The Divorce Stories We Tell Are Based in Fiction.

Why Care About The Ugly Divorce Stories People Tell?

Divorced people have stories to tell about their marriages that usually involve a simple fairy tale plot and a three to four-sentence rundown with a theme of good versus evil.

Whichever person is telling the tale is the one who survived debauchery, injustice, ugliness, or all of the above, and the ex is the villain. Not that the spouse’s version is entirely inaccurate; let’s just say the divorce story is never told fairly. It is a prosecutor’s case against an undefended defendant, and that’s how it is and always will be. All three of my exes are villains, without a doubt, and if my husband ever divorces me, he will be a villain, too. That’s the way it works in Divorce Story Land.

Sarah was telling me what a dirty, rotten piece of feces her husband Russ was and how she was one femtometer* away from divorcing him after 24 years of marriage but had one massive concern if she did.

“I’m afraid Russ will trash talk me to everyone we know,” she says. “I know he will do it, and I just can’t handle it if he does.”

“You have no choice but to handle it,” I said. “He will talk badly about you and blame you, and that’s how it is and will always be. No matter what you did or didn’t do. The best thing you can do is to expect it and not care.”

Her face went blank. “What? Really?”

“Yes, guaranteed, and you will do the same.”

I have written several thousand articles and blogs in my life, and I am about to drop the wisdom bomb everyone has been waiting for all these years: The true path to peace is to let others be the way they are and not give a femtometer what anyone thinks or says about you. That includes your ex, mother-in-law, jealous sibling, co-worker, nasty stepdaughter, and the neighbor’s dog. That’s it, the end. Ahhhhmmmmm. (vibrational meditative sound). Namaste.

The Stories People Tell.

People will tell their stories however they will; we can do nothing about it. There is no need to defend, beg them not to, or go around trying to correct their verbal messes. Stop trying to create a perfect world where all injustices are solved, and everything is wrapped up in a bow. The only sane approach is to leave it alone, live your own life, and let it pass. Everyone but a Buddhist monk loves the drama of short and nasty divorce stories; it’s human nature, but the good news is that people who hear them will think about it for maybe fifteen seconds and never again. It simply is not the big deal you may think it is when someone speaks about you being a shrew or bastard from hell.

If someone in my social circle says to me, “I heard you are a shrew from hell,” I say, “It’s probably true,’” and go on about my business. Everyone expects someone to be defensive and fight for their honor, but they’ll respect you more if you don’t. I learned this from a guy I dated for about a month many years ago, and later on, the concept came up at a conference as a brilliant strategy to disarm potential verbal attackers. Someone approached him when I was standing with him and mentioned that he was the lady’s man and heartbreak kid of all San Antonio. “Yes, I probably am,” he said, and everyone laughed. I had to agree that his response was wonderful, but even if that fact was 15 percent true, I didn’t want to date him anymore, which was my prerogative. If someone says something unpleasant about you, take at least a little ownership with no excuses or justifications, and you’ll be instantly forgiven. It’s magic.

If people understood how off-kilter so many others are mentally and emotionally and how far off their reality is from the truth, they could save a lot of time and not worry about what they think. I would have hoped our latest political season would have shown that to be accurate, but there the population goes again, giving too many others too much credit for having valid insight.

People don’t see, hear, and process things clearly or accurately. Our minds are creative studios where things heard are bent and twisted; study after study has shown how you may say the word black and the other person may hear the word turquoise, and that’s very common, if not a given. Understanding one another accurately is not something most of us do very well; our brains and the filters that sort through the information we hear are dirty and damaged, like an old, unmaintained car’s air filter, and that’s why research says that memories and stories told by all of us should be viewed as imperfect and mostly fiction. That’s why I groan and beg couples to stop when in an aggressive row, saying things like, “You did this!” “I did not!” “Oh my God, you absolutely did … “

“Stooooooooooppppp!” I say. “It does not matter!” And it doesn’t matter.

