STUPID Divorce

By Vincent Fudge

In this follow-up to his first relationship guide, SMART Love, Vincent Fudge II takes a personal approach to offering advice for men about divorce. In STUPID Divorce, the narrator explores the reasons for his divorce, laying bare his emotions while providing a helpful and insightful approach to separation. Fudge's narrative suggests that divorce

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lloyd Vincent Fudge Jr
• Release date: Jun 3, 2021
• ISBN: 9781087957548

Vincent Fudge

A high school dropout with a criminal record, Vincent Fudge II spent eight months homeless before joining the military. He used educational benefits from the military to earn both a bachelor's and master's degree in communication, then ventured across the country with his wife and first child to finesse his way into one of the nation's top military financial services associations. He built a house for his family, had two additional children, and wrote his first relationship improvement book inspired by his marital missteps. After facing marital adversity and re-evaluating his life goals, he started a life coaching business. He worked for sugar water and used life's lemons to make lemonade. He currently lives in San Antonio, Texas, with his three children.

Book preview

Prologue

AS A SURVEYOR, I ENCOURAGE you to consider how to learn from these shared experiences and marinate on the consequences of decisions made in this separation story. The goal of this project was to document the navigation through the dissolution of marriage, detail how it felt to undo my marriage, and distill my reflections into lessons learned. I found that a lot of relationship advice I had read or been given tended to be ambiguous, and for the advice to be applicable, I had to take what I could from it and implement my own interpretation of the advice. Solid divorce advice is a much rarer commodity because you cannot truly speak to it without having experienced it. Considering the circumstances of divorce, finding objective guidance on the matter is nearly impossible. Allow this narrative to serve as an observation of the full experience to which you can draw your own conclusions and influence your own decision-making processes.

Find truth in my truth—either in finding a way to articulate your similar struggles with my words or identifying with my self-reflection, or (at times) self-deprecation, as I chose to be transparent with my vulnerability. I also hope that you can learn from my faults by not making the same missteps and seeing the occasional error in my judgment. Divorce has been the hardest and most painful experience I have ever endured, and whether my narrative serves as a cautionary tale, relatable read, or insightful exploration, I hope you are satisfied with your takeaways from this read.

THERE ARE NO MISTAKES. THE EVENTS WE BRING UPON OURSELVES, NO MATTER HOW UNPLEASANT, ARE NECESSARY IN ORDER TO LEARN WHAT WE NEED TO LEARN; WHATEVER STEPS WE TAKE, THEY ARE NECESSARY TO REACH THE PLACES WE HAVE CHOSEN TO GO.

—RICHARD BACH

Dear God,

Thank you for waking me up this morning.

Thank you for answering my prayers.

Thank you for everything, God.

I miss my wife.

I miss my children.

I miss my home.

I feel like I failed them, God.

I feel like I failed myself.

I am trying to be positive.

I am trying to be happy.

I am trying to be peaceful.

I am trying to be a good distant father.

I am trying to stop the pain.

I am trying to find closure.

I am trying to heal.

God, please grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

Amen.

The chill of the metal surprised me as I grasped the casket bar. I leaned heavily on it as I continued to pray for forgiveness and peace of mind. There is no greater pain than the grief of death, especially death that feels in part your fault. Even when, in your honesty, you did everything you could have done…loss of this magnitude weighs deeply on your conscience and burdens you until you can forgive yourself and those involved. With my eyes clenched shut, amid my serenity prayer, a mental picture of Ebony’s smiling face on our wedding day flashed across my mind. I let out a whimper and collapsed in front of the casket, crushed by my pain.

Who Were We?

I WAS EDWARD. I WAS a knucklehead unhappily wedded in a toxic marriage to a wonderfully flawed woman who was not meant for me. My life story was an odyssey of accomplishing milestones and triumphing over adversity. After a myriad of early life mishaps, I forged my personality and defined my character in the fires of military life. The events that were catalyst to this project were a series of unfortunate events that resulted in impulsive decisions derived from egotistical statements and actions influenced by reprobates. My ex-wife, Ebony, was a beautiful, unstable creature with the most traumatic early life of anyone I had ever known. She was a self-saboteur with a personality that was molded in foster care and a survivalist mentality that was cultivated with a necessity for independence and control.

Ebony and I had a tumultuous on-and-off relationship for the decade prior to getting married. We had two children together: Elizabeth and Elijah. Though we held deep love for one another, we were young, broken people who had not known how to love each other properly. We established a relationship full of toxic behaviors; unhealthy norms; ineffective communication; harbored resentment; distrust; unreconciled conflict; and mutual mental, emotional, and (though rarely) physical abuse. Through it all, we had experienced several prolific life events, and against the advice of our cohorts, we decided to get married without premarital counseling nor a prenuptial agreement. After three and a half years of episodes, vacations, meltdowns, apologies, things unsaid, celebrations, bad behavior, sex, therapy, police calls, marital workshops, family photo sessions, smiles, illness, sweat, and tears…we decided to call it quits.

We found ourselves utterly exhausted of one another while struggling to continue maintaining the implementation of a relationship improvement concept I created previously called SMART Love. While I found myself in a place of acceptance, confident things had the potential to continue getting better if not any easier…Ebony felt that our lives together had a toxic repetition and did not acknowledge the progress we had made toward improving our marriage.

Categorically, separating parties can identify with one or a combination of the following five scenarios related to the divorce experience:

The Scorned: The wronged victim fed up with habitual trespasses and ready to end the marital journey despite what there is for gain or loss in the process. The options weighed for staying are overwhelmed by the need for liberation and independence. The scorned often finds the separation process most easy to navigate through. As most often the petitioner, comparatively speaking it is easier to be the person breaking up than it is to be broken up with.

The Offender: The instigator of separation through malicious acts, be it trespasses, vices, abuses, or merely mishandling the marriage by failing to reconcile, who addresses opportunities for