I can understand why the heart attack is a popular way to die. There’s a conciseness to it. One minute you’re enjoying your McNuggets and then—boom!—you’re gone.

Divorces are like heart attacks. One minute you’re legally married, and then you sign some papers and—boom!—your marriage is declared dead. The divorce decree, just like an autopsy, gives you the time of death and establishes a cause.

But it’s far less revealing. After I signed my divorce papers, legally ending my ten-year marriage, I stared at the cause: “constructive abandonment,” a no-faultish way of saying that even though my wife, Rose, and I had been living together under the same roof, we jointly abandoned our roles as husband and wife. In other words, the marriage failed because we failed to be married. That’s like saying the cause of death was ceasing to live.

While this may fulfill the requirements of New York State Family Law, it would never hold up on CSI.

I decided to conduct my own autopsy, with the help of a dozen relationship experts. The results proved shocking, because I bet you’ve made some of these same mistakes.

MISTAKE 1: Strong retrospective evidence (i.e. 20/20 hindsight) suggests overwhelming feelings of love led couple to make key compromises in life/goals not supportive of each individual’s long-term happiness

Or: We Got Married While Madly in Love

When we make the most important decision of our lives—i.e., who we should be with till death do us part—most of us are operating under the influence. The brain in love is awash with the feel-good hormone dopamine. In fact, love activates the same pleasure center in the brain that cocaine does, says Helen Fisher, Ph.D., a professor of biological anthropology at Rutgers University.

So all of us commitment-averse males had it right all along – you DO have to be high to want to get married.  But why would humans choose mates in such a compromised state? “The human animal has not evolved to be happy,” says Fisher. “It’s evolved to make more human animals.”

So when my wife Rose and I met and fell in love, we really were feeling something bigger than both of us—or at least far older. A primordial drive to mate, have a family. This drive didn’t care a lick that I was just finishing grad school, or that I’d previously decided that I’d never settle down before career was humming. It was equally indifferent to Rose’s upbringing in a nice Jewish family where a central tenet is that a husband provides financially for the wife. That made hitching her wagon to a penniless film student not necessarily the wisest choice for her future happiness.

Avoid the same mistake:  Put chemistry to work for you. In her new book Why Him? Why Her?, Dr. Fisher shows you how to recognize the personality types you’re most likely to have chemistry with long term.  One surprising tip – check out the length of your beloved’s ring finger before slipping that engagement ring on.  A ring finger roughly the same length as the pointer is a marker for being a negotiator while a ring finger much longer than your pointer finger indicates a director.  If you and your beloved don’t square up here, no worries – this is one case where opposites continue to attract.

MISTAKE 2: Review of medical history shows extensive and ultimately successful efforts to conceive offspring in newlywed stage of relationship

Or: We Had Kids as Newlyweds

Right after we got married, my wife’s biological alarm clock began ringing. Not that I wasn’t complicit—it meant having a lot of sex. Great work if you can get it, right? And it was both those things—great and work. As anybody who’s been through it knows, trying to conceive can feel like you’re having a menage-a-trois with a fertility chart. What should be the most intimate of experiences was now something that we were sharing with doctors and our families (“Looking forward to meeting our grandson!”)

Thing is, making somebody’s grandson is not very hot. “The most essential aspect of a romantic relationship is not love—because we have lots of people that we love—but intimacy,” says relationship expert David Deida, author of The Enlightened Sex Manual. “What makes a relationship intimate are the things you share with your partner alone.”

When we were trying to conceive, we actually called sex “trying.” As in, “We’re going to try this month.” All that trying yielded two beautiful boys who are the most important things on this earth for me. But I think all the trying complicated our physical relationship for the rest of our marriage.

A couple’s memory of their passionate early years helps to sustain their romance during the later years of marriage.  While other couples can look back and say, “We’ll always have Paris,” we got stuck with “We’ll always have that funky motel off the turnpike where we had to meet in order to do it in the window.”

Avoid the same mistake: Sex expert Dr. Ruth Westheimer gave me this suggestion to make conceiving a less trying experience for couples:  “Use some very sexy scenes from a movie you’ve both seen and liked. Believe it or not, people have control over their brains and can use fantasy to help them program their thoughts in the right direction.” 

MISTAKE 3: Struggling writer husband assumed primary care-giving responsibilities, while successful businesswoman wife procured porcine assets (brought home the bacon).

