I think we all struggle to cope with failed relationships. And having a failed relationship doesn’t mean you are, as a person, a failure. But reading this made me wonder whether the author wouldn’t just feel better if he called a failure a failure:
Since I’ve been divorced, I’ve had more than a few people imply this means that my 10-year relationship (and three-year marriage) was a failure, or even that I am a failure at relationships.
My ex-wife, Jane, hears this too, and says she has often felt ashamed to be divorced so young, barely into her 30s. Yet despite the stigma divorce carries, both of us feel that not only was the relationship a success for the decade it lasted, but the fact we ended it at the appropriate time is a sign we are, in fact, quite adept at love.
Keep telling yourself that, buddy. With this illogical idea that failed relationships are actually success, the author does people struggling with a failed relationship a great disservice, a harm. Because there they are, struggling, crying, trying to cope, learning from their mistakes, and along comes Joe Genius here and tells them: There’s no problem! You should feel good about this!
I didn’t intend to write about abortion here, but I will. It’s similar to telling a post-abortive woman that the abortion was a simple matter of choice, no worries, she shouldn’t feel bad. This must exacerbate the pain immensely. (“I’m not even supposed to feel bad!”)
So, Mr. Growing Up Jung, can it, grow up and learn to grapple with your failure and those of your family members. After all, the beauty of life is that we get up when we fall down. (We don’t instantaneously, upon getting up, try to claim we never fell in the first place.)
by 
I would love to see this guy’s wedding video… I wonder if they actually made vows to each other, or if they somehow skirted around that little inconvenience. If he failed to keep those vows, then he failed – no matter how happy he is with that failure.
I’m 30 now and I have watched 8 marriages of people my own age crumble and fall apart. (There are more than a few more teetering on the edge.) What stays with me is the image of their weddings…and the beautiful vows they spent hours and hours writing. I’ll never be able to ask if those vows haunt them as much as they haunt me.
I skimmed the piece and had to laugh out loud at his best reason for not citing divorce as “failure”: “Perhaps wedding vows have been taken too literally.” Don’t you just hate it when you make promises and vows and then are misunderstood as having actually meant what you said? Come on, people, get with the program.
It’s telling that he attempts to isolate the divorce as utterly autochthonous. Apparently his and his wife’s behaviour in the previous 10 years had absolutely nothing to do with the *failure* of their marriage.
That’s a bit like telling a chain smoker that the 2 packs a day he inhaled for 25 years had nothing to do with the cancer forming in his lungs. Very Orwellian, imo.