Portrait of a Marriage: "A Lousy Divorce"

In January 2002, Doug and Mary McNeil held each other and cried.

"We don't have to do this!" Mary sobbed.

They'd been married almost 19 years. Had four great kids. Loved each other deeply. And yet …

The next day they stood in a Colorado Springs courtroom. The judge said coldly, "I declare this marriage to be irretrievably broken." And just like that, Doug and Mary were divorced.

"It was the most devastating sentence I've ever heard," Mary says. "It was like a person had died."

Doug and Mary moved on. Two years later they both remarried—a good decision, though a lot of their friends didn't think so at the time. Today, four-plus years later, they're thrilled with their second spouses and new lives.

The best part? They remarried each other.

When Doug met Mary

In 1981, Doug, a pastor's son from Michigan's Upper Peninsula, took a job in Grand Rapids. There he met the pastor's daughter at the church he was attending. Though four years older than Mary, who was still a teenager, he called to ask her out. She thought he seemed shy and geeky, but said yes.

"I found out Doug was funny, interesting, intelligent, and a great singer," she says, "and suddenly I thought, Wow, this is it."

They married in 1983. But although things appeared great, cracks soon began to form.

"We couldn't save money," Doug recalls. "In a budget, you have quarterly or bi-annual bills, like car insurance. I'd try to save extra money to pay those bills, but Mary would consider that money available and spend it. We never stayed focused on a goal, and that became really frustrating."

Mary adds, "Our personalities and ways of functioning were so different. Not to excuse my overspending, but Doug is good at keeping information in his head. His idea of a budget was, don't spend money. I'm more visual, and I want to see things written down. What do we want in five years? In one year? What do we need next month? But we never talked that through."

Their non-communication about money created deeper issues. Doug felt as if Mary were purposely trying to undermine him in what he wanted to see them accomplish as a couple and a family. "I was oblivious," says Mary. "I didn't see that, to him, my inability to handle money and to work together toward goals were signs of disrespect."

Couples therapy only further frustrated Doug. "We'd discuss how Mary wasn't pulling with me toward a goal," he says. "Then years later, when we went back to therapy, she claimed she'd never heard that before. And I thought, Oh, come on."

Insecurity and suspicion

In 1998, after 15 years of slow decline, the marriage accelerated into a downward spiral. Doug had started a home-construction business that year. But it didn't do as well as they'd hoped, and Mary disliked the insecurity of not having a regular paycheck.

"I didn't set out to undermine the business, but that's how it seemed to Doug," she says. "As time went by, I felt more insecure, and Doug felt more angry at what he viewed as my disrespect of his abilities. He stuffed his anger, and I tried to push him to get a 'real' job, which of course made him more angry and me more insecure."

Mary dealt with her insecurity by spending money; if Doug bought a tool for the business, she'd decide she was entitled to buy something for herself.

"I thought, Wait a minute. Her behavior and attitudes toward me and the marriage aren't very loving," Doug says. "So I started flirting with other women. I saw it as a way to hurt Mary without doing anything 'technically' wrong. I was angry, and exploiting Mary's insecurity was a way to show that." 

His actions didn't escape Mary's attention. So she responded through sex—her way of dealing with marital conflict. "I thought, If we can make love enough, then Doug will be happy," Mary admits. She also became suspicious and clingy. When Doug would arrive home after being somewhere other than work, she'd demand, "Where have you been? Why didn't you call?"

One night, exasperated during an argument, Doug snapped, "I'm going out."

"Where?" she shot back.

"I'm a man. I have needs."

Devastated, Mary's imagination tormented her for the two hours he was gone. Years later, they'd clear the air about where Doug had been that night. They laugh about it now.

Home Depot. 

The great divide

Doug's solution to needing more money was to work harder and longer and take on more side jobs. But he still couldn't keep up with Mary's spending. Debt piled up.

