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Divorce is always tough.
Well, maybe not always.
And it’s certainly not equally difficult for everyone.
For example, if you try to divorce a prince from some Middle Eastern country, even if you manage to escape to Europe and seek asylum, he may send people after you. They could locate you, anesthetise you with a sedative designed for mammals weighing over seven hundred kilograms, and then send you back home in a package, via diplomatic mail. Meanwhile, in the U.S. state of Nevada, known as the divorce capital of America, you can obtain a divorce by mail or online, without any contact with your former partner or the authorities, for a cost of around $130. In a word, it’s quicker and easier than getting married in the same state, by an Elvis impersonator, in one of Vegas’s chapels of love.
Or, for example, consider India. According to the Hindu Marriage Act of 1955, a woman must cite one of the reasons for divorce listed in this law: that her husband has converted to another religion; that he has been absent for seven years or spent at least that long in prison; or that he has contracted leprosy. Unlike women in India, those in Sweden don’t have to think about where they might find Mycobacterium leprae in Gothenburg or Malmö, and spice their husband’s food with it until his nose and ears fall off. They don’t even have to cite a specific reason for divorce. They aren’t even required to say, although they might wish to, ‘I listened to him on vacation as he described the palette of the local Chardonnay for 45 minutes, which, after the citrus, reveals a graceful note of peach skin and wet brick at the finish. And then I realised that I had been married for eight years to an idiot who knows what wet brick tastes like.’
So, in Sweden, as in most European countries, there is no need to cite any reason for the dissolution of a marriage. However, if reasons were given, traditional ones such as lack of commitment, fights and quarrels, infidelity, and unrealistic expectations would be cited. Interestingly, more often women than men initiate divorces (about 70% of divorces are initiated by women). These spouses might say that summer landscapes over Marbella or Palma de Mallorca, sunsets over Mykonos, or glasses of wine in hidden spots in the Stockholm archipelago inspire one thing only: to type into Google search ‘How to get a divorce in Sweden’.
At least that’s what the statistics say. According to them, the number of divorces peaks twice a year, in March and August, immediately after winter and summer vacations. Often, these vacations don’t turn out as spouses imagined when they were pronouncing their vows in the wedding videos.
It’s fine that there are wedding videos. We have all been forced to watch them after the weddings of close relatives or friends, and they all look a bit alike. To be completely honest, after the first five minutes, in which we are reminded of how happy and beautiful the bride and groom were on their wedding day, we quickly realise that among the numerous speakers, there definitely isn’t a Cicero, Churchill, or Martin Luther King. By the time it’s the turn of the twelfth speaker, the groom’s great uncle, we may already feel like blood is dripping from our ears.
But if, in contrast, there were a genre of personal films about divorce, almost every one would be a boldly authentic masterpiece of human drama.
For example:
Clip 00004 – El Portal Alicante, July 23.
Astrid: “This is a wonderful restaurant near the shore in Alicante.”
Lars: “Astrid decided to become a vegan that very evening.”
Astrid: “Lars wanted to try a grill from some trained animal.”
Lars: “I was torn between the steak of a seal that plays the trumpet and a chess-playing octopus.”
Astrid: “He chose the octopus. Only because it beat him at chess.”
Lars: “Of course it beat me. How could it not, when it plays with eight arms?”
Clip 00005 – Marbella, July 24.
Astrid: “This is the Antequera winery. Lars wanted to try his hand at blind tasting.”
Lars: “I tasted, described, and recognised six local Chardonnays blindfolded!”
Astrid: “This is the waiter holding me back from hitting Lars with a wet brick in the mouth, to see if he could recognise the taste.”
Clip 00006 – Costa Del Sol, July 24.
Lars: “You see, here we are already driving through Costa Del Sol.”
Astrid: “He drank twelve glasses of wine, and for the first seven kilometers, he forgot to remove the blindfold from the blind tasting!”
Lars: “For forty minutes, she didn’t stop telling me that I was driving too fast.”
Astrid: “He was going ninety kilometers per hour and then tried to get out of the moving car to buy fries at McDonald’s.”
Lars: “Then I stopped the car and told her that if she was so concerned about safety, she should get out and check if the brake lights were working.”
Astrid: “When I got out, he stepped on the gas and left me on the road in the middle of the night.”
Lars: “Then Astrid showed her innate sense of direction.”
Astrid: “You know I have a poor sense of direction!”
Clip 00007 – Pico de la Concha, July 26.
Lars: “Poor orientation is when you’re not sure where left is. But when instead of going to the hotel that was 800 meters away, you end up on a mountain at Pico de la Concha, 14 kilometers from Marbella, that’s not just bad orientation. That has a Latin name, and it’s written in three lines.”
Astrid: “The mountain rescue service found me after two days.”
Lars: “Her and some Czech tourists who went hiking in flip-flops.”
Astrid: “That day I Googled ‘how to get a divorce’ for the first time.”
Lars: “I thought we were having a really good time. That divorce request was quite surprising.”
Astrid: “Had I known it was that simple, I would have divorced in 2018 when he fell asleep at my sister’s wedding with his face in a plate of cake.”
And how simple is filing for divorce, really?
First, you need to identify yourself, using an e-ID such as Freja+ at Sveriges Domstolars e-service. Then you need to choose the “tingsrätt” that you belong to and pay a fee of 900 SEK. The day on which the divorce application is registered in the district court is the cut-off date; it is significant for the division of property.
After that, you need to answer a few simple questions.
For example:
Do any children under the age of 16 live with you?
- No, we do not have children under the age of 16 living with us.
- Yes, we have children under the age of 16 living with us.
- We have a twelve-year-old child who lives in our apartment, but we are not allowed to enter his room. We suspect that he has developed a financial empire in Asia and has a multi-million amount in cryptocurrency in a secret account. Also, he has sent his genetic sample for analysis to AncestryDNA because he thinks he couldn’t have turned out this smart from the two of us and suspects he was switched at the hospital.
Do you want a cool-off period?
- We want a cool-off period.
- We do not want a cool-off period.
- I’m afraid if we have a cool-off period, a Swedish noir series will be filmed about us afterwards, in which the investigation will never find Lars’s body.
Do you both agree on the divorce?
- We agree.
- We do not agree.
- I might not agree. But I’m afraid I’ll end up in a Swedish noir series where the investigation never finds my body. If I do end up in a series, I want to be played by Alexander Skarsgård. And it’s impossible for him to play me if there’s no body in the series.
And so on. Nothing special.
However, it’s important to say that the aim of this text is not to encourage you to get a divorce. If you think there’s at least a one percent chance of saving your marriage, that marriage is worth saving. If there is still, somewhere within you, even a faint memory of the person you once decided to spend your life with, and if you can still recognise them in your partner for a moment, all your past failures to have the marriage you envisioned will be minor compared to one possible future success.
With this text, we just wanted to remind you that you’re not alone in your problems, and that there are plenty of people who, like you, have returned from vacation with a renewed desire to get a divorce. It might even be their most significant souvenir, perhaps alongside a wet brick in the suitcase, just in case there’s some unforeseen blind wine tasting in the last days of the marriage.
In the end, while making decisions about the future of your marriage, you must always be aware that there are many more women, men, and non-binary people out there, waiting for you, ready to disappoint you in entirely new, imaginative, and unexpected ways.
By the time you get to your second divorce – and yes, a second marriage ends in divorce in 60% of cases – technology and society will probably have advanced so much that you’ll be able to complete the whole procedure through a phone app. The process won’t be much more complicated than unfriending someone on Facebook.
