Traveling through Indonesia, I have spoken with a surprisingly high number of middle-aged women somewhere in the process of getting divorced. Compared with the United States, many Indonesians marry younger, with significant cultural pressure placed on women to find a husband by their mid-twenties. At the same time, once married many women choose to stay home as housewives. This can lead to a dynamic where as they get older, they mature apart from their husbands and by their early forties end up in a position where the marriage falls apart.
Such a divorce often forces them to rebuild their lives from the ground up. In addition to starting from scratch materially, financially, and/or professionally, they also go through a kind of renaissance where they rediscover their passions in life that they had put on hold when they became stay-at-home wives. It feels partially similar to retired, empty-