Author of Divorce Memoir Juggles Book Tour, Wedding Planning
Life after divorce can be a complicated—and often surprising—process. For one writer, celebrating the end of her first marriage led to an unexpected result: a new one.
In a recent article for CNN, Sascha Rothchild described her peculiar predicament. Rothchild had completed a new memoir called “How to Get Divorced by 30,” about her split from the man that she married at the age of 27 and divorced by the time she was 30.
Rothchild was on vacation having just completed her book tour endorsing the memoir when her current boyfriend dropped to one knee on scenic Mammoth Mountain and proposed to her. She was literally floored, dropping the glass of champagne that she was holding and nearly fainting at the sight of a diamond ring and a real-life proposal.
You see, this was the first marriage proposal that Rothchild had ever had. In her first marriage, she and her so-called “lovable, lackadaisical stoner husband”
had dated for three years before she determined that it was time to get married. He didn’t propose to her, but rather it was a mutual decision that they made to “do this.”
She called her desire to marry her first husband a part of her “arbitrary timetable.” She bought her own engagement ring, and even claimed that she bought something “untraditional,” so that she could wear it on another finger in case they got divorced. “I was planning my divorce while I was planning my wedding,” Rothchild wrote.
It was this self-defeating and off-kilter process that she described in her new memoir.
Rothchild goes on to say that she had done her best to pretend that the wedding that she was planning wasn’t a real wedding. It took place three months after the agreement to wed, and they hired a stand-up comedian to perform the ceremony. According to Rothchild, the comedian “never uttered the words love, forever or til death do us part.”
After realizing how unhappy she was in that marriage, Rothchild decided to get a divorce, saying that she was “too young to be stuck in nuptial mediocrity.”
Rothchild’s second go-round in the wedding game taught her what she had been missing out on the first time around. She slowly realized that her new fiancé had rented out an entire lakefront area, and that he had spent months having the engagement ring designed and custom-made with the help of her sister.
As she had traveled the country defending her book about a failed first marriage, her boyfriend was planning his proposal to get them started on her second.
In other words, she realized that he had put all of the effort into this proposal that her first marriage arrangement had lacked. This was a new experience.
Rothchild realized that while she had been with her boyfriend, Matt, she had not been focused on marriage itself, but on love, and on enjoying the relationship itself. Overcoming the urge to have a small second wedding, Matt helped her to agree on a big wedding, and now Rothchild finds herself planning the wedding with her fiancé, rather than in spite of him.
“I’m getting wrapped up in trumpet versus mermaid versus princess-cut wedding dresses,” she writes, “and in color schemes and bouquet shapes and invitation fonts. I’m enjoying the small moments of making decisions with Matt about venues and open bars and save the date cards.”
The planning is apparently solidifying their bond, as they practice compromise and choose with care, rather than going through the motions.
Even as Rothchild tells interviewers about the transformative nature of a divorce, she is exercising the fruit of that transformation en route to her second marriage and her life after divorce.
