Divorce doesn’t happen in a day. It’s usually a long, painful process that comes with emotional and financial trauma, self-doubt, disagreements and psychological breakdown. It is not something that one would wish for, or walk out of smiling and clapping. You see, these are people who were once deeply madly in love and now they’re total strangers, to the point of agreeing to part ways for good.
I’m sure if we did a comparison of which gender gets affected most by divorce, we would conclude that men take longer to ‘heal’ from the separation, especially if kids are involved. Men rarely talk about their lives and what they go through, and it is their inability to open up and share their failures, worries, and pain from divorce that makes it harder for their hearts to heal. Since they don’t reach out for support when their families get shattered, their chances of suffering from helplessness, stress and depression increase. They will meet their boys out for gym, nyama choma and a drink, talk about football, politics and who owns the latest machine in town, but won’t open up on their ailing mental health.
It is in this regard that a good number of divorced men would never wish to ever marry again, in their lifetime. Never. I’ve had male friends, and friends of friends who are divorced and swear by the heavens that they would never commit to marriage. The loss of control over their lives, impairment of both family and social sense, and financial anxiety literally cripples their minds and whole systems and when they finally come out of the nasty divorce, alive, they sigh and slam the effing marriage door! Often, false accusations against them in favour of the fair gender is part of the emotional trauma that they go through, sometimes with denial of custody of their kid(s).
You and I know so well that in many cases, it is the women who are given (almost) full custody of the children, if they are involved. This is how once loving and present fathers find themselves ‘divorced’ from their children as well. Co-parenting is not for everyone, and bitter women usually deny these men the right to visit their kids. Relentless quarrels and personal differences also complicate the relationship between dad and kids, making them hold grudges against their innocent old men for ‘leaving them’. This leaves the man feeling distanced and lonely, regardless of the compensation he might try to give the children to maintain his position in their lives.
Second marriages fail at an even higher rate than first marriages, and no one in their right senses would walk into a slaughterhouse, again! Losing all or half of assets once a lifetime is enough. Losing a spouse and kids you loved to divorce, once, is enough torture.
Men are hopeless romantics when they decide to love. Well, a heartbreak can mend. A heart can heal, with time. It is the financial loss that gives men goosebumps! Their wallets rarely heal, and the alimony lasts forever. Most men you and I know, won’t remarry because of the above. There is way too much risk of financial loss because when a man puts everything he has into a marriage and it ends, the pain is unbearable and they don’t talk about it, neither do they heal enough to remarry.
Unlike women who might really want to remarry and get loved, maybe have babies, men usually don’t see the benefits of marrying again. Marriage simply stops making sense to them after the divorce. They don’t see how a second marriage can benefit them, if the first one didn’t, and that’s the primary reason.
A man’s tendency to think logically makes him weigh all the pros and cons of marriage, and only after that, does he choose the best option. Stay single for life! This is a man who has already tasted the limitations and downsides of marriage and now wants to enjoy his newfound freedom.
Tying the knot again would mean losing or reinventing himself all over again and there is no reason why he would give up his independence and get committed again in a marriage he is not guaranteed would last. So if he can easily have access to sex, emotional support and everything else a woman provides without legal consequences, unnecessary emotional attachments and commitment, why would he remarry?
Divorce is nearly as hard on you as the death of a spouse. This is the reason some people never want to suffer through a divorce again. Once burned, twice learned!
