Erosion Can Often Be Mistaken For an Explosion

​I am putting the finishing touches on my memoir. As such, I have spent a lot of time the last year writing about relationships. After all, at the center of almost all memoirs is relationships - the good, the bad, and the ugly.

The plots of our lives are ultimately shaped through the stories of our relationships. There are no meaningful stories without them.

In my writing and reading, I came across an article on the mental health challenges of marriage. The article outlined the 7 signs of a silent divorce. I want to share them with you here:

1. You stop talking about anything real. Conversations become transactional - about kids, bills, or chores, but never about emotions.

2. You feel lonelier with them than when you're alone. The emotional connection has vanished, leaving quiet emptiness between you.

3. There's peace - but it's cold. No arguments, no passion, just emotional distance disguised as calm.

4. You stop caring to fix things. The effort, hope, and fight to make it work slowly fade.

5. Affection feels awkward or forced. Hugs, kisses, and small touches start feeling like obligations, not intimacy.

6. You fantasize about being free - not in love. You daydream more about peace without them than life together.

7. You live separate lives under one roof. Different schedules, rooms and emotional worlds - you coexist but don't connect.

Why am I sharing this with you? A couple of reasons.

One, when my 22 year marriage ended in divorce, many people asked me - with good intentions (mostly) - what happened? As if some event - some unpredictable explosion - destroyed a union that had previously been held together by 22 years of bonding.

What kind of event, they had to be wondering, could destroy such a bond?

The reality is, when I read those 7 signs above, I related to every single one of them. And not loosely, but in direct alignment. All 7, every moment of every day, for at least the last decade of my marriage. And in the midst of all 7 of those signs, I came to accept they were just part of what needed to happen to hold my marriage together.

Yes, my unwritten strategy for holding my marriage together was actually 7 signs of a silent divorce.

Many will ask, how on earth could you have believed that. Felt that. And my only answer would be that I was in a dark place. But I am sharing this because I have come to know I am not the only one who has or will experience that dark place.

Living inside divorce under the illusion that you are living inside a marriage can be exhausting. It can indeed take a toll on one's mental health.

I am also sharing this because I didn't understand any of what I am sharing here until many years after my divorce. Obviously, had I understood much of this while inside the marriage, and if I - and we, because those signs require two people - had been in a healthier place and in earlier stages of those signs, they could have been seven things to work on to grow a marriage, and not the path to blowing one up.

They may have helped put a stop to the erosion that was cutting a path through a marriage on the way to the explosion. Because in many cases, divorce is far more erosion than explosion.

Maybe someone will read this and see subtle hints of one or some or all of these signs in your marriage. Maybe they will be an avenue to sit down, review with a partner, have a discussion. A discussion that might feel like an explosion, but actually might serve to prevent one.

And maybe one day one of my boys will announce they are getting married. Maybe these signs will be an opportunity for me to counsel them - to guide them - to hand to them to use as daily guardrails, a daily taking of the marriage temperature.

Fevers can often be more manageable than the disease that follows.

Divorce rarely pops up as "it's over" - it more often spends years laying the fuse that will one day make a slow fade look like a bomb just went off.

Fuses can be undone.

More often than not, exploding bombs can not.