When to Break a Commitment

Posted By Stephanie Dolgoff on February 19, 2012

I’m going through a divorce, which is hideous, as anyone who has been through one knows. Not only are you mourning the death of the family you dreamed about and worked so hard to build, but if you speak or write about it in public, as I have, you deal with people who (believe it or not) truly think that you represent all that is wrong with society: a failure to live up to commitments.

I have no Earthly idea how, if all of us in marriages that make us feel terrible about ourselves were to stay put, the world would be a better place. In some magical way, there would be no nuclear threat, everyone would have enough to eat, cancer would be as rare as leprosy and cartoon sparrows and butterflies would flutter and chirp around us like Snow White pre-apple. Oh, and weight loss would be a breeze.

Yeah, no. With the possible exception of Kim Kardashian and her ilk, most people who divorce do so only after exhausting all other means of keeping the commitment alive, and after long and painful introspection about what it means to break a commitment. This process has taught me that some commitments—ones that interfere with other, more important ones you’ve made to yourself and to others—should be broken.

READ THE WHOLE POST HERE AT BESTLIFE.COM

Hi, all,

I have been nuts with work, for which I am beyond grateful, considering the state of the economy and how many capable people are scratching the dusty ground for whatever they can get. Like many things in life in these middle years, it’s not the way it should be, but it’s the way it is. I’m loathe to turn any stories down, even though I’m cranking into the nights and weekends, because I don’t know if I’ll be cycling into famine any time soon.

Still, I didn’t want anyone to start Googling me to make sure they hadn’t missed my obit. Below, a piece I did for Redbook that got a lot of love.

Please Don’t Call This a Revenge Body

Photo Credit: Dori Klotzman

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The other night, a bunch of us were out at Souen, this superhealthy, macrobiotic restaurant near Union Square, which has been serving patchouli-scented, hummus-eating healthy people since the early ’70s. This was at the request of my friend Julie, who is a vegetarian. The food was good (I had some garlicky greens) and as much as I love a good cheeseburger, I got really into that feeling of filling my body with something indisputably healthy. My dish was so tasty–truly tasty, not just tasty-for-healthy-food tasty–in fact, that I had fantasy flashes of revamping my life so as to incorporate more kale.

It was all good until dessert. Julie got some kind of soy-based pudding thingy with cacao in it, which didn’t taste like pudding but wasn’t horrible, either. To me, the best thing about it was that it wasn’t good enough to compel you to finish it, thus making it low calorie.

Jen, however, ordered the cookie of the day, which was the driest, nastiest amalgam of pressed gains that had ever been baked at 350 degrees, with sesame seeds sprinkled on top where by all rights there should have been pretty artificially dyed pink and turquoise sprinkles or at the very least chocolate chips. It is pictured above. She took one tiny piece and shoved the plate away disdainfully.

We all took a crumb and tried it. If you looked around the table at that moment, you’d have seen five sour-faced women sliding their tongues along the roofs of their mouths like toddlers who were given strained spinach in lieu of the expected apple sauce. (more…)

My best friend Julie is in from LA and we went to this little Thai place near my house. We’ve been friends since we were 14, and would be locked in conversation even if we saw each other every day, as we did when we were roommates in our 20s. But since we haven’t hung out in forever and are both going through divorces and all they entail, we had to take turns eating our tofu with peanut sauce to allow the other to say her piece.

A frequent subject back then was men what to make of their silliness. We spent hours dissecting the precise way they said, “Hey,” when they passed us in the office, or why they’d say they’d call and then not do it (”I mean, then why say it?!?”). It all seemed to matter so much, as if we decoded their bizarre boy behavior we’d unlock the secret to heterosexual happiness.

The subject tonight, two decades later, was men and what to make of their silliness, although it wasn’t nearly as urgent as it seemed back then. By now we know there is no secret to romantic happiness no matter whom you’re attracted to, just a bunch of human beings with various body parts wandering around the planet doing their best and as often as not accidentally hurting one another. As rotten as our recent experiences have been, though, we spoke of these male creatures with a lot more forgiveness and appreciation of all shades of gray, perhaps because we’ve got more grays ourselves.

About a third of the way through dinner, the waitress came over and informed us that “a gentleman” would like to buy us a drink. (more…)

Big grumpy controversial piece from June 2011. You can read it here.

A little piece I did for HuffPo…

Stephanie Dolgoff

My husband and I have split up, and although it was my decision to leave and it remains the right one, it sucks. We were married almost 10 years and have two daughters, so it was a hideous outcome to arrive at after trying so hard not to. Divorce was the less sucky of the two sucky options I saw before me, but that fact doesn’t mitigate the suckitude one iota.

That divorce is hard is not news. It’s like when people say marriage is hard. It’s obvious, a tremendous understatement, and yet when it comes out of someone’s mouth, everyone clucks and nods in empathy and truly seems to know exactly what the speaker means, even though they were told nothing. It’s so outrageously, undeniably true and universal that it requires no explanation, no elaboration, for people to instantly relate and silently run their minds over their current apparently intractable struggle. When you’re going through a life changing personal matter that you’d rather not discuss, lazy, somewhat cliched distillations like that can come in mighty handy. “Divorce is hard” is my go-to summary when well-meaning people ask me how things are going and I sense that they don’t want more than a fleeting peek into my emotional life.

READ THE REST AT HUFFINGTONPOST.COM

Today they tried to deliver my new couch and we found that the made-in-California plum softsuede behemoth didn’t fit into my rinky-dink New York City elevator. The driver had to shlep it back to the warehouse. After thwacking myself repeatedly on the head for not measuring the elevator before ordering the couch (who measures elevators?) I spent the afternoon working on solutions.

Having it carried up 19 flights would have cost about half of what the sofa itself cost. Sending it back to the company for them to modify it would have cost hundreds in shipping and labor and I’d have no couch for another six weeks. The only thing that made sense is to have the couch’s arm taken off and then reattached in my apartment. (more…)

My grandma Pauline, of the Bronx-transplanted mauve Lincoln-driving Floridian maternal grandparents who died when I was in my 20s, adored Mentos, specifically the mint kind in the blue tube. She kept them in her purse, in her cabinets, in her night table and, of course, in her gigantic mauve Lincoln. When I was a kid, I loved pillaging the Mentos, because they were addictive and there were always more, somewhere.

Today in the gym I saw a commercial for Mentos Rainbow. The ad shows a couple at home; the woman spots a spider and wigs, so the dude sneers at her like she’s a wuss and goes to squash the spider, who grabs him by his index finger and cartoonishly flings him against the wall bookcase and the floor on either side of him, finally smashing him into the coffee table and dragging him out the door.

And then the tagline: “It’s better to know what’s coming next.”

The idea being that the candies in Mentos Rainbow are in color and flavor order, and represented as such on the package, so you’re spared that hideous, crippling anticipatory anxiety you get with, say, Lifesavers in the assorted pack. (more…)