Three Marriages, Three Divorces: What I’ve Learned

A personal look at what three marriages and three divorces taught me about love, responsibility, and choosing peace over conflict.

I’ve been married three times… and divorced three times.

That’s not something I say lightly—and definitely not something I got right. But it is something I’ve learned a lot from.

In this episode, I’m sharing a more personal perspective on divorce. Not from a place of having done it perfectly, and not as advice that applies to every situation—but simply what I’ve learned from living it.

I talk through each of my marriages and what ultimately led to those relationships ending, including:

• getting married young and realizing it wasn’t the right fit
• trying to become someone I wasn’t in order to make a marriage work
• staying too long in a relationship that wasn’t healthy
• and the moment I realized I couldn’t let the next 10 years look like the last 10

But more than anything, this episode is about how I chose to walk through divorce.

Why I didn’t want it to be a fight.

Why I chose flexibility over being right.

And how that decision has shaped my relationships with my exes—especially as co-parents.

I also talk about what it looks like now:

• navigating life with shared history
• co-parenting through hard seasons
• and in one case, maintaining a genuine friendship that still exists today

This isn’t a conversation about whether divorce is right or wrong.

And it’s not a one-size-fits-all approach.

It’s just an honest reflection on love, responsibility, growth… and what it means to move forward without destroying each other in the process.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 1:05

