If we mark our weddings with elaborate rituals, why can’t we do the same when marriages end?

Last month would have been my ten-year wedding anniversary. According to brides.com, the traditional gift for a decade of marriage is tin or aluminium, which symbolise the “strength and resilience of your marriage”.

My marriage was crushed like a tin can on recycling day after three years and four months of incremental misery, and we were legally divorced by 2019. Still, I felt there was something significant about the passing of this metallic milestone. The problem is, society sucks at dealing with the end of a relationship. While weddings are a multi-million dollar industry, divorce is rarely celebrated, or even acknowledged, in a publicly recognised way. 

According to Stats NZ, 7,995 couples were granted a divorce last year in Aotearoa. That’s about 150 divorces per week. Most of us will know someone who’s been through a divorce, or lived through one in childhood, yet we never come together to acknowledge this process. We love to get dressed up and cheer for the start of a marital union, but where is our solidarity at the dissolution of romance?

Of course, people get divorced for all sorts of complex reasons, which makes it slightly harder to respond to than the general jubilation of a wedding party. For some of us, divorce is a hard-fought freedom from the trauma of abusive relationships. For others, it’s a tragic trainwreck of despair. Sometimes getting divorced is a perfectly amicable process. But it’s always an administrative burden, and one that tends to leave us richer or poorer – a cruel subversion of the pledge we make on our wedding day.

In his cheerfully provocative book Religion for Atheists, writer and founder of The School of Life, Alain de Botton, makes the case for borrowing from religious rituals to improve our secular lifestyles. While some may take offence at the idea of replicating – or bastardising – spiritual practices, I think he’s onto something with this idea.

Most contemporary weddings draw heavily from pagan and religious traditions, as do many of our favourite national holidays. Religion for Atheists posits that religious rituals offer a blueprint for processing difficult feelings. According to de Botton, “religions are wise in not expecting us to deal with all of our emotions on our own. They know how confusing and humiliating it can be to have to admit to despair, lust, envy or egomania.” In the creation and propagation of rituals, he argues, religions give us “lines to recite and songs to sing while they carry us across the treacherous regions of our psyches.”

That’s why I decided to mark my would-be anniversary with a DIY divorce ritual. I wanted to share both the sadness and the strength I’ve gained from the end of my relationship with the people who have helped me build my best post-marriage life. Unlike my traditionally Christian wedding, I didn’t have a playbook for my vows or venues – nor did I have resources from the bank of Mum and Dad. Instead, I drew from three core pastimes that have nourished our humanity for generations: feasting, laughing, and reciting poetry. 

With a budget less than the average child’s birthday party, I hired a community hall and set about scavenging decorations. The ‘ceremony’ began with a potluck dinner (dresscode: formal). From there, we alternated between quiet reflection and hen-do levity. One friend read the poet John O’Donahue’s ‘Blessing for the end of a relationship’; two teamed up to write a sex-themed quiz.

Halfway through the night, I tried to normalise the sharing of “confusing and humiliating” experiences through the ancient art of bingo. All you need is a long list of the things that you wish you hadn’t done and are willing to read in public: the winner is the first to tick off nine regrets to which they can relate. 

Undoing or redoing some of the rituals of my wedding proved another source of inspiration. We danced to a playlist of classic breakup bangers. My parents, who ‘gave me away’ to my husband, penned a brief speech that claimed me back into the clan. I wore a white dress and an op-shopped veil that I bought for a recent festival. We cut a cake, we popped champagne, and I promised to look after myself “in sickness and in health”. 

With a divorce rate of 7.6 divorces for every 1,000 estimated existing marriages and civil unions in Aotearoa, I fear it’s only a matter of time before capitalism declares the end of love a market worth mining. One day, we’ll have magazines and dress shops dedicated to the art of untying our overpriced nuptial knots.

Until then, I think we ought to write our own rituals. We may not grow up dreaming of divorces, but we can turn them into transcendental memories.