In the first post featuring songwriter, Terry Radigan, she shared that although the songs on her album, The Breakdown of a Breakup are presented in an order that follows her progress through divorce, her emotions didn’t follow such a neat and orderly path. At times she was taken by surprised by the emotions she was experiencing and had to work through what was behind the feeling. Today we continue with Terry talking about confronting the end of her marriage and the challenge of going public with her songs:
Were you surprised by your divorce?
Yes I was, and then I looked and went, “Well, maybe not so much between my ex and I as a couple.” He’d been struggling with where he was in his life, so it sort of made sense to me in retrospect. It was almost easier to not take it personally, as crazy as that sounds. If somebody’s just feeling really lost and not particularly good about themselves, it makes sense that he might be prey to taking a shortcut to feeling good for a second, without thinking about what he’s doing.
As far as did I see us getting divorced, no, but I never made any bones about infidelity being okay. It just isn’t. That was a done deal when I found out about that. It was still really, really difficult to finally not do the, “It’s a lot of time, that’s 20 years, and do you toss that away?” and all the questions you ask. I kept thinking to myself, “Why am I asking myself these questions and being annoyed with myself,” thinking maybe I was being too tough on it, when these questions could have been asked by my ex, before he went and had an affair. It was an interesting conversation to get into with myself, and an argument too.
It sounds like there was a part of you that was trying to rationalize why you should stay in the marriage.
Oh, absolutely. I think that’s what you do. It’s a relationship, and I don’t know if the fact that mine was such a long one and was so good in so many ways, you just feel like you can’t be hasty and you just don’t toss something like that away. You want to take care with it, but at the same time, you want the person that you’re in the relationship with to take that same care, and if they don’t, at least in my case, then it was okay for me to say, “It’s OK for me to feel the way I do. I’m not giving up on anything or walking away from anything, I’m just saying that that’s not going to work for me.”
How easy or difficult was it to write these songs knowing that other people would hear them and it would be very public?
I’ve been doing this for three years, putting it out, and I also wrote them, so I’m pretty far removed at this point. You write them, then you record them, then it’s the technical stuff of recording them and then making the record and mixing and getting it done, so all the business stuff comes in. There are some people who know me, and some of them who know me fairly well, knew nothing about this. They might have known that I was divorced…if they met me right after, they might not have known that I was ever married, it’s not something I talked about because I just didn’t want to get caught up in the conversation “I was married” and then have someone go on to a man-bashing routine. I also didn’t want people saying “oh, you poor thing,” so it was easier to just start up again.
Now that people are hearing these songs and they’re getting a glimpse into it, some of them are, like, “Are you okay?” and I’m like, “Yeah, I’m fine, you’re listening and you’re back where I was three years ago, so thank you for asking, but I’m on the other end of it now.”
There are still really hard things. I’m really private in my life, other than I write songs, which is pretty funny. I do want to always be fine and carry on, so to put out this group of songs where it was really just me, and it has to be kind of like what your blog is, Mandy, more of a conversation than “I’m a songwriter, here are some songs of mine.” It’s this conversation that you start that hopefully somebody hears and taps into part of it. So, it’s a real lesson for me. I do feel like I’m being a little cracked open like an egg, and it’s a little uncomfortable, but it’s also liberating, and it’s going to put me in touch with something that I haven’t been in touch with much, so I don’t mind being uncomfortable. I think it’s probably going to be good for me, at the end of the day.
Has your ex listened…do you talk to your ex?
I don’t want to go into too much because I do not want to bash him. It was hard for him after, and he really went to some extremes, so I didn’t have any communication for that reason. Then when he started some communications and I felt like he was a little bit on the other side, I just sort of nicely let him know that I didn’t have any hard feelings, although he was not one of my favorite people. While he was not an enemy on any level, I had no interest in being friends.
So you don’t know what he thinks about any of these songs?
No, although I will say that no matter what, he was always supportive. He’s a creative type as well, so he was always really supportive of that and understood the need for that. I would think that no matter what, even though some of these songs might make him uncomfortable, just because they talk about some stuff, I think no matter what,he’d probably go, “Well, if that’s what you had to do to get on the other end, I’m glad you did it.” I would venture that he would go there.
…to be continued…
The Divorce Coach Says
I think pretty much everyone I’ve interviewed has felt anguish over the decision to end the marriage regardless of the duration. For short-term marriages, the anguish comes from wondering if you’ve worked hard enough. At some point, you cross over an invisible line and wonder if you’re throwing a part of you away. But Terry’s point is key – you want your partner to value your relationship the same as you do. If that value is gone, then you have to decide if it can be regained. And it isn’t only infidelity that causes a relationship to lose its value. It can happen too when you grow apart so actually you realize there isn’t much of a relationship to value. I think that’s what happened to my marriage.
Terry’s observation about the time lag in the reactions her friends have had hearing about more of the details is very similar to what happens in marriage. One spouse struggles with trying to decide whether to stay in the marriage and then decides the relationship is over. When she tells her husband, he’s surprised and his grieving process just starts. Then you tell the children and their grieving process starts. For the spouse who’s only just been told, his partner may appear very unemotional and while she may be feeling numb, there’s a good chance that she’s simply at an entirely different stage in the grieving process.
How did your marriage lose value? When did you realize it? Did your spouse value it differently?
You can buy Terry Radigan’s album The Breakdown of a Breakup and find out more information at Terry’s website.
Photo credit: Franco Folini