Portrait of a Marriage: "A Lousy Divorce"

Doug and Mary McNeil faced money woes, foreclosure, and even separation. What next?

Jim Killam

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In January 2002, Doug and Mary McNeil held each other and cried.

"We don't have to do this!" Mary sobbed.

They'd been married almost 19 years. Had four great kids. Loved each other deeply. And yet …

The next day they stood in a Colorado Springs courtroom. The judge said coldly, "I declare this marriage to be irretrievably broken." And just like that, Doug and Mary were divorced.

"It was the most devastating sentence I've ever heard," Mary says. "It was like a person had died."

Doug and Mary moved on. Two years later they both remarried—a good decision, though a lot of their friends didn't think so at the time. Today, four-plus years later, they're thrilled with their second spouses and new lives.

The best part? They remarried each other.

When Doug met Mary

In 1981, Doug, a pastor's son from Michigan's Upper Peninsula, took a job in Grand Rapids. There he met the pastor's daughter at the church he was attending. Though four years older than Mary, who was still a teenager, he called to ask her out. She thought he seemed shy and geeky, but said yes.

"I found out Doug was funny, interesting, intelligent, and a great singer," she says, "and suddenly I thought, Wow, this is it."

They married in 1983. But although things appeared great, cracks soon began to form.

"We couldn't save money," Doug recalls. "In a budget, you have quarterly or bi-annual bills, like car insurance. I'd try to save extra money to pay those bills, but Mary would consider that money available and spend it. We never stayed focused on a goal, and that became really frustrating."

Mary adds, "Our personalities and ways of functioning were so different. Not to excuse my overspending, but Doug is good at keeping information in his head. His idea of a budget was, don't spend money. I'm more visual, and I want to see things written down. What do we want in five years? In one year? What do we need next month? But we never talked that through."

Their non-communication about money created deeper issues. Doug felt as if Mary were purposely trying to undermine him in what he wanted to see them accomplish as a couple and a family. "I was oblivious," says Mary. "I didn't see that, to him, my inability to handle money and to work together toward goals were signs of disrespect."

Couples therapy only further frustrated Doug. "We'd discuss how Mary wasn't pulling with me toward a goal," he says. "Then years later, when we went back to therapy, she claimed she'd never heard that before. And I thought, Oh, come on."

Insecurity and suspicion

In 1998, after 15 years of slow decline, the marriage accelerated into a downward spiral. Doug had started a home-construction business that year. But it didn't do as well as they'd hoped, and Mary disliked the insecurity of not having a regular paycheck.

"I didn't set out to undermine the business, but that's how it seemed to Doug," she says. "As time went by, I felt more insecure, and Doug felt more angry at what he viewed as my disrespect of his abilities. He stuffed his anger, and I tried to push him to get a 'real' job, which of course made him more angry and me more insecure."

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Originally published in: Marriage Partnership, 2008, Fall, Page 42

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