Finally, to stop the financial bleeding, Doug closed the business, sold his tools, and found a job working for someone else. He'd recently built his family a house, and they'd rolled the business debt into the mortgage. But with their income down and spending still too high, the bank foreclosed.

"By that point I felt like, if Mary couldn't pull together with me for the sake of keeping herself in a nice house," Doug says, "how would she ever work with me on anything?"

In May 2000, Doug told Mary he couldn't take it anymore; he was leaving. "I had to do something separate from her (financially), to make sure the children were cared for," he says. "If that meant we had to be separated and eventually divorced, then that's what I'd do. It wasn't necessarily what

I wanted. My feeling was, I could always remarry her."

Yet despite his conviction, he had doubts. "I wasn't totally convinced divorce was the right thing," he says.

In a way, Doug was separating from God too. "I was in a void. I wanted God to fix things, and he wasn't."

"I was stunned," Mary says. "I knew we were in bad shape, but I never imagined he'd be willing to walk away from our family."

The house was auctioned in the foreclosure. Mary and the kids moved into a condo; Doug lived in a tent in a private campground for the summer.

In August, Mary took a job at a publishing company in Colorado Springs and moved with their three younger kids. Doug stayed in Michigan with their oldest. Mary knew the move would be difficult for the kids, but the job paid substantially more than she was making in Grand Rapids. Given their financial troubles, she thought it was worth the risk.

"When a marriage falls apart," she says, "we don't realize how inwardly focused we can become. We think we're taking care of others, but we're so fractured ourselves that it's difficult to see anything but our own needs."

At Christmas 2000, Doug moved to Colorado Springs to work things out with Mary. Once there, he planned to restart his home-building business. But it didn't take long to see that Mary was behind on bills and the family needed the money he'd earmarked for the business.

Mary didn't have answers. "I was trying so hard, and I couldn't figure out why it wasn't working," she says.

Doug felt deflated. "I'd hoped she would have seen the seriousness of my intent and what had already happened," he says. "But it hadn't made any difference in her habits."

They began to talk about divorce, and Doug took a construction job with Raytheon Polar Services, which provides support for scientific research teams. In Antarctica.

"That's as far separated as you can be," Mary says.

Doug would be gone nine months; in fact, he wouldn't even see a plane from the outside world for most of that time. With limited phone service, they were forced to keep in touch mostly by e-mail. Doug sent money home regularly, but when he checked bank accounts online, he noticed more overdue bills. Unfortunately, Doug didn't feel the internet was a good tool for bringing up the subject with Mary, or to repair trust. His e-mails became fewer and further between.

"With e-mail, it's difficult to communicate tone," Mary says. "So what I thought was coming across as gentle and loving was coming across as accusatory. Everything fell apart again."

Mary wasn't the only woman Doug was keeping in touch with by e-mail. What had been flirting with other women before their initial separation in Michigan had become much more, and he was tending to a romance with a woman there.

"It was someone I knew, and I was insanely jealous and angry," Mary says. Even still, she clung to hope that the marriage would survive.

"I found when you ask God to show you your part in a problem, he'll answer," Mary says. "He'd point out issues in my life and patiently wait for me to deal with them. Layer after layer of things such as my lack of support for Doug's business got peeled away. When I went to church or even to work, I'd look at other men and evaluate them against Doug. I never met anyone who was single who measured up to him."

Life in focus

In October 2001, while seeking a doctor's advice for someone else, Mary unexpectedly discovered something about herself: She had attention deficit disorder (ADD).

"I called my dad and told him," she says. "He started to cry and said, 'Mary, I have that. I think Grandma did too.' For me, counseling, educating myself, and getting on medication changed my life. It was akin to a second born-again experience."

Mary had always struggled with setting priorities and getting work done. Suddenly, she could focus. A night-to-day change was her ability to handle money. She now had the means and desire to keep track of what, when, and where she was spending. She told Doug by e-mail, but he was less than convinced.

 "I'd seen in counseling the 'aha' light go on in Mary," says Doug. "It would seem she'd had a revelation, yet nothing ever changed."

