Pooling Emotional Resources

Pooling Emotional Resources

Nature has invested us with free choice. We make those choices and quite often regret them after the fact. Some of those choices are irrelevant to our lives; an error made, and swiftly rectified. Others have far greater, more deep-seated meaning and consequences. Sometimes we think we are invested emotionally, perhaps confusing what we feel for a brief admiration for another person, parsing the pleasure we have in their company as evidence that we must surely love them.

The matrimonial covenant is not meant to be a transitory fling, useful for a year or two then set aside because the match has rough edges that cannot be sufficiently smoothed to make living together a thing of beauty and happy contentment. However, a reality has emerged; the personality that was originally thought to be a match for one's own is anything but; priorities, values and background are too different to be reconciled to those so completely at variance.

The union undergoes a transformation, as though suddenly, or not so suddenly a veil of contented complacency has been lifted to reveal a hideous trap. Psychologically as well as physically the vow to love, honour and obey and live together in harmony in sickness and in health 'till death do they part has lost its allure. Leaving in its place distaste, dismay, disorder, distemper. Irritations abound and mean-spirited little messages are delivered to ensure no one is ignorant of the abyss that has opened.

So there is a distance that cannot be breached, and resentment that cannot be reconciled, and a legal contract that must be put asunder. Difficult, but necessary. But nothing in life is ever as simple as it may seem, and when the marriage, however long its duration, has produced offspring, the complications that ensue with children suddenly finding their emotional security upended threatening to leave them void of a parent becomes an urgent instability.

Sometimes leading reasonably mature adults to fashion an alternate lifestyle for themselves other than shuttling their children back and forth between them, in a surfeit of ill-will and grudges. "Time and time again I have seen cases -- and this is one -- where the children are treated as Frisbees. Undoubtedly this will cause a host of inconveniences for the parties, but I am confident that all of them can be resolved; the children are worth the trouble." Thus said Justice J.W. Quinn in 2003 in St.Catharines, Ontario.

Having heard of a new arrangement between estranged couples that took place in Virginia in 2000, he adjudged in a custody trial that the parents involved should establish a temporary "bird's nest" agreement. Whereby they would live together separately, and share their children equally. What works for some will not for others. But there appear to be a small number of divorced couples who share a house, each living in a separated portion, the children between.

A Toronto radio producer and writer wrote a book, Reconcilable Differences: Marriages End, Families Don't, that profiled ten families who had "successfully failed" marriages, one of whom used a bird's nest arrangement. One of those families, years ago, was that of the current premier of Ontario, Kathleen Wynne. She and her husband agreed to separate, but that they would live together, with their children, and Ms. Wynne's new same-sex partner.

The writer, Cate Cochran, experienced her own episode in life with a nesting version when she and her husband split their family in 2003, but in another sense bringing it back together by buying a house where she lived downstairs, her former husband upstairs, while for their children and their dog it was an open-house situation throughout the shared home.

"It just takes being a grown-up, really. We wanted to raise our children together.  ...We were good co-parents, but we weren't really meant to be together."