After being married for nearly thirty years and observing my friends’ experiences with separations, reconciliations, and divorces, I’ve learned that marriage, with all its magic and misery, its contentments and disappointments, remains a mystery, not easy for those in it to understand and largely inaccessible to outsiders.

I was MARRIED for TWO FUCKING YEARS! Hell would be like Club Med!

It took me a lifetime.

I didn’t exactly want to get divorced. I didn’t exactly not want to. I believed in almost equal measure both that divorcing Paul was the right thing to do and that by doing so I was destroying the best thing I had. By then my marriage had become like the trail in that moment when I realized there was a bull in both directions. I simply made a leap of faith and pushed on in the direction where I’d never been.

Sex role training becomes divorce training.

There were long periods in my marriage when I was in enormous pain, and I did a lot of things during that time that reflect how much pain I was in. I am not going to argue every point of that story, but I will say that it painted a picture of me that is essentially untrue.

I spent about eight hours deep in thought over whether to get divorced. That may seem like a long time to ponder something, but I multitasked and slept at the same time. I woke up with an erection, and a decision.

I got divorced from my wife on June 6, 2006. Yeah, 6-6-06, which coincidentally, was when my wife turned into a slithering demon spawned from the fiery depths of Satan's anus. But for legal reasons, I have to call her, "Kate."

I’ve been preparing all my life for this debate.

I wanted a divorce, so I bought myself a house, to give me the incentive to stay married.

It's a very strange time of life. I go on a lot of long walks. I stopped watching television for a year so I wouldn't avoid my feelings. All I read are self-help books. And when I go to parties, I corner divorced people and badger them for details about what this was like for them and how they got through it. Divorce is like my own personal disaster porn.

"All my adult life I've felt drawn to ask long-married couples how they were able to stay together. All of them said the same thing: "We worked hard at it.

If you made a list of the reasons why any couple got married, and another list of the reasons for their divorce, you'd have a hell of a lot of overlapping.

We had suffered enough - 30 years. It was a huge challenge. There was something in it for everyone, but there was pain in it for everyone.