Excerpt from Divorced! (Romer): Don't Let a Man Make You Unhappy (Interview with Elaine Langley)
ELAINE LANGLEY
“Don’t let a man
make you unhappy.”
Elaine Langley is a slender, graceful
woman with long flowing brown hair and a model’s face. She admits to doing some
modeling before her first marriage (she’s had two), which ended in divorce in
the late 1970s.
"The No-Fault divorce changed things,”
Elaine told me, in discussing her first divorce. “You didn’t have to claim
someone was having an affair and ruin their reputation.”
Elaine said the whole process was easy,
because it was her choice. “I paid $150 to get the divorce. Ben didn’t fight
me. I wasn’t upset.”
She explained that her husband Ben had
broken her trust in him after only two years of marriage. “We had moved out to
Wyoming so he could go to law school. Just a few weeks after we got there he
said, ‘I don’t want to be one of these idiots. Let’s go back home.’”
Elaine was shocked, but she immediately
got on the phone—they were living in married student housing at the time. She
called one of the professors at the college where she’d been going to school
and told him, ‘Looks like I’m coming back—has registration started yet?’”
Fortunately, Elaine was able to get
back into her program. The couple returned home but they never really got over
the upset. And then things became even more complicated.
“Ben was working on his M.S. degree
when he got a phone call from his stepfather in Kentucky. His stepfather wanted
Ben to go to work for him. So, Ben said to me, ‘Let’s go to Kentucky.'I was
halfway through my Master’s program, and not happy about moving again.”
B
ut she went with him—again. They moved
in with his parents temporarily. Elaine was able to enroll in a program at a
university in the next town and complete her Master’s. She was happy there but
Ben wasn’t.
“I had an opportunity to teach at a
small college nearby and when I told him he said no, he wanted to go to Alabama
and be near his grandmother,” Elaine told me.
To Elaine, this was pretty much the
last straw. “I loved Ben, but I was upset because he couldn’t make up his mind.
He was driving me nutty.”
She said what really broke them up,
however, was the issue of having a baby. “I thought one day I’d have a child,”
she said, “but Ben made it clear he would never want a child—after four years
it became very clear.”
So, Elaine took the position at the
college and Ben went to Alabama. She was still holding out hope, but not much
hope.
Then, something happened that clarified
everything. “I was starting the fall semester,” she said, “and I met this guy.
He was at the school—he offered to drive me somewhere, and we went out for coffee. Our hands touched, and there was a spark. That was enough for me.
“I realized I didn’t have to stay
married.”
*****************************
Elaine felt some guilt—“I remember
crying on the phone one morning and saying, ‘I’m so sorry’ “—but when she asked
for a divorce Ben agreed.
“He just said, ‘If that’s what you
want.’”
She told me that it was the new man in
her life, Paul, who made it possible for her to leave Ben. “I don’t think I
could have done it without him,” she said. “I did feel bad, but I thought I was
doing the right thing.”
Her decision was validated by the fact
that her family supported her. “My mother had been married 29 years and then
got a divorce. She said it was up to me—it was my life,” Elaine said.
Elaine and Paul lived together for a
year and a half but then broke it off. “Paul was a transition person,” Elaine
told me.
She said she was happy to be divorced
from Ben. “Whatever plans that we made together meant nothing to him,” she
explained.
*********************************
“I met Richard in 1986. I was teaching
at a university in New York—and also trying to pass the Equal Rights Amendment
(E.R.A.),” Elaine said. “I was working with the Field Director of the National
Organization for Women (N.O.W.)”
It was the Field Director who
introduced them. “She said, ‘You gotta’ meet this guy, he’s such a good guy!’
She brought him to the office, and I thought he was cute but a little
overweight.”
Richard ended up falling in love with
her. “I was tickled because he was so smart. He was a lawyer, who was
volunteering to work with N.O.W.,” Elaine said.
She was proud of him, proud of their
relationship. He’d written a brief on
some of the women’s issues that were important to her. “I thought he was
the best guy I’d ever met,” she said.
Elaine felt that their marriage was
good, right up to the end. But she didn’t like how he was treating her, and
found herself getting “bitchy”.
“He tried to control me,” she explained.
Elaine said that after they broke up
her friends told her that Richard was never a feminist. “I didn’t understand that,” she said.
But Richard’s actions were proving it.
“He had fallen ‘in lust’ with a 22-year old, someone half his age. “He hadn’t
made partner at his law firm, so maybe it was a mid-life crisis,” Elaine said.
Still, she was hopeful. Then one day she
was feeling especially uptight and called her masseuse. The masseuse suggested she talk to a psychic.
“I was in the office of my house, and the
psychic started telling me what I was looking at. Then she said, ‘He’s replaced
you in his bed.’”
Elaine didn’t think it was true, but a
few weeks later, Richard told her he’d found someone else.
“He was standing in the doorway of the
bathroom of the house we’d renovated together, and he said he didn’t love me,
he loved this other girl,” she said. “I
went straight down on my knees, lost all my energy, and cried. I couldn’t
believe it. I was mad. Not so much about him, but about the house I’d
renovated.”
Elaine said her mother, always
supportive, advised her to be done with him.
“I was angry at him for a long time
because we were arguing,” she said. “I think he was abusive. I didn’t realize
what abusive was.”
But she added, “I got it back—I had
been unfaithful to Ben. Now Richard was unfaithful to me.
**********************************
Elaine says that the lesson of her
first divorce is that nothing is worth being unhappy. Having worked with
women’s organizations such as N.O.W. for over 20 years, she’s learned that if
it costs more to be in a relationship than it’s worth, she’s not interested.
But she is not against the idea of
marriage, to this day. “My Ph.D. dissertation was about happy marriages. Just
because I couldn’t do it doesn’t mean I don’t believe in marriage…..If the
right person came along, I might be interested.”
Now, however, she has learned to trust
herself, to believe in herself. “I learned from the first relationship—I gave
him everything he wanted, I moved every time he wanted.”
Her philosophy these days is simple:
“Life is too short to be miserable. You don’t want to be unhappy. I’ve not
wasted my life. From the days of following the love of my life to wherever he
wanted to go till now: being able to speak about it. I will not let something
pass that needs to be dealt with.”
ELAINE’S ADVICE FOR THE NEWLY DIVORCED
“The bottom line is, don’t let a man
make you unhappy.”
GUIDELINES FOR SINGLES OVER 40
1. Turn to your family
for support. A consoling family member can be just the person you need to ease
you out of guilt, or even a depression.
2.
Consider Elaine’s
philosophy—if it costs more emotionally
to be in a relationship than it’s worth,
your divorce was probably for the best.
3. Don’t be surprised if friends tell you things about your ex
that surprise you—and if it eases your conscience (or your pain), allow
yourself to be soothed.
4. A new love interest, even a temporary one, can go a long way
toward smoothing the waters during an unhappy divorce.
5. Follow Elaine’s lead and don’t let a divorce waste your
life. Get involved immediately in worthwhile, productive activities.
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