Married, Divorced, Now Friends: How Mark Manson Helped Turn Failure Into Victory
By: Nadia Lelutiu
Tags: Relationships, Divorce, Values, Mark Manson, Marriage

Sitting down with my coffee this morning, I realize that although today seems on the surface like any other day, it definitely is not. I got a text from my ex-husband asking if I felt like meeting him for brunch. I can see you all wide-eyed ready to blare alarm bells! This sounds like drama, right? On any other day, I would feel the same way. I would be suspicious, reluctant to respond, defensive, and generally heartbroken by the memories stirred up by him making contact. But today is different, and it is a huge relief to make peace with the past and not a small feat. Deciding to get a divorce is also no small feat. I give a lot of credit to Mark Manson’s “counterintuitive approach to living a good life” for both my decision to divorce and for being able to stay friends with the man I divorced. Counterintuitive enough? It will get more confusing before it makes sense, so stick with me.

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck doesn’t seem like the title of a book that can lead to epiphanies and life transformations, but it is precisely that kind of book. I received it as a gift during a period in my marriage that had gotten so grim that it was impossible for my husband and I to speak to each other, much less be in any close physical proximity. He kept his head down and slept in the basement. I cried alone upstairs in my bedroom. The tension in the house was palpable, and this had been going on for months. It was devastating and there was nothing I wanted more than to “not give a f*ck” anymore! It was enough to make me pick up the book, despite my first impression being that the title sounds like a narcissist’s manifesto.

I was trying so hard to make my marriage work. You see, this was not my first marriage. It was my fourth, and the stakes were very high if I couldn’t make this work. I would be divorced four times. I was fine with being married four times, because sometimes it takes a few tries to get it right, but I could not handle the thought of being divorced four times. That meant complete failure and quite frankly, I was the common denominator in all four failed marriages, despite the myriad of reasons for each dissolution. The complexity and burden of the situation weighed heavily on my heart. The more I tried to fix things with my husband, the worse our relationship got. It was a total disaster. I couldn’t live that way anymore. To escape the pain, I started going to the gym a lot and reading Mark Manson. The first chapter is entitled “Don’t Try.” Within moments, I was reading descriptions of people in a “feedback loop from hell,” and it might as well have been written about me.

Manson’s point was the more you try, the less happy you become. Instead, he urges us to embrace the struggle and failure, because any attempt to avoid it only backfires. His method to accomplishing this insurmountable task was not to stop caring, but to carefully choose what you give a f*ck about. I was overly focused on not having a fourth divorce, when I really needed to be focused on how to stop feeling like I was being buried alive in a broken marriage. The idea he lays out encourages thoughtful exploration of what values genuinely matter to us, accepting negativity as a part of life, and trusting life to take care of us. Decisions are easier to make as you lighten the burden of the many f*cks you’ve been giving about things that ultimately don’t matter.

What pain do you want in your life? Manson rejects the toxic positivity of current spiritual movements on the basis that life is endlessly problematic and there is value in suffering, because it inspires change. Furthermore, he posits that happiness requires struggle. Happiness comes from solving problems, therefore no struggle, no happiness. This framework for happiness forced me to wonder what I was willing to suffer in order to have the happiness I desired in my marriage. Was the pain worthwhile? Would my fantasy life ever come out of this marriage? These questions switched my focus from the stigma of multiple divorces to evaluating if this marriage was right in the first place. This meant taking inventory of the values that were most important to me and determining if I’ve been more loyal to my husband, for the sake of staying married, than to myself. Were our values ever going to line up? Was I just fooling myself into believing that this marriage could work all along?

My ex-husband and I are very different people. He was a forty-year old bachelor when we met who traveled the world as a stage manager for famous musical artists. I was a single mother of two small boys who worked at a 9-to-5 in order to provide a comfortable life for my kids. I was overly bound to commitments in my life. He hardly knew the concept of commitment; life was a series of adventures. He’s only lived for himself until he met me. We also had very different styles of parenting, financial aspirations, and priorities. He leaned toward an authoritarian mindset when it came to raising children, and I was constantly torn between him and my kids. There was no way to make either of them happy without causing strife with the other. I had very ambitious financial goals, while he was content with a simple life that would get him by. Family was always my top priority, and he made work, whether professional or personal, his priority. Our values have never been in line and this realization struck me like lightening.