Welcome back to Peace of Work. I'm Danielle Tantone. And today I want to talk about something that's kind of unpopular to talk about. And that is divorce. As you may know, if you've listened to my podcast for a while, I have been married three times and I've been divorced three times. And that's not something I'm proud of at all. But it is what it is. It's the truth of who I am and where I've been. It's not something I say lightly and not something I did perfectly, but I have learned a lot. So I thought I'd share some of the things I learned and some of the stories that that I've gone through. So for a little bit of quick context, every relationship is different, obviously. Some divorces are complicated and painful and require distance. And so I am not judging anyone else or claiming to have that everyone should do it my way. I just thought I'd share kind of an unpopular perspective around divorce. So my first marriage, I was pretty young, although not super young. I was in my mid-twenties. And we were together for a couple of years before we even got married. But we were only married for less than a year. We had no kids, so it was a pretty clean break. We really didn't have any assets. I paid him a little bit of money for a little bit of time to just help him get on his feet, and that was it. There was there was no reason to keep in touch. And I really never heard from him again, you know, all these years. And I realized this morning that it's been about 25 years since we got married. So I would have been married 25 years this year if we had stayed together. Which is kind of sad. You know, I'd be neat to be had to have been married that long, but wasn't in the cards. That one was a short marriage. So I realized pretty quickly that it wasn't a good fit, that we just weren't right for each other and we didn't communicate well, and I had kind of rushed into it. So we got divorced. And after that one, I kind of frantically dated, I would say. I it didn't feel frantic at the time. It felt like just kind of keeping myself busy and having fun sowing my wild oats, so to speak. So I did that for a short while, and then I met my second husband, and he was really different. He was a born-again Christian who was saving himself for marriage, and I was obviously not that. I was raised Jewish, so I hadn't saved myself for marriage even before my first marriage, but and I wasn't a Christian, so it was like a very mismatch on paper. But I had a spiritual awakening, and I became a Christian, and we just felt this connection, and I felt like it's what God was calling me to do, and that because I was a new creature in Christ, we had all the foundation that we needed, and we could make this work. But really, and I explored this in depth in my first book, piece of work, a memoir. I was trying to be someone I wasn't. I was trying so hard to be this perfect Christian wife, and I just couldn't do it. So when the shit hit the fans, so to speak, I took all the blame for the fall of our marriage. And it was largely my fault, but nothing is ever a hundred percent one person's fault. And what I learned was you can't build a marriage on becoming someone else, on trying to be who you're not. And taking all the blame isn't actually healthy or fair. Thankfully, I did make a decision that we had two kids together and we were going to be in each other's lives, whether we liked it or not, and that we had to put our love for the kids first. So I refused to let us be, to let us harbor anger toward each other and to let that interfere with our parenting and with just the way we treated each other in front of the kids. I I basically took what my mom had taught me, kill them with kindness, and took it to a new level. I just became super flexible, tried to just agree on most things. Thankfully, we really did agree on the most fundamental things about parenting. And I just tried to be flexible when I didn't, whether it was finances, whether it was sport and activities that the kids did or didn't do. We did have in all three, we had somebody help us with the paperwork, like a mediator of sort. In one case, it was an actual mediator. In the other two, it was either a paralegal or just a lawyer who wrote up the paperwork for us. And that helped because it's like you can get into like nitpicky fights about things, but we never went to court and we never fought over things. We just figured out a way to agree. And I think that if more people could do this, there'd be they'd save themselves so much money and time and stress and sadness and grief. I know it's not always possible. Some people, you can try all you want to be reasonable and they just won't. They refuse. But you have a lot more control. I don't like the word control because it's it kind of sounds like manipulation, but you have a lot more influence than you think based on how you act and how you behave. And you can't control another person's actions or reactions, but you can control your own. And when you refuse to engage in that fighting, and when you just decide that, yeah, you know what? I do think that I should have this money and you should have that money, and I should have this house and you should have that, whatever the case may be, you can dig your heels in and fight about it, but like usually when you do that, you end up losing, you end up both losing, and you end up spending so much money to have a lawyer tell you, no, you have this and you have that, or a judge. When if you really, if you can find a way to get past your own ego and your own childishness almost, you can realize that none of that really matters. I mean, in the big scheme of things, like yes, it's money, and yes, you worked hard for it, and yes, it's not fair if that person gets some of your money that you worked hard for. But you know, at the same time, you once thought you were gonna share your life with this person for the rest of your life. You once thought this was the love of your life, and they trusted that. And I'm kind of talking in generalities here, whether it's to the male or the female or the breadwinner or the non-breadwinner. I've seen it both ways. And in my case, I've mostly been the breadwinner, not in every case, but in a couple of the cases, you know, it was me that had to be just willing to make it right and to make it even to be more generous than I thought was fair. And I chose that. I guess I didn't have to choose that, but I have had seen enough cases where so much fighting happened that I didn't want that to happen in my divorce. So I chose to just agree about more things than I probably agree, would have agreed on. And, you know, I'll be honest, like we we didn't have a lot of assets in any of my three marriages. So we had some more or less in in each of the three, but it was I just the way I thought about it is you know what? This is my choice, and I want to make it right, and I want to make it as painless as possible for both of us. Because again, I think I've said this already. This person is gonna be in my life for the rest of my life, whether I like it or not. We have kids together, and so we might as well make it a friendship of sorts. So that's that's kind of my take. And it's again, I do understand that it's not always possible. Sometimes you're just dealing with someone who's completely unreasonable, no matter how reasonable you are. But usually if you are extra reasonable, they may, they can