Who is right about the details of what happened in your story of anger and injustice is not important. Stop fighting to be correct; it’s a predictor of divorce. I remember my two young children arguing over who started their tussle first. I wouldn’t listen to it. I said both of you are going down because you shouldn’t be tussling in the first place.

Once I started figuring out how socially and emotionally dysfunctional most people are, I found a good way to remind myself of it. I visualize the groups of people in that category as a passel of monkeys desperately grabbing hundreds of bananas from a basket. Here’s a video like that to help. Once you see it, tell yourself those monkeys are almost everyone you know. Now, do you care what they think? They’re not worrying about you, anyway; at the end of the day, they only care about getting a banana.

My ex-husband used to say that my immediate family, the Whetstones, were “prone to hyperbole.” Yes, we all are, and other people understate their tales, and all of us take bits from October 1997 and put it with that thing that happened in 2005 and add a flavoring of something that happened last week, and each of those bits is only 23 percent accurate, maybe. Who cares? We’re not trying to solve a murder. Any conversation should be taken with a grain of salt as meaningless flibbity-gibbit. When people tell me stories at a party, I say to myself, “Maybe, and maybe … not. Where’s the snack tray?”

“Melba told me that our entire family is trash!” said Annette, whose veins and tendons were popping out of her neck, and her brows raised so high they were touching her hairline. (That was an exaggeration). She was having a hard time hearing such a thing about her family members, but since she can’t fix or change it, what’s the best thing to do? I say, let people think whatever they think. Who cares? Does it matter if Melba believes that family is trash? What is trash anyway? I’d add that Annette now has the opportunity to extricate Melba from the sphere of people she visits with. That’s what I do with people who tell me things I’d prefer not to hear. But making a big deal and emotion-packed hissy fit over something someone said wastes one’s precious life. If you can’t stay relatively calm in most non-life-threatening instances, I plead with you to start working on that now. It is the greatest gift you may ever give to yourself.

Memories.

When I first got divorced from my kid’s dad a long time ago, I heard many things about myself from the community grapevine, and the source of that information could have only been one person: my ex.

My ex told Mr. Y, who told Ms. Q, and then Raymone and Cookie said, “Becky is crazy; she has lost her mind. She sleeps with every man she meets; she slept with her boss to get her job, and Becky is dating a manatee.” The things that got back to me did get crazier and crazier. I learned early on that there was no use in worrying about it or trying to control it. It didn’t affect my life that much, if at all. People will think what they will about me I learned. Then I thought about that old party game where one person whispers a word in someone’s ear, and then they whisper it to the next, and after it’s been whispered a dozen or more times, the word announced at the end is entirely different from the original. Hearsay is meaningless ear waste, pure and simple.

I once saw a YouTube video of pastor TD Jakes, a religious leader who sweats, yells, and passionately makes his points. I love watching him, though I’m not religious. He was talking about what I am talking about now … paraphrasing, it was that if people are criticizing you, trying to rip you down, lying about you, “Thank God because you are blessed.” He meant that people who make a difference in this world, who have a voice, who stand out of the crowd, who persevere through adversity, will be envied, and the enemy will try everything possible to disempower them. He will ensure gossip and nasty stories are told, that you will experience a tough time, all meant to cause you to surrender. At the end of the day, you are blessed because you are a survivor, a good person who overcomes difficult things and moves yourself in a positive direction.

A Hard Lesson on Loyalty

One of my most painful experiences — and lessons — was learning that not many people are not loyal. After my third divorce, my best friend was a shoulder to cry on for my ex, who had a new relationship and girlfriend and was flaunting her all over town. Yes, it was an affair. He was a powerful U.S. Congressman, and we all know that no one cares about the character flaws of politicians; their friends and hangers-on want access to power and will sell their souls to be near it.