Questioning our values is not a common item on the to-do list. We get caught up in the mundane day to day tasks and overwhelmed by the predicaments we encounter. Stopping to review the basis for why we do what we do, which is what our values determine, is rarely on the agenda. I was so afraid of being wrong and making a mistake that I had abandoned my own integrity for the sake of the relationship. I had to figure out if this marriage honored my values, in order to figure out what to do about the marriage. I spent so much time worrying about a divorce and trying so hard to fix things, without considering why this was more important to me than the values I strove to uphold. As Manson succinctly states, “change is as simple as choosing to give a fuck about something else.”

“You’re Wrong About Everything (But So Am I)” is the title of Chapter 6 in Manson’s book, and it was the magnum opus. This chapter illustrates why certainty impedes growth and how we are wired to be wrong and misleading, because our brains measure every new bit of information in a biased manner based on what we feel to be true in that moment. His suggestion to living happily is to accept that we are wrong all the time and work towards being less wrong next time. Embrace uncertainty because it leads to growth. “Manson’s Law of Avoidance” states that the more something threatens your identity, the more you will avoid it. He applies this law to both good and bad things in life, so a successful career as a rock star is just as likely to threaten your identity as a fourth divorce.

People fear success for the same reason they fear failure. Who they identify as in that moment is threatened, and they have to change how they view themselves. Manson suggests we limit our opportunities and potential when we engage in this type of avoidance. Then he writes the words that would change everything for me, “When someone admits to herself, ‘You know, maybe I’m not good at relationships,’ then she is suddenly free to act and end her bad marriage. She has no identity to protect by staying in a miserable, crappy marriage just to prove something to herself.” Followed by, “If you’re sitting there, miserable day after day, then that means you’re already wrong about something major in your life.” Mind. Blown. How could I be more wrong than I already was in that marriage? I couldn’t be. It was miserable for both of us.

You have to act despite the pain, which Manson emphasizes is part of the process toward progress. He suggests our fear of failure holds us back and the only way forward is to stop avoiding failure. Manson soothes our trepidation by acknowledging that we will feel helpless and unsure what to do, but also reminds us that we don’t really ever know what we’re doing, because we are wrong all the time. So, we have nothing to lose by acting despite the fear. “Do something. The answers will follow,” is Manson’s powerful advise. As if these epiphanies weren’t enough, the last couple of chapters held some hard to swallow truths that removed any lingering doubts I had about asking for a divorce.

Manson gets very real about what makes a relationship toxic. I cringe just thinking about the way I felt when I realized that my husband and I both fit the yin and yang of a toxic relationship through our perfectly executed entitled behaviors. He blamed me for his emotions and actions and I took the blame for everything and tried to fix it. These toxic tendencies matched up perfectly to create drama and suffering. This part of Manson’s book held a grave and indisputable truth. It would take both of us to change drastically for the marriage to stand a chance, but we were so deep in toxic sludge, choking to death is all we could do together. That’s when I realized ending our marriage was the only way to survive. If I couldn’t save the marriage, at least I could save myself.

I finally chose to give a fuck about more important things than a fourth failed marriage, upsetting my husband’s lifestyle, or trying so hard to be everything to everyone. I chose to live with the pain of another divorce, because I knew staying married would be more detrimental to both of us. Neither one of us are bad people. We both have pure intentions and good hearts, so the decision was extremely difficult. However, it was obvious after reading Manson’s book that I was not honoring my values, I feared failure and being wrong, and our partnership was toxic. I had to endure another failure in order to grow into the version of me I longed to achieve. And I had the reassurance from Manson that I will be wrong again, just a little bit less wrong next time. I could deal with that.

It has been almost a year since I told my husband that I wanted a divorce, and it has been a difficult journey for both of us. But, today I realized we have healed individually enough to make a call from my ex-husband asking to join him for brunch a pleasant circumstance. We care for each other as friends do. He’s helped me with my car issues, I’ve picked him up when his car crapped out. We are no longer in a toxic entanglement, which allows us to be our best selves. He’s thriving now, and so am I, because we are both focused on our own values without those values being in conflict. So maybe we should have never been married, or maybe we were wrong to divorce, or some might consider it a mistake to be friends with an ex, but so what. We are always wrong, and each time we move forward through failure, we prosper.