Rory McIlroy’s marriage may be over but ‘respectful’ breakups are not a failure
Perhaps it’s just me but I detected the faintest hint of mirth when Rory McIlroy announced that his seven-year marriage to Erica Stoll had ended. “Seems like only yesterday they were at Ashford Castle,” some online commenters noted, referring to the bellsand-whistles-and-some-more-bells wedding the couple enjoyed back in the Mayo resort in 2017.
No doubt when the pair were planning their gorgeous nuptials, thought to cost in the region of €1m, they didn’t foresee that they would be filing divorce papers in a Palm Beach county court in Florida within seven years. (Or maybe a part of them did, because this week it was revealed that a watertight prenup agreement was signed beforehand. They will share custody of their three-year-old daughter Poppy.)
Back in 2017, it certainly seemed like a forever deal. “I could speak to her about anything, we ended up spending a bit of time together and realised that there was something more there,” McIlroy told the Irish Independent that year. “I love that she knows everything about me, and there was no judgment there.”
McIlroy has noted that he wants the divorce to be “as respectful and amicable as possible”. The whys and wherefores of the split are unknown, and may never surface. But when you consider the alternative — staying in an unhappy marriage — a “respectful and amicable” way forward sounds like a good thing.
It calls to mind a friend who is going through a divorce six years after her own wedding day. She is slightly ashamed that she and her husband are calling it quits while most of us can still feel the remnants of our hangovers from that day. “God, it’s like something out of Hollywood,” she said, appalled at herself. At the same time, and much like McIlroy evidently has, she knows that an amicable split is far better for her family than going down swinging.
The question soon surfaces: what makes a “successful” marriage? There’s so much wrong with the term ‘failed marriage’, and yet we often use it to describe a union that is no more.
There are those who believe successful marriages are ones that are only broken when one person dies, but I’m not so sure. We all know couples who have stayed ‘together’ for 40, 50 or even 60 years. Their lives are separate, their interests never link, they live together and are married in name only. Marriage has, in fact, diminished them, not embellished them in the way it’s meant to. Some are deeply unhappy but won’t countenance a divorce because of how it might look.
There are some marriages in which an outward semblance of legitimacy and respectability are intact, simply because they have never broken up. Inside some of these marriages, violence, animosity and hostility are rife. Are these people ‘better’ at marriage than the couple who called it quits but are endeavouring to co-parent harmoniously and move forward as friends? Do these marriages ‘work’ better, even though no one is doing the work involved to stay happy? I know which scenario I’d rather live in.
My friend, and no doubt the likes of McIlroy and Stoll, came to a crossroads. They could leave a relationship that no longer serves them, while striving for a better union, apart. They could give two fingers to what people think when there’s talk of throwing in the towel (no one throws the marital towel in just for the hell of it, by the way). Or, they could have stayed together and let their marriage curdle into something that doesn’t benefit anyone involved.
McIlroy and Stoll chose the former — that makes them a success at this whole marriage game in my eyes.