Mary wasn't confident either. "All I had was a tiny seed of hope," she says. "From the way he treated me, I knew he still loved me at least a little, but I was never certain we'd get back together."

Although Doug's other relationship was shaky, it didn't change his outlook on his marriage. The divorce finalized in January 2002.

"My prayers alternated between begging God to help me stop loving Doug to begging God to bring Doug back to me," Mary says. "I read every book I could find, talked the ears off my friends, and vacillated minute to minute between love and anger."

But later that month, "Something clicked in my head," she recalls. "I realized I'd be okay if Doug didn't come back to me. I quit struggling and grasping and just relaxed in God's care."

Doug and Mary stayed friendly over the next couple years. "He'd talk to me about wanting to break up with his girlfriend because she'd cheated on him," Mary says. "How weird is that?"

Friends told her to distance herself—not to let Doug walk on her. Although she knew they meant well, she also knew a "tough love" approach would drive Doug away for good. "It absolutely would have," Doug agrees.

 "I had ups and downs, week by week and even hour by hour," Mary admits, "but I wanted to get back together with him. It was never beyond hope to me, even when I knew he had a girlfriend.

In February 2004, with Mary's knowledge, Doug flew to Michigan to end his relationship. "I had evidence she was being unfaithful," he says. "When I compared her actions to Mary's, I knew that relationship had to end. Though I hadn't prayed about it, the convoluted way I became aware of what was going on was definitely divine intervention. Humanly speaking, I shouldn't have found out; she lived more than 1,000 miles away."

When he returned to Colorado Springs, he realized he'd lost his car keys. He called Mary for a ride from the airport. "I could see in his eyes a new attitude," she recalls.

 "I'd done so many things wrong," Doug says, "and I'd tried to blame Mary to justify my actions. That day in the car, I knew I needed to make things right." So he asked her to get together the next morning to talk. Doug asked Mary a question he'd never asked: "Can you ever forgive me for the way I've treated you?" Then he added, "You can ask me about anything, and I'll answer it."

And she did. Difficult questions about relationships he'd had with other women, including several of her friends back in Michigan during their separation. He laid bare all the junk and hurt and secrecy.

"Did we both say, here's every single detail of every minute we were apart? Absolutely not," Mary says. "But I asked every question I needed an answer to. And I know Doug told me the truth because he didn't try to make himself look good. Whatever ugliness was there, he told me as gently and kindly as he could."

"That day I knew we were okay," Doug says.

Things accelerated quickly. "When you've already spent 20-plus years together," Mary says, "there's not much point to a long engagement." They picked out new wedding rings at a pawn shop (neither had much disposable income) and set the wedding date for a month later.

Better than new

Doug and Mary are quick to say their new marriage is more than just the old one patched up. There's no more stuffed anger, clingy neediness, or lack of trust. "Sure, we both carry scars," Mary says. "But what we have is a whole new thing, because we both come at it with a sense of gratitude for each other and a realization of how fragile a relationship can be."

Mary's add treatment really did change the way they could communicate. Today, Mary can stick to a budget. And while things still aren't perfect financially, their approach to those bumps in the road is far healthier.

 "The difference is that we're facing them together, both of us clear on our dreams, goals, and plans," Mary says.

They've added safeguards too. When they got back together, they severed all ties with anyone who'd shown romantic interest in either of them.

"We weren't willing to risk our relationship to be 'just friends' with anyone of the opposite sex," Mary says.

People ask Mary how she and Doug managed to turn things around. "I can only say, God changes hearts," she says. "He changed Doug's, and he changed mine. You know how in Ezekiel 11:19 God says he'll remove the heart of stone and replace it with a heart of flesh? That's exactly what he did for us. He gave us a gift—a new marriage and a second chance—and we're not going to waste it or take it for granted."

Jim Killam, an MP regular contributor, teaches journalism at Northern Illinois University and is co-author of Rescuing the Raggedy Man (Xulon).

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