Or: We Busted Gender Stereotypes

Rose earned more money than me. Not a little more. A lot. Often, I felt like an expense line in her budget. And even though roughly a third of wives now out-earn their husbands these days, I never felt comfortable with it. I rang up Brenda Shoshanna, Ph.D., author of Why Men Leave, and asked why.  “For many men their identity and sense of self esteem is very dependent on doing well at work and is often reflected in their income and so when a wife earns more, husbands can feel they’re really not the man in the family.”

Further complicating this was our decision to work from home so that we could both be on hand to take care of the new baby. A great idea that broke bad on us. Whenever her work line rang, I would get stuck changing the diapers, enviously watching her do big business—while, of course, she was stuck on the phone, enviously watching me change diapers. It was almost funny. Almost.

Avoid the same mistake: To make you feel like you’re the one wearing the pants in the relationship, rip hers off.  A recent University of Kansas study found that socially dominant women were the most likely to respond sexually to submission fantasies.

MISTAKE 4: “In good times and in bad” ratio skewed several standard deviation points toward “bad” by year-long period of death/illness/injury to extended familial unit.

 Or: Chaos became our comfort zone.

During our family’s year from hell, every four weeks or so a brand new crisis would arrive at our doorstep — almost as if we’d inadvertently checked a box enrolling us in the tragedy-of-the-month club while subscribing to a magazine or something.  The hyper-vigilance that sustained my wife and I through these crises was not so conducive for relaxed date nights and handholding. Post-traumatic stress turns your world upside down: when the end of the world becomes your comfort zone, each new crisis is actually a relief from the stress of worrying about what will befall you next. It got so I felt closest to my wife not at a romantic dinner but racing to the hospital together. That was our date night.

According to neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux, Ph.D., author of The Emotional Brain, fear-based memories are encoded in a different, more instinctual part of the brain. While my hippocampus and prefrontal cortex were clear that the year from hell was over and could understand my wife as a person distinct from that experience, down in my amygdala, the story was less clear. It’s possible that my wife and I came to associate each other’s presence with stressful situations, says LeDoux.

Avoid the same mistake:  Sharing an event isn’t the same thing as really sharing an experience with your partner.  Leading PTSD researcher Dr. Candace Monson told me that the best way for couples to turn hardship into a tie that binds is to start talking about the experience immediately afterwards with help from a cognitive-behavioral psychologist.

MISTAKE 5: Effort on behalf of male partner to bridge growing intimacy gap by sequestering himself for a year to write book about how he saved marriage by buying car on Ebay proves less than effective.

Or: My Romantic Gestures Were Too Grand

In his new book, Venus on Fire, Mars on Ice, Dr. John Gray takes his exploration of male/female differences to how men and women interact on a molecular, hormonal level. “Men and women actually do have “chemistry.” A woman gives off phernomes when she feels taken care of by a man. What men fail to realize is that on an interpersonal, chemical level, it’s the small stuff that really matters.”

When I landed my first book contract it was a chance for me to finally do some “big stuff” for our relationship, both in terms of getting paid a good sum of money but also in terms of writing a book that I believed spoke directly to the challenges we’d gone through together. In my mind, going off to work each day was a romantic quest to slay our dragons. All my wife knew was that I was gone. Completely caught up in my work. For close to a year. I finally looked up from my work to discover that the marriage I thought I was saving was gone.

 Avoid the same mistake: Sweat the small stuff.  Dr. Gray says, “Men like to score points.  If you want to score 36 points, don’t give your lady 36 roses — give her one rose thirty-six times.”

***

I wish I could blame Rose for our divorce. Blame is such a useful device at times like this. Not only does it make a convenient receptacle for all your anger, there’s something comforting about being wronged. You’re absolved of any responsibility.

Thing is, Rose is a wonderful person—intelligent, idealistic, passionate, a devoted mother. It would be so much easier for me to move on if she were a worthless human being. And unfortunately for her, despite my respectable list of faults, I’m a decent enough guy.

No, the ultimate cause for our uncoupling lay not in all the little things we did wrong, but in the unanticipated effects of all the big things that we did right. Our strengths are hard to separate from our weaknesses. My ability to analyze my marriage to death makes me wonder if that is, in fact, what happened. Marriages can’t be fixed from the outside looking in.

I think that love dies in much same way that a heart does. Over the life of a relationship, all the little resentments and tiny disappointments accumulate inside you like cholesterol to slowly, almost imperceptibly, choke the intimacy and connection that are the lifeblood of any relationship.

