72: It's a Myth: What Sapiens Teaches Us About Divorce

In this episode, Quinn cracks open Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens and shows how its central idea—that humans rule the world because we can create and share stories—directly applies to divorce.

Marriage? A story. Divorce-as-failure? A story. Myths about women’s value, motherhood, and happiness? Stories.

Quinn weaves history, Harari’s insights, and her own lived experience to reveal how deeply we’ve been shaped by cultural fictions—and how liberating it is to see them for what they are. Divorce doesn’t make you broken; it’s your personal Cognitive Revolution, your chance to rewrite the myth and live into your most beautiful life.

What you’ll hear in this episode:

• Why marriage and divorce are cultural myths, not biological truths
• How the story of marriage has shifted across history—from property deals to love matches
• The myths divorced women are handed (and why they’re total BS)
• How to name, question, and rewrite the stories that are shaping your post-divorce life
• Why divorce is not failure—it’s evolution

If it’s all just story, then babe—you get to write the next chapter.

Links:

Awake by Jen Hatmaker

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari 

PostDivorceGlowUp.com

Email: quinn@postdivorceglowup.com

Transcript

0:49

Hey babe. Welcome back to the podcast. It is Fall Break here in Tucson. So a couple of my kiddos are with their dad this week, and I am off to Dallas to teach at Brita Joe's Stay or Go retreat. I've been getting homework done and meals planned for the kids that are still at home, and I am so excited to just have some. Girl time and hang with my bestie and all the women at her retreat. I will report back next week. I'm sure. I'm just gonna be so full of myself. Oh, don't you love it when you are full of yourself. speaking of a woman who is full of herself. Last week I read Jen Hat's memoir. It's called Awake. OMG read this book. It tells the story of her divorce journey. I loved it. I highly recommend it. It was so different. from my journey. She woke up one night to hear her husband sending a voice message to his girlfriend, and by morning he was out of the house and she was on this different journey, a journey. She did not expect I personally was not familiar with Jen before this book, but I feel like we could be good friends. Her divorce came as a shock to her and was deeply painful in ways that mine wasn't. So if that was kind of your journey, you might find some deep resonance with her story and the way she managed. sometimes we have this idea of what going through a divorce is like. I certainly had my ideas before I went through it. I think. Divorce is not just one thing. It's not just shocking and painful, though it can be. It can also be a relief and freedom, and sometimes it's all of it. Sometimes it's shocking and painful and a relief and it's freedom And I found myself reading Jen's word, especially what she wrote about her children and their struggles, and it gave me pause and a desire to check in with my kiddos. So I was out running errands with my youngest and I just took a moment to talk to her about the divorce and ask. If she ever wishes that her dad and I were still married, and her answer was so immediate and unequivocal, she said, never thank God, because that's how I feel too. Never do I wish I was still married to her dad, but I actually wanna talk to you about a different book. This book came up because I had recommended it to one of my daughters and she read it and we've been discussing it, and it was recommended to me by my oldest son. And this book, it just shook me. It's called Sapiens, a brief history of humankind by Yuval Noah Harra, and I read it after my divorce as I was trying to regain my balance with this new way of living. And I was also deconstructing my Mormon pathway and trying to find my balance again. And it's basically the story of us humans, homo sapiens from the very beginning of our evolution until now. The author starts with what he called the cognitive revolution around 70,000 years ago when humans really came to the fore and became the only species able to create and share stories. That's what allowed us to cooperate in massive groups, which looks like building civilizations and running the world and creating climate change and wars. And from that place, the author. Takes you through the agricultural revolution, the rise of religion and empires, capitalism, science, technology, all through the lens of how much of what we think is quote unquote real is actually just. Shared belief. Just a shared story. Things like money and nations and laws, and even marriage and divorce. These are not biological facts. They're stories that humans other people invented and then passed on until. It started to feel like the truth, and that's just the way it is. And that's why I love this book because it shows us how powerful the stories we tell ourselves really are. And if story is what sets us apart as humans, then babe, we can absolutely rewrite our own. Now. I know, I know, I know. I keep telling you about this week after week after week. Change your stories and your life will change for the better. Well, better stories make better life. But you know, here we are again and this story never gets old. So I'm gonna come at it from the direction of Sapiens and through the lens of Harra. Now, harra says, homo sapiens rule the world because it is the only animal that can cooperate flexibly in large numbers. Cooperation is based on myths. Think about that. Think about it for just a second. The myth that. It matters, whatever it is, like going to college, getting baptized, being married, it's just a myth. Cooperation is based on myths. Cooperation. And thus, society is