I am a single Switzer

Okay, you guys. This will be my only post – ever – about my divorce.  And I’m not going to spend much time talking about what led us to divorce. I will say that the genesis of this post is that today, as of 9:53am PDT, Mr. and Mrs. Switzer ceased to exist as a legal entity. 

As for what led us here – the end of love is a messy thing.  There are really no heroes, no martyrs, sometimes victims, but really, as the love dissolves, we do things to each other, fair and unfair.  What matters at the end of the day is that we look forward rather than back, learn the lessons, and make ourselves better for the experience.  Of course it’s hard, and of course we’re broken as a result.

Those breaks take time, effort and attention to heal. They lead to disordered thinking and bad decisions.  They change how we act and behave, and those changes can cost us more than the love we’ve lost…I lost my house, dog, car, every memento from my past, and nearly lost my job.  But the breaks do heal.  You begin to think like yourself again.  If you’re lucky, you have friends like I did, who took me by the shoulders, shook me around and told me to get it together – after they’d given me some time to grieve and get the crazy out of my system.  Sometimes they took me by the hand and made me do things I didn’t want to do, and sometimes they were wrong. 

Lost love often reminds me of phantom limb syndrome in a way – a year after removing it for the last time, I still reflexively check to make sure my wedding ring hasn’t fallen off whenever my hands get wet (this has caused some awkward moments in my gym’s jacuzzi).  25 years after the fact, when I hear “Electric Avenue”, I can still smell my high school girlfriend (and first love)’s perfume, and remember the feel of her jeans.  This doesn’t go away, and I don’t want it to.  When I check for a ring that isn’t there, it hurts now, but these phantom reminders, like my “Electric Avenue” quirk, become happy things with time.  My phantom ring will eventually fade, but there will always be triggers that remind me of 11 good years with Mrs. Switzer.

And now I’m dating.  Usually not very well.  I have no radar for discerning when women are interested – I think they are when they aren’t, and vice versa – and seem to be clumsy in the initial, “interest-building” phase.  Somehow I’ve managed to only connect with women in other states, which concerns my friends, but I think is just a strange phase…I do spend most of my time in social media, so many of my friends are scattered, and we have the opportunity to explore each other intellectually that is not always comfortable in person.  Maybe my next love comes this way, maybe not – I’m smitten at the moment with a woman in the single Twitterverse, and I’m trying like hell to get her (make her? hmm) smitten back.  To protect her identity, we’ll call her Mystery Girl.  MG is sweet, hurt and damaged like me, smart, funny, beautiful, and has just enough edge to her to know I could be cut if I’m not careful.  It’s scary to put myself back out there – sometimes I think I’m in, sometimes I think I’ve run her off, and sometimes I’m just happy to wait and see – but I think this will be wildly worth it no matter how it ends up.  It’s intoxicating.

And to close I provide, for your entertainment, how today’s proceedings went…

So I arrived at court at 9:25, for our 9:30 hearing, because I’m a good citizen.  I met my lawyer for the first time (hawt, btw) – we’ve done this whole thing via email!  She ran off to make copies of everything, and I started tweeting furiously.  Mrs. Switzer texted that she was running late (natch; always been her M.O.), so I made fun of her in Twitterland about that.  She begged me to stall so she could be there, even though she wasn’t needed, and I teased her about not being the boss of me anymore.  Everyone finally came together about 9:40, and we got everything together.  Mrs. S and I asked the attorney if it would be funny for us to launch into a big fight in court – she didn’t get the joke.  I suggested as an alternative we could just start making out in front of the judge; we made everyone uncomfortable while we were married, why not go out in a blaze of glory?  Ha!

We headed into the courtroom, with Mrs. S and I still joking about things we could do to mess with people and giggling, which caused the judge to stop the proceedings and tell us to shush and sit down.  Now, this in itself is kinda funny, but I should tell you – we got shushed at our wedding, too.  After the fact, all agreed it was a nice little closure to our entire marriage – sort of closing the circle. 

After the guy before us was finished (I don’t know what he did, but he got a stern talking-to from the judge lady about finding a job right quick), I was called up with my attorney.  And 11 years of marriage was undone with 10 questions, just like that.  I admit to choking up just a bit when attorney asked if the marriage was irretrievably broken, and when I went back to Ms. Ex (her new name!) I saw she’d had the same response.  We sure don’t want each other anymore, but that’s still a sad moment. 

When I moved out of the Switzerhouse, I did a mean thing.  Ms. Ex had a book that we both loved, and she’d always joked that if we ever split up, she was taking it.  So I made sure to go to her office and steal that damn book.  Today, to thank her for 11 good years, I gave her a new leatherbound copy of that book and walked her back to her car.  One chapter closed, a new one begins…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 18th, 2009 at 3:44 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.