Max Quijano was over at his ex-wife’s house in Toronto the other day doing laundry for their two children. While he was at it, he did his ex-wife’s laundry, too. A friend of his called to ask what Quijano was up to. When he found out he was aghast.
“Yes, I do her laundry but she does amazing things for me, too,” Quijano, a 45-year-old computer security analyst, said of his ex-wife Kristin Taylor, a 39-year-old manager. “It’s both ways.”
The exes had an enviably amicable divorce. They separated in 2008 after five years of marriage: The fighting (plus having little in common) was making them profoundly unhappy. Taylor resisted the split initially, clinging to “some imaginary perfect life.” A stint in therapy helped her understand they’d survive a divorce: “He’s a good dad. I’m a good mom. We make a terrible couple.”
Quijano moved out but returned to the family home every morning to see his son and daughter off to daycare, picking them up in the afternoons. Four years later, Quijano was missing his kids badly and battling severe depression after losing a job. And so his ex-wife generously invited him to move back in for a while, into their son’s room. The divorcees lived like this for three years before Quijano moved out, but only 150 metres away. “It’s like it’s the same house, just separated by a few blocks,” he says.
Quijano and Taylor now live in separate homes - only 150 metres apart. (Christopher Katsarov for The Globe and Mail)
For the Toronto exes, the guiding principles were to put their kids first and not forget what it was that brought them together in the first place. “From the very beginning since we met and got married, we just always agreed on being good people, regardless of anything,” said Quijano, who, incidentally, invited his ex-wife and ex-in-laws to his wedding when he remarried last summer.
The exes are two in a legion re-envisioning divorce in hopes of splitting with dignity. These husbands and wives want what’s best for their kids, which is family, and they want to salvage their own sanity. Many are doing things differently because they saw the carnage of their parents’ divorces, with mom and dad not speaking or badmouthing each other in front of the kids. There are good reasons why some divorces go very badly: chronic infidelity, abuse, mental illness and addiction can make separating traumatic. But for others parting under less extenuating circumstances, divorce can be an awakening: Some people find they are better ex-spouses than they were spouses.
Some 41 per cent of marriages will dissolve before the 30th anniversary, according to Statistics Canada data from 2008, the last year the agency collected divorce information. Even as Canadians live longer and struggle to maintain long-term monogamous unions, many have been rethinking how they want to end those unions.
The advent of no-fault divorce in this country in 1968 brought the first pivotal shift: Canadians could divorce simply for falling out of love following a separation period; no longer was cruelty or adultery – polarizing good-guy/bad-guy scenarios – the prerequisite for splitting up. Shared parenting also became the norm, with fathers increasingly involved in raising kids after a divorce.
Today, many of these exes are actively trying to drop the antagonistic timbre of separation. They’re choosing collaborative divorce and hiring mediators to avoid adversarial litigation and high court costs. They’re seeking out specialized therapists, divorce coaches and “divorce doulas” to calm the waters. Technology is also stepping in, with websites such as Positive Co-Parenting After Divorce and apps such as 2Houses and OurFamilyWizard helping exes parent more seamlessly with forums, resources, shared calendars and contacts lists.
These are some of the cultural shifts surveyed in U.S. journalist Wendy Paris’s new book Splitopia: Dispatches from Today’s Good Divorce and How to Part Well. Through a rigorous review of the existing research literature on divorce, plus interviews with more than 200 exes, as well as lawyers, therapists and coaches, Paris offers a new mindset around separation. She examines why divorce has remained so shrouded in ignorance, why we fear bad splits but fail to recognize bad marriages, and why “horror stories suck up the airtime,” even as many couples are taking a more civilized way forward – leaving the old-style, cold-turkey divorce behind. She believes the good divorce will eventually become the norm.
“People are going to partner up and hope it lasts forever. Those relationships are going to continually break up. The law and research is pushing us toward shared parenting. This is a shift in doctrine that forces people to remain involved with each other. It has to go this way,” the author said in an interview from Los Angeles.