based on myths, and this is uniquely human. Now, chimps we know can cooperate, but only with individuals that they know personally. Ants cooperate, but only with the other ants in their colonies. Bees can build hives, but they never wake up one day and say, Hey, let's try a triangle or a spiral hive instead. Only humans that we know of can imagine something that does not exist and then get millions of strangers to believe in it. Can we talk about cryptocurrency? Because money, it's just paper or metal or crypto, but we believe in the story of its value, so it runs the global economy. Borders. There is no mountain range in nature marking the US from Mexico in Arizona. It is literally a line on a map that we all pretend is real. Nations, corporations, religions. They are just stories. And here's the kicker. Marriage and divorce are just some of the stories too. So what is natural? What would be here without the story? Well, sex would still be happening. Pair bonding. That happens in nature, raising babies together, that happens, that's natural. But marriage, the legal contract, the religious vows, the cultural weight, the pressure that we put on women to make the world go round. That's human storytelling. Myth making at work. And the story around marriage has changed a thousand times. In ancient Mesopotamia, marriage was a property deal. Wives were literally listed alongside cattle. In contracts and then we moved to Medieval Europe. Marriages are family alliances. Love. Ha. That was not the point. And then in the 19th century, wives were legally the property of their husbands in most of the Western world. And only in the last century did marriage for love or women as people. Become the story that anyone gets to live by. So when someone voices an opinion about divorce as a failure, or absent abuse, you should have stayed for your children or. Dating after divorce is terrible and dangerous, or single moms are the worst and are destined to live in poverty. What they're really sharing with you is the myth. They're telling you that you broke the current version of the myth that our society has chosen and you must pay. But babe, myths are not facts. They are inventions that change with the culture or simply by you opting out of one story and creating another. Harra reminds us that we believe in a particular order, not because it is objectively true, but because believing it enables us to cooperate effectively. So Staying married at all costs served societies, it kept it properly intact. It kept churches powerful, and it kept track of whose kids are whose. But does it serve you? Did it serve you? Now, uh, ask yourself, who benefits from you struggling to thrive post-divorce? Who benefits from keeping voices like mine on the sidelines and amplifies voices of struggling single mothers? I'm guessing it's a patriarchal society. It's religion and economic systems that really love having access to the free labor of women to manage the social, emotional and sexual desires of men. And to that, I say adu, no thank you. 70,000 years ago, Humans had what Harra calls the cognitive revolution and something perhaps it was brought on by consuming a regular diet of magic mushrooms. And that's where we learned to imagine realities that didn't yet exist. And that is what made humans unstoppable. That's why we rule planet Earth and not the Neanderthals. Now divorce can be your personal cognitive revolution. Magic mushrooms are optional at this point. Not required remember what that cognitive revolution was. It's where we learned to imagine realities that don't exist yet before your divorce, you were living inside of someone else's story, someone's else's mythology. The mythology of a good woman stays married no matter what, or children from divorced homes are damaged or single women are. The worst, but now afterwards you get to imagine a brand new reality. You get to say. I get to be a single mom and create a wilder, freer life for myself and for my kids, or I am no longer tethered to someone who didn't see me. I get to decide what love looks like and what feels good to me. That leap from believing in the collective myth to imagining your own is exactly what makes us human divorce, as you know, it is not an ending baby. It is an evolutionary flex. You are becoming more of your capital S self, more human, more You just like Pinocchio, where he is like, I'm a real boy. When he was actually just believing a story that he was a real boy and he was just a puppet. You get to become your real self. Harari goes on to say that any large scale human cooperation, whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city, or an archaic tribe, is rooted in common myths that exist only in people's collective imagination. And boy, do you see this at the forefront of American politics right now with the Christian nationalism And white supremacy and people saying that women already have equality and they need to go back to the kitchen. All of these stories, these, these myths that exist in certain populations, collective imagination. Some of the myths that divorce women are handed are about our value as women. After divorce that we are somehow damaged. That's just a story, or that children of divorce are doomed to suffer. That is also just a story. Research does not back that up. This myth that you fail that marriage, therefore you fail that life and you can never have a successful relationship. That is bullshit. These aren't universal truths. They are repeated stories and repetition makes a story familiar. It does not make it true. There are some specific myths to which women are especially vulnerable because they were created to keep us in our place, and they include ideas or stories or myths as we're going to call them, that your value is in your beauty