I’d like to think that my marriage fell apart because we made all the right mistakes—made with the best of intentions and from a place of love. I think this is part of what makes it difficult to move on. But understanding that allows me to look back at the relationship and appreciate its meaning and beauty, warts and all.  Even if my ex just looks back at me and says, “that’s the jerk who ruined my life,” she is, and always will be, my favorite mistake.

Thanks!!!  M

The shot echoed through the woods then all was silent. Even the birds stopped singing. They dragged out the body.

“The perfect size for eating,” said Dean, manager of the Texas ranch under whose auspices the boar hunt was being conducted and in whose employ I now found myself. He slit the boar open with an expert flick of his knife that landed the guts at our feet. The heart, still beating, hopped like a legless frog.

I was a long, long way from Manhattan. I’d say a long way from home but the bank got the apartment and my ex-wife got the kids. All I got was a storage space full of memories. No direction home. That’s how divorce feels. And so I just kept moving. Like an outlaw on the lam. New jobs, new experiences, new people. Anything to put the past behind me.

I went to ground in Texas. A big state. Plenty of places for a man to get lost. Ditched my city clothes. Walked into a western wear shop north of Dallas and walked out a new man. You walk different in cowboy boots. Something about a cowboy hat makes you stand up straight. When I talked my way onto Dean’s ranch, I looked the part.

I kept my head down. Worked hard. Did my best to blend in with the other cowboys. But Dean and his right hand, Mike, were onto me. They were the genuine article. Wore spurs every day of their lives. I was all hat and no cattle and they knew it. When I made the mistake of shaking Dean’s hand without first removing my glove, he called me out.

“Real cowboy would know not to do that,” he said, fixing me in his Clint Eastwood squint. “What’s an educated man like you doing mucking out stalls?”

Dean’s hand rested near the knife on his belt. When not using it to gut wild animals, Dean often employed it rhetorically, unsheathing it to express strong displeasure. Nothing makes your point like steel. He had my full and complete attention.

“Are you lost? Or are you looking for something?”

A good question. Wish I had a good answer. I was fresh out of those since the divorce. Even when its the right thing to do, divorce isn’t the answer – just a different set of questions. Who was I now that everything that made me who I was — home, marriage, family — had been stripped away? Looking for yourself in the heat of those kinds of changes is like trying to find your shadow at high noon.

Dean stared me down and then looked to Mike. Mike took a drag on his cigarette, nodded.

“You best come with us.”

**

Dean decided it was time to teach me a lesson.

The metal pipe hit me in the gut, knocked the wind out of me. Dean laughed while his sons dragged me from the back of a 4 x 4 and then made me simulate a certain physical act with a mechanical bull.

Bulldogging, or steer-wrestling is a rodeo event in which the cowboy jumps from a galloping horse, grabs a steer by the horns and uses leverage, muscle and meanness to bring it down. Dean was getting back into rodeo shape and we took turns on his training rig, sliding off a mechanical horse towed by one 4 x 4 to grab the horns of a mechanical bull being towed by another.

“Get angry! Turn that son of a buck!”

Dean put me through my paces until the vague feeling that this was a silly thing for a man my age to be doing was replaced by a distinct sensation of physical pain. My lower back, which hadn’t ridden anything more demanding than a desk chair in years, was giving it to me with both barrels. And then there was a third sensation, one I hadn’t felt in a long time.

I was having fun.

“How’s this compare to the real thing?” I asked, half-considering giving it a go.

“A live steer is six, seven hundred pounds of trouble. Things can get pretty Western.”

Things “getting Western,” was Dean’s shorthand for out-of-control situations that result in maiming, injury or death. For Dean, Western was not a fashion but a fact, no the fact of life: if you got on the wrong side of a bull or the wrong side of an argument things could, and regularly did, “get Western.” Life is a blood-sport. Nobody makes it out alive.

“Get up on Redlight,” Dean said, pointing at one his rodeo horses in the corral. I hesitated. I’d done my share of trail riding but these rodeo horses where not your old Y-Camp trail-pounders. I’d just seen a much more experienced rider get bucked off his own horse. This could get Western.

I mounted Redlight and immediately congratulated myself on foretelling my own doom. Riding Redlight was like trying balance on top of a coiled spring with an attitude problem.

