The Chic Young Divorcée

Róisín Lanigan on metabolizing a divorce through pop culture and the promises that can’t be kept. This essay was originally published in The Fence.

I am generally against personal essays. I think they are undignified. Which is unfortunate for me, because when you get divorced, as I have just done, all anyone wants to know is what happened. I am not that young—but I am young to be divorced. My advice for anyone who feels self-conscious about their age would simply be: don’t get botox, get divorced.

What happened was this. On the day itself, I put the wedding dress on first before getting the creases out. I was too nervous to steam it properly. My hands were trembling.

"It has wrinkles at the bottom," my friend said. She looked very beautiful in her own creaseless bridesmaid dress, which was green. She had a dark tan that’s incongruous with her freckles. The overall effect, I felt, looked appropriately Irish.

The photographer was there, trying to be unobtrusive, taking photos in the background. I had only eaten crisps for breakfast, and when I went to the shop to buy them there were several armed police officers in the queue, which I felt was a bad omen. My friend pointed out all police officers in Belfast are armed, which I conceded to be true, but still, it worried me. I convinced her to continue steaming the rest of the wrinkles while the dress was on, which was an insane thing to suggest, but she went along with it because women are allowed to be insane for one day in their entire lives, and that is on their wedding day. The material was thin. Hot air scalded my thighs and I gasped. "Sorry," she said. We agreed, it looked fine.

But the scald scabbed over and scarred. And the scar is still on my thigh. It’s barely perceptible now, but I know it’s there, so I look at it all the time. Every time I look at it, when I get out of the shower or when I’m lying in bed I think: this scar lasted longer than the marriage! It’s a joke I tell myself. And I’m not really laughing, but, sadly, it is funny.

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I read an article in which a woman metabolises her young divorce through the break-up of Taylor Swift and Joe Alwyn. People keep telling me to read Cleopatra and Frankenstein. Miley Cyrus has got divorced. Sophie Turner is getting divorced. Ariana Grande gets divorced. Every time a celebrity who is under 40 announces their divorce people send it to me, like a personalised push notification. The New York-based website The Cut had a special ‘divorce week,' where they only published content about divorce and people kept sending the articles to me on Instagram and I reply "ha ha."

Someone is going through a break-up and tells me they wish it was a divorce instead, because it is a more socially elegant version of sadness. My boss sent me a link to Emily Ratajkowski saying it is chic to be divorced before 30, and I reply "ha ha." Gisele Bündchen looks hotter after her divorce; everyone agrees this to be something that just happens to women when you get divorced. I do not look like Gisele Bündchen.

The TikTok algorithm keeps suggesting videos where American women with beachy waves and absolutely no lines on their face complain about their ex-husbands. Sometimes people don’t know I am getting a divorce, and then the first thing they ask when they find out is: are you going to write about the divorce? "No," I say, "obviously not. That would be insane."

DIRT ON BREAKUPS