The situation
After fourteen years, my husband and I are divorcing. We’re arguing over the house and money through solicitors, the children are moving between two homes, and I swing between fury at him and fear of starting again on my own.
Your situation, reframed
AI interpretationYou are grieving a marriage, untangling a shared life and worrying about your children at the same time, and anger and fear are natural responses to that. The danger is that the fight quietly becomes the point: winning exchanges, assigning blame, making him feel what you feel. The Stoic question is narrower and more useful: whatever he does, who do you want to be while this is happening?
The dichotomy of control
AI interpretationYours to act on
- The tone of every message and email you send
- What the children hear from you about their other parent
- Getting proper legal and financial advice, and acting on it calmly
- How you rebuild your days, routines and friendships
Not yours
- How your ex-husband behaves, or what he says about you
- The pace of the legal process and the final settlement
- Whether friends and family take sides
- The past fourteen years, which cannot be rewritten
The Stoics said
Verbatim from the source · full citationsMarcus Aurelius, Meditations 6.6
The best way of avenging thyself is not to become like the wrong doer.
Seneca, On Anger 3.43
… We do just the same thing: we worry someone who is connected with us, although the end of both victor and vanquished is at hand, and that soon. Let us rather pass the little remnant of our lives in peace and quiet: may no one loathe us when we lie dead. A quarrel is often brought to an end by a cry of “Fire!” in the neighbourhood, and the appearance of a wild beast parts the highwayman from the traveller: men have no leisure to battle with minor evils when menaced by some overpowering terror. What have we to do with fighting and ambuscades? do you want anything more than death to befall him with whom you are angry? well, even though you sit quiet, he will be sure to die. …
Epictetus, Enchiridion 5
Men are disturbed not by the things which happen, but by the opinions about the things: for example, death is nothing terrible, for if it were, it would have seemed so to Socrates; for the opinion about death, that it is terrible, is the terrible thing. When then we are impeded or disturbed or grieved, let us never blame others, but ourselves, that is, our opinions. It is the act of an ill-instructed man to blame others for his own bad condition; it is the act of one who has begun to be instructed, to lay the blame on himself; and of one whose instruction is completed, neither to blame another, nor himself.
What this means here
AI interpretationMarcus Aurelius, Meditations 6.6
This single sentence is the whole section, and in a divorce it may be the most practical one on the page. When you feel wronged, the urge is to match him: the cutting email, the point scored through solicitors, the remark in front of the children. Marcus is reminding himself that this kind of revenge costs the one thing the other person cannot take from you, which is your own character.
Translation note: Thyself is an older form of yourself; avenging thyself simply means getting your own back.
Seneca, On Anger 3.43
Seneca describes a spectacle from the Roman arena: a bull and a bear fastened together, fighting until the winner is killed as well. Two parents locked in a bitter divorce can look much the same, bound together by children and money while tearing at each other. The point is not to give in, but to see that life is short and a long war of attrition rarely leaves a winner. The passage asks whether you can keep what remains of your life peaceful, for others and for yourself.
Translation note: To worry someone here means to harass or savage them, as a dog worries a sheep.
Epictetus, Enchiridion 5
Divorce invites endless blame: his fault, your fault, round and round. Epictetus sets out three stages. Blaming the other person is where everyone starts and blaming yourself is a step on, but the aim is to stop putting either of you in the dock and to look instead at the judgements making each day harder, such as the belief that you cannot cope alone. That is not a verdict that nobody did anything wrong; it is a way of spending your energy on what you can still change.
Translation note: Ill-instructed means untrained in this way of thinking; opinions here means the judgements we form about what happens to us.
Each passage, in its own way, draws the same line. The marriage ending is no longer in your control; how you conduct yourself through the ending is. Revenge would make you more like the person you are angry with, the fight itself eats time you will not get back, and blame, whether aimed at him or at yourself, keeps you looking backwards. None of this means accepting an unfair settlement: take good advice and stand your ground. If you are ever afraid of him, or he is controlling you or the money, that calls for specialist support and legal protection, not endurance.
One action for today
AI interpretationAsk what your role requires
Before you send anything to your ex-husband or reply to a solicitor’s letter, write it, then leave it until the next morning. Reread it as the parent your children need and ask whether you would be content for them to read it in ten years. Send only what passes that test, and keep the rest in a private notebook where the anger can go without doing damage.
A line to carry
“The best way of avenging thyself is not to become like the wrong doer.”
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 6.6