“Any tips?” I called out to Dean. He just laughed.

“It’s 95% energy. As long as you know the way home, your horse’ll get you there. You just have to know you’re a horseman.”

No doubt Redlight shared my skepticism on this point, but he gave me the bye. I stayed in the saddle. I liked ranch life. I liked working hard all day; it made it easy to sleep at night. I liked learning to string barbed wire. Drive a tractor. When alfalfa was ready to harvest. If a yearling was cut out to race, show, or be a cutter. To store my cowboy hat upside down to keep the luck from spilling out.

Over lunches at the Two Brother’s Diner, Dean and I would chew over current events. He was a redneck from a very red state and I was a true blue New York liberal but the more we pulled the issues apart, the more we found on which we could come together. “If you and I can see eye to eye,” Dean said, “what the hell’s the rest of the country’s problem?”

I told Dean and Mike about my problems, the large life I’d lost in New York, the divorce. I got no real sympathy – not because they were unsympathetic, but because, according to the cowboy calculus, I hadn’t lost anything real. A fancy apartment is no protection from the true elements of life. No matter where you live, life can get pretty Western. Especially where women are concerned. Women are like the weather – you sure enjoy a sunny day but you don’t bank on it lasting forever. A cowboy’s only true commodity is himself. Everything but character can be bought, sold or broken. Despite all I’d lost, they still accounted me a man in full.

What surprised me most about the Cowboy way was how Eastern it could be.

“You just have to accept Karma,” Mike said one day while we were walking through the stable, checking on the pregnant mares that were fixing to foal soon.

“You a big fan of karma, Mike?” I asked, surprised. Mike looks about as New Age as a Marlboro billboard.

“Oh yeah. Don’t have to be Hindu or whatever to have karma. I lived a whole year with an Indian Chief, a wise man. We all of us got things we’re supposed to do. And if you buck that, life’ll let you know. Maybe it’s your karma to be a cowboy. Maybe that’s why you’re here.”

I laughed but Mike was at least half-serious. “Round-up’s coming up,” he said. “We could use you.”

Unfortunately, feeling at home on the range didn’t help me “cowboy up” to the new normal of my non-family life. I was a free man now. I could run wild, be a dog. But with no stick to fetch, a dog just lies around licking his balls all day. The novelty of that wears off. I had a big hole where my sense of purpose used to be. Daily phone calls to my boys just served as daily reminders that we no longer lived under the same roof. Every visit just made me more of a visitor in their lives.

**

On my one afternoon off, I went to town — or rather, its modern-day equivalent, the mall. Had to pick up a birthday present for my nine-year-old. You only get Sunday afternoons off at the ranch. Just because it’s the weekend doesn’t mean the horses take a day off from eating. Or making manure. Economies rise and fall, relationships come and go, but horseshit is forever.

Shopping malls are like happy families. As Tolstoy famously said of the latter, they’re all alike. But after my weeks on the ranch, I couldn’t walk through the food court without thinking of a feed-lot. The snaking movie theater line bore an uncanny resemblance to the chutes we used to work cattle. Like everything else in my post-divorce life, what had been familiar was now strange.

I found the toy store and asked the clerk if they had any automatic pitching machines. She pointed towards the sporting goods aisle. I thought a pitching machine would be a good gift now that I wasn’t around to play ball every day. As I walked towards sporting goods, I replayed the game tape of our impromptu afternoons at the baseball park. Every day was the World Series. It was always game six. Bottom of the ninth. Two outs. Bases loaded. My nine-year-old was at the plate. Right shoulder high, bat tight to his ear just like I showed him. His younger brother was in the outfield bouncing on his toes, ready for the crack of the bat. And now, taking the mound, was a relief pitcher — the Franklin Sports MLB Power Pitcher Pro.

Not me. Not their Dad. Unless it was an alternate weekend or pre-negotiated portion of their school holidays. I lost it right there in the sporting goods aisle.

This was what I’d been running from all this time. The memory of an uncomplicated afternoon with my boys, playing ball. The nostalgia for things once taken for granted cuts deepest because it makes us realize we never fully grasp what we have until it’s gone.

The jig was up. Mike was right. If you try to buck your karma, life will let you know. And life was letting me know. My place was with my boys. As close as I could get. I now saw that all the other details of life, all the changes that divorce thrusts upon you, were just details. Life is 95% energy. As long as you know the way home, your horse will get you there.

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