On the Occasion of My Third Divorce

After my first divorce at 23 from my high school sweetheart, it would have never occurred to me that some 30 years later I would be living in Hollywood, pursuing an acting career full-time, childless, living with chronic illness, and finalizing not my second, but my third divorce. I would have been mortified, and probably suicidal. It's a good thing we can't know our futures - maybe all of us would feel that way. Yet when I look at how I arrived at each divorce, they all made sense, sad as they were. I dated my first husband for six years before we married, all through high school and two years into college. I only had three other dates with boys besides him. He was my first real love, but I think I married him mainly to please my parents, who had done exactly the same thing. I believe if my parents had encouraged me to leave home and go off to college, I would have, even if it meant breaking up with him, which would have been the right thing to do. But I was very shy then, and scared of leaving home, and I had been offered a full scholarship to the University of Alabama in Huntsville - even my books were paid for. So I took the easy way out, and stayed home for school, and married him in my senior year of college. In hindsight, this is the single biggest regret of my life. I don't know if my life would have turned out very differently if I had attended Bryn Mawr, the prestigious "Seven Sisters" college that was recruiting me, where my father wanted me to go. It is located near Philadelphia and would have certainly opened my eyes to the world sooner. But as it was, I took a trip to New York City my freshman year at UAH, and came home telling my family that I had found where I belonged. They laughed at me, but nobody laughed when I finally moved to the New York area after my second divorce in 1993. Who knows? Maybe I would have moved to New York earlier. Maybe I would have discovered my calling as an actress earlier. Or maybe I would have had a physical breakdown earlier and had to leave school. Not even God can change the past, and it is pointless to speculate. But I know if I could do it over again, I would have listened to my father and gone to Bryn Mawr. The short answer as to why my first marriage fell apart is that I was far more successful in my career than my husband, and this put too much of a strain on his ego which led him to abuse me emotionally and physically. We stayed together for four years, and I finally left when I began to fear for my life after he started sleeping with a gun beside our bed. It was not amicable; I left during the day while he was working so that he could not hurt me, and our marriage counselor advised me not to ever be alone with him. He took me to court to contest the divorce, even though we had no property to divide. I remember vividly the pain of sitting on the witness stand, testifying that my marriage was irreparably broken. And I remember the kindness of the judge, who wished me all the best in my new start in life. I never saw my first husband again. I remember how miserable I was over the next several months. I had no idea as to how to be single. I'd never lived alone, and this was prior to the age of video dating. We didn't even have personal computers back then, so there was no online dating. The best place to meet men when you were living in Birmingham, Alabama, was in church. And that is where I met my second husband. I was feeling terribly guilty over having left my first husband, as the Baptist Church to which I belonged at the time preached that divorce is unforgivable except in the case of adultery, which had not played a part in my divorce. But I joined the church's singles group, and met some nice, if boring men. In the meantime, I had a blazing romance with the man who lived next door to me at my apartment complex, who ultimately moved away after four months, leaving me with a shattered heart. I met my second husband at a church picnic about four months later, and when I discovered he was a guitarist who liked rock and roll, I was smitten. I was, and still am, a sucker for musicians. We started dating right away and soon were in love. But the sticking point for him was that he refused to have sex before we married. He was a 27-year-old virgin. Now, I wasn't the most experienced woman in the world, but I had been married, and I'd been around the block a few times after that, and I was a young woman with a healthy libido. In other words, I was horny, and frustrated. So I agreed to marry him after we had only dated for eight months, primarily because, a) I didn't know how to be single, and b) I wanted to have sex with him. Not exactly the best reasons for a marriage. I realized during our engagement that I was probably making a mistake, but my maid of honor told me I was being silly and that I just had cold feet. But you get cold feet for a reason. I knew after only a month that our marriage was going to be a disaster; the sex wasn't good, and we had very little in common. But I stayed for four years because I didn't want to be divorced twice. The marriage got us both to Nashville, which was one step closer to moving to the Northeast for me, but that was about the only good thing that came out of it for me. And once again, although we parted amicably, I have never seen my exhusband again. It's almost as if this marriage never even happened. Shortly after my second divorce, I began the Executive MBA program at Vanderbilt University, sponsored by my employer, Nortel Networks. Once again, I was getting an all-expenses paid education, and at a top-notch university. Since I was single, I treated this like the college experience I never had. I partied like mad and dated as many different types of men as I could, determined to make up for what I missed in my youth, and to find out what kind of man really suited me best. And after I graduated in 1992, I finally executed my plan of moving to, or at least near, New York. I transferred within Nortel to New Jersey, and I got an apartment on the ocean. This began three of the happiest years of my life. Within six months, I met the man who became my third husband, and whom so far remains the love of my life. And surprise! He was another musician. But he also had a day job as a computer scientist. Only one problem: he had a girlfriend - in another state. He and I were not involved romantically for the first three months I knew him. We worked together on producing a CD in his home studio, with me recording vocals for the first time ever. He didn't tell me about the girlfriend for about two months, but by then I was smitten. We got involved anyway, and it took him nearly nine months to finally end things with her. During this time I alternated between extreme joy when I was with him and extreme anger at him, wondering how he could be so cavalier toward both of us. I should have paid attention, because it revealed an astonishing lack of ability to empathize which was crucial after I became ill later in our marriage. But