come around. I think that's the key is remembering that even though you might hate this person right now, or they may be they might have betrayed you to such an extent that you're you harbor so much anger and hurt and resentment. They were once someone. They were once your love, they were once your person. And even though they're not that anymore, and you realize what a dreadful mistake you might have made, they're still I think seeing that and remembering that is a is helpful because and remembering that they're only human. Like you may think they're a really shitty human, but they're still only human. And trying to see the best of them, believe the best of them goes a very long way. So that's my that's the way I've always chosen to do it. And thankfully, in my choosing to do that, even though we're talking about three totally different people in different situations on my three divorces, my choice to be like that did affect how they in turn treated me. So it it can have more influence than you think. All right, so then my third marriage, we I reconnected with Mike. We had gone to high school together. I ignored red flags. I mean, there were plenty of them. I rushed into that marriage for all sorts of reasons, and I kind of outlined this again in the book. I mean, I go into depth about all of it, and I tried so hard to make it work. This part's not really in that memoir. It may be in a future memoir, but the main point is I could blame, I could post on Facebook or talk to all my all of our mutual friends and family, and I could talk about how it really was and how why I did this and why I chose to leave. But that's not really helpful because again, this is the father of my youngest child. This is someone that I chose. And I tried for so many years to make it work. We were together for almost 10 years when I looked back at the last 10 years and I said, I cannot have the next 10 years look like these last 10. We just bickered and fought over all sorts of things. And I thought that staying, pushing through, was the best choice. I mean, obviously, I made a commitment. This was the third time I had tried to make this commitment, and I was determined to make it work and couldn't make it work. And honestly, I probably stayed too long. My older children were affected quite a bit by it and you know harbored a lot of anger toward me for staying as long as I did. But it was hard because it wasn't like 100% bad. And it wasn't, you know, it wasn't like an obvious, oh, he's beating me, we better leave. It wasn't like that. And yet staying isn't always the strong choice. Leaving can be the responsible choice. So you know, I tried and tried and tried, and even he would say that, you know, I gave it a valiant effort. I we we just didn't communicate well, we didn't see eye to eye on a lot of important things. And ultimately, we are so much better as friends than as husband and wife. In many ways, he's still my person for a lot of things. I mean, sometimes it's something as simple as like fixing something on my cell phone or in my car. Sometimes it's really little things that he's just good at. And I love that he's still part of my life. And people look at us, his friends and mine, and they're like, how can you guys still be so close? How do you still spend so much time together? And the reality is we spend time together in small doses. And I think the truth is we still love each other. I love him maybe a little more like a brother. I mean, not exactly, obviously, he's my ex-husband. That would be weird if he was like my brother. But like, but it's like that because like he can annoy the hell out of me, but I but in a loving way, in a way that's never gonna make me stop loving him. And I think that's such a such a better place. I'm so glad that we're there instead of that fighting, you know, we can't see each other, we can't stand each other, we hate each other. Um, you know, again, he's gonna be in my life forever. So how do I want that to look? And I love that we're able to go out to eat together with our daughter, we're able to choose peace. And even when we sometimes don't agree on how to move forward with a parenting question or a schedule question, we have to choose to compromise. And whether that's me or him or both, it's a lot harder to be divorced from someone than to be married to them sometimes because you no longer have the same influence and the same closeness that causes them to want to please you, you know. Like there's in some cases they don't want to, they don't, they almost sometimes want to do the exact opposite of what you want, depending on your situation. So, like I said, I know that what I have and what I've shared with all three of my exes is not always possible. Some situations really require distance or strong boundaries. So I'm not trying to say that you just be nice and everything works. I know that it's not as simple as that. But I think that keeping remembering why you loved them in the first place is helpful. And remembering, especially if you have children, that you created this human being, these human beings together is helpful. Understanding that things may come. If your kids are young, you may go through some really hard things and you're gonna have to go through them together. Not a hundred percent together, not as if you're living together, but you know, my ex of my older two kids, we have navigated some really hard stuff the last couple of years. I talked about that in some of the episodes. So I've been alone because I'm not with a partner now. I'm not married, but I have been navigating it with him and his wife, and that's something complicated, you know, like there's a lot of nuances. So that's why I'm so grateful that we have always been amicable and we've always been able to be maybe not friends, but but co-parents, amicable co-parents, I guess. And then Mike and I have been able to have a level of friendship that's even more than just amicable. Like we're truly friends, and that has been so great. Like on holidays and birthdays, we just celebrated our young our daughter's birthday, and it was neat to be able to do it together. He came over for breakfast and was here with my mom. And you know what, it means a lot to her, so it's neat to see how this one is different than the previous one. And it hasn't always been perfect, but I'm really proud of us, and I'm really grateful that it's been allowed to be like this. So that's all I wanted to share. You know, I didn't get everything right, obviously, or it'd still be married. But I do feel peace with how I've walked through it, and that matters more to me now than being right ever did. Anyway, just wanted to share kind of a little heartfelt thoughts, some of my personal thoughts about divorce. I'm sure there's a whole bunch more that I should have, could have, would have said. And this is by no means saying that divorce attorneys are bad or anything like that at all. Another thing I want to say is that I still believe in marriage. And I am in no ways a proponent of divorce. I think that that's easy to misinfer from what I share. I do believe that marriage is supposed to be forever. I do believe that. I know it wouldn't seem like that when you look at my life, but I tried and I failed at marriage, but I think I've been pretty successful at divorce. Uh dubious honor. Dubious quality, I guess. That is all. Thank you for listening. See you next time.