or your youth, or your pleasing personality. You need to maintain your youth and beauty for as long as you can, no matter the cost financially. Mentally or emotionally, the most important thing your body can be is thin, not strong, not healthy. Thin. That is so stupid. That is so stupid. Um, money is hard to make and confusing to deal with. Leave it to the men. Women should budget and cut back, but don't pay attention to learning how to leverage your money through investments. The story that dating after divorce is so hard, you should have stayed married or making friends as an adult is so hard. You should have stayed married. So many myths around divorced women and with you should have stayed married. It's such bullshit or this is a great one. You are not allowed to be happy. It is so selfish for you to be happy when people around you are sad or hurting because of the divorce. I call bullshit. I call bullshit on every one of these. These are stories, these are myths. And you girlfriend do not have to believe them. So how do we step out of the myth? Number one, we name it, we write down the story we've been told and we question it. I remember going to my parents, I was in my sophomore year of high school. I had this plan laid out that I wanted to go to college early and I was going to become a paralegal, and then I was gonna go to law school and I would use my job as a paralegal to support myself. I had this whole plan and my parents' story was that. It's so important that you graduate from high school. I cannot even believe it. No one in the history of ever has asked to see my high school diploma. So when you see a story like, my kid must graduate from high school in order to have a good life, write it down, start questioning it. Maybe your story has to do with your finances or your relationships or your health. And then number two, ask, Who does this story serve? Um, spoiler alert. It usually serves men. Men who run a church, men who run a government. It usually doesn't serve you. A lot of women that I come in contact with who want to date, they think they have to get in shape before they are worthy of. Having an attractive man, attractive to them, man, approach them. It is so much bullshit. No. Who does that serve? It serves the diet industry and ugh, can we just be done with them? Okay. Your third step is you're going to rewrite it, so you're going to tell yourself a new myth. A new story. I am divorced. Therefore, I am free to build the life I actually want. I get to be happy just because even if other people are sad or struggling or angry, I'm going to let money be easy dudes. Figure it out. How hard can it be? People love me and want to be my friends. I am safe in this world. In this moment. I am safe. And then number four, you need to start living it out. Harra points out that telling effective stories. Is not easy. The difficulty lies not in telling the story, but in convincing everyone to believe it. But here's the thing, we're not trying to convince everyone that you deserve to be happy or that you can thrive. The only person you need to convince is yourself. And that means repeating your story to yourself and just being playful with it, living as if it's true. Moving your body through the world as if your myth was the accepted reality. It doesn't matter if anybody else believes it. It matters that you believe your story. Marriage, motherhood, divorce, all of it. Is a story, and you my love are the storyteller. Now, Hara gave us this beautiful map. I highly recommend the book, but you now hold the pen. The old myths of failure and shame and brokenness about divorce. They have had their run. Now it is time for the divorce myth to evolve and it doesn't have to be one or the other. It doesn't have to be all pain or all upside. It can be all the things. It can be the 50 50 of of living a human life, but I know for sure divorce is not failure. Divorce is revolution. Come on bitches. Divorce is an opportunity to imagine your most beautiful life. Divorce is you becoming the author of this beautiful story, the story I used to have about divorce. Was that I was going to be lonely and poor and depressed, and that aligned perfectly with what society and my religion had told me. I also believed that my children would suffer deeply, not do well in school. They would be social outcasts, and they would resent me for destroying our family. And instead, the reality is that my life is full of authentic and deep connections. I'm far more stable financially now than I was when I was married, and I wake up most days very happy to be alive, which was not the case when I was married. And as for my children, they are thriving. they are top of their classes in school. They're earning scholarships, pursuing. Interesting hobbies and careers. Not one of them. Wishes that I had stayed married to their father. But you might say, Hey, Quinn, that is your specific situation, and you're right. But this specific situation is a creation of my specific story, my specific myth that. I have been telling myself in order to help me create this life, the story, the myth came first and the creation of this life followed I could have just as easily. Lived into the mythical reality that society had placed before me. A story of isolation and depression and poverty. I could let bumps in the road turn into deep depressions based on that story, but I'm choosing to create a mythology that helps me thrive and prosper. And you can too. So here's your question, I just wanna leave you with this. If all of this is truly mythology, it's all just a story. All the things that you think are the rules and the way things are, and the way they have to be, and you get to choose any story you want, what story do you want to live into now? will talk to you next week.