It stunned me how people I had hung out with for years believed his side of the story about me and my children, which was negative and condemning to the point of saying we were mental cases. While I was desperate for their emotional support, I got none, and instead, my dearest friends of many years backed away and sided with the powerful man who would take them around to events and let them be seen with him. I was no longer allowed in their homes, and the birthdays and holidays we spent together were now spent alone. I could not believe it, but I had to accept it. Ultimately, I had no one left but my children and nothing to lose.

Friends who have character and genuinely love you will not hear, entertain, or accept dirty laundry told about you, which will surely be thrown out during and after a divorce process. They will defend and protect you from harmful information. This type of person is difficult to find; if you are divorced, I am sure you have experienced this. Luckily, my husband and daughter are that way. I hope you have at least one loyal person, the most valuable and rare human trait. If you ever want to know who your friends are, get a divorce from someone who has power or money.

When speaking to clients about post-divorce possibilities, I tell them that people they never thought would, will leave them in the dust and people they didn’t realize cared would come out of the woodwork to offer support in their difficult times. It’s the ultimate weeding-out process designed to work in our favor. The bottom line is we can suffer over how incapable so many people are of offering the kind of support and kindness we all need and want, or we can accept it and focus on a healthy relationship with ourselves and others and what’s real in our lives.

Important Life Lesson: Work on you.

To free yourself from what others think, you must be okay with yourself. Think about it: if you think you’re defective, and someone says something that underscores that, it will sting. If you know your value, and they insinuate something is wrong with you, you will understand their opinion has nothing to do with you, that the person speaking is showing you how they filter information and nothing more. And truth be told, they don’t have all the information about you. They’re taking bits and pieces of meaningless facts and rumors and piecing them into a negative quilt that no one would buy. Now is the right time to ensure you are okay with yourself as your number one defense against adversity. That means accepting yourself as a flawed human being, just as you are. Our value has nothing to do with achievement, money, job title, beauty, weight, age, or anything else. We are valuable from birth because we are human beings, and that cannot change. If you can believe and accept that now, as I do, your life will begin to change. This will be the best decision you have ever made and will steer you toward a good life and a truly new life, regardless of what others think or say about you; I do it daily.

We can’t be all things to all people; some have zero feelings about us or will hate us, and there will be everyone else in between. I’m okay with what anyone thinks about me, and I want you to be that way, too, because I want you to have peace. I want you to understand that it does not matter what others think about you because it, sincerely, does not.

So, in divorce and life, you will be someone’s villain; there’s no way around it. If I must be one, I’d like her to look like Ursula the Sea Witch in Little Mermaid. Who do you imagine your villainized self to be? (Insert comment here) When you decide who it is, pat them or it on the head and thank them for a job well done. They are the ones that are taking all the heat for you, for the villain some see you to be is a fictionalized character just like the one you just picked. The genuine authentic you is a mistake-maker; you are flawed, as all humans are, but the amazing thing, the most important thing, is that you are precious beyond all imagination.

• A femtometer, is one of the smallest measurements there is. Represented by the symbol fm, it is a unit of length in the metric system equal to one quadrillionth of a meter, or 10⁻-15 meters. It is used to measure nuclear sizes.

Becky Whetstone, Ph.D., is a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in Arkansas and Texas* and is known as America’s Marriage Crisis Manager®.

She is a former features writer and columnist for the San Antonio Express-News, and is the author of “I (Think) I Want Out: What To Do When One Of You Wants Out” published by HCI Books, distributed by Simon and Schuster, and to be released February 4, 2025.

She has worked with thousands of couples to save their marriages. She can work with you, too, as a life coach if you’re not in Texas or Arkansas. She also has a YouTube Channel called Marriage Crisis Manager where she talks about relationships. She has a telehealth private practice as a therapist and life coach via Zoom. To contact her, check out www.MarriageCrisisManager.com. Also, here is how to find her work on the Huffington Post. Don’t forget to follow her on Medium so you don’t miss a thing!

For licensure verification, find Becky Whetstone Cheairs.

Marriage Crisis Manager is an Amazon affiliate and may receive a small fee if you purchase recommended books from our links at no extra cost to you.

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