual date giving me advice, because advice is just an opinion and open to debate. My dysfunctional behavior wasn’t open to debate. It was off the charts, wrong.
There was also a huge difference when my men friends tried to help me by sharing how they felt about my behavior, rather than jamming advice down my throat.
But to me, at the time, it was all the same. I resented and rejected women who shared how they felt about my angry behavior, and I did the same with my men friends.
This is painful for me to recall because I know I hurt people who cared about me enough to dig deep into their hearts and share how they were experiencing my behavior. No one who is willing to share their feelings about me on that level deserves anything but thanks and a hug.
The moment of change for me came after my men friends threw up their hands in disgust, and my umpteenth relationship with a woman failed. I looked into the mirror and saw an angry, conflicted man, a man who had little capacity to feel anything for anyone else because I didn’t feel anything for myself. I had become numb and inured to all pain.
So I sat down with a group of men twenty years ago, eight guys, some of whom were as conflicted about relationships with both men and women as I was, and I dug deep and found the source of my anger and pain.
I had buried the memories of my boyhood deep, stuffed them into a steamer trunk in my soul, and thrown away the key. Once I opened that trunk, the pain I had suffered as a boy floated to the surface and screamed for attention. I gave it its due, and in time managed to leave it behind.
Once I was able to cope with my past, I was able to “hear” what those around me who loved me had to say about how they felt about me. I embraced the men who cared enough about me to want to help me, and I learned how to control my anger.
I began dating women with a renewed sense of wanting to get it right. I began to hear what they were sharing from their hearts about me and I accepted what they said as their absolute truths.
It was wrong-headed to reject love from the men and women in my life who cared enough to, well, care about me.
It feels extraordinarily empowering to be able to take in what men and women share from their hearts with me. I hear what they’re saying and I respect them for having the courage to face the angry lion and tell me their truth.
If you’re a man who finds himself in conflict in your relationships with men and women, perhaps a moment of reflection might help you hear what they’re saying. Get involved with other men, many of whom share your issues, and sit down in small groups to work through your issues in confidence. Embrace the truth when it’s expressed from a loving, caring place, and grow from the experience.
Act like a man!