once he ended things with the other woman, and I became his "official" girlfriend, life was wonderful. I was by then singing on weekends in a wedding band, because the tape we had made together had gotten me jobs with two bands; we owned a 16-foot catamaran that we sailed every weekend in Sandy Hook Bay and watched the sun glint off the two towers of the World Trade Center; and at night we fell asleep in my apartment to the music of the waves crashing just outside my window. It was too beautiful to last, but I was aware of that and savored every achingly wonderful moment. About a year later, his company announced that they were moving to West Palm Beach, Florida. Neither of us wanted to move there. It was the mid-1990s, the height of the dot.com boom, and California was the place computer scientists went to get rich. So we headed west, and moved in together in Silicon Valley. At first, life in Cali was great. We bought a beautiful house on the San Francisco Bay about halfway between San Jose and San Francisco. I got a great, though stressful, job with Nortel in Santa Clara; he went to work for NEC. We worked long hours, but we carpooled to work together, and it was fun. We bought a boat. We were young and rich and in love. After two years of living together, he proposed to me, on the rim of the Grand Canyon at sunset. Does it get any more romantic than that? Probably, but still. We threw an elaborate weekend wedding event in April of 1998 that culminated with an outdoor sunset ceremony at the Highlands Inn in Carmel. It was the best day of my life. Our two-week honeymoon in Greece was fit for the gods. All was bliss. Until it wasn't, because I got sick. I had had health problems for a long time, mostly since my second year at Vanderbilt. I got bronchitis and I just never really got well. I have a mitral valve prolapse that I take medication for, and when I started the job in Santa Clara I started getting terrible migraines on an almost weekly basis. I injured my back lifting a computer monitor at work, and started needing to see a chiropractor every week. It seemed as if I was falling apart one piece at a time. But I was always able to keep working 10 to 12 hour days, until late in 1998, when I literally collapsed on a business trip to Dallas, with a blinding migraine. My boss sent me home and to the doctor, and the doctor sent me off to bed rest for three months. Then the tests started, revealing all sorts of problems: thyroid disease, Lyme disease, food allergies, chronic Epstein-Barr virus, and a few others. Three months' leave became nine, and then I resigned from my high-paid, high-prestige job to try a project management job at an Internet start-up that was close to my home. But that only lasted six months, as that work proved to be too stressful for me to handle. I had body aches and joint pains all over my body, and no one could tell me why. By this point I was using alternative medicine such as homeopathy to treat my various ailments, and the doctor treating me prescribed injections of raw thymus gland to improve my immune system. They made me feel much better, so I decided to try to return to full-time work as a management consultant for a prestigious Boston-based firm. But I had only been on the job for a month when I took the fall that ended my career while on a business trip in Boston, rupturing a disc in my lower back, an injury which remains inoperable. About three months later, the telltale butterfly rash of Lupus appeared on my face, and I was diagnosed with SLE. In October, my appendix ruptured; misdiagnosed with stomach flu, I became septic and nearly died. I went on disability that month and formally retired. 2000 was not a good year for me. As one can imagine, all this illness was very hard on a very new marriage. My husband had fallen in love with a high-powered executive who made a lot of money. Two years into our marriage, I had become disabled, with no job, and my income was about one-fifth of what it had been before. I guess he always expected that eventually I would get well, and go back to work. But I never did. And he told me later that without my work, I just wasn't enough for him. Oh, that hurt. But at least he was honest, finally. It took several years for us to fall apart. He started running marathons in 2001, the same year I started acting. And these were the two paths that diverged and eventually led us down roads that became too far apart for us to ever come together again. So we sat in the mediator's office yesterday, after being separated for over two years, bitterly divided over how to split our estate. Hard to believe two people who had once loved each other so much could so turn against each other. He had refused to speak to me on the phone for most of our separation, communicating only by e-mail, which means I have a written record of all the names he has called me, and the seven nasty messages he sent on my most recent birthday, including the one calling me an "evil liar." Lovely. But I had decided that enough was enough, and we were going to reach an agreement yesterday, one that was fair to both of us. It only took two hours, face to face, to agree on how much and for how long he will pay me. And as we parted, I said "I guess I may not ever see you again," and dissolved into tears. And he held me, and for a moment all the acrimony was gone and it was just the two of us, holding onto each other as if we would never let go. And then the moment passed, and we said goodbye, and "I love you" for the last time. And our 14-year marriage will pass into history by the end of the month. What to say, then, as I become a three-time loser at marriage? Have I become a punchline, another Hollywood poster child for divorced actors? I know I feel that way sometimes. Bur I did the best I could with the choices that I made. I tried hard to make my marriages work. I loved these men as best I could, given the situations I was in. I wish that I had been stronger, not so needy and dependent, and a better wife, better able to be a full partner, especially this last time. But I wasn't able to, mostly because of illness. And now, I sit in my beautiful Hollywood apartment, with my little pug Clarabelle at my side, and I look at the home that I have created with elements from all my marriages integrated into it, and I realize that I am the sum of all my experiences. I would not be the person I am if I had not been married three times. I might be a better person, but I might be less interesting or less empathetic or less forgiving. And I realize that each man has helped me move along further to get me to the place that I believe I was meant to be: here in LA, practicing my craft of acting, and drawing on my wealth of experience in love and heartache and pain to bring characters to life on the stage and the screen. I used to shrug off anything bad that happened to me by saying, "At least I got a good story out of it." My marriages have given a lifetime's worth of good stories. And actors are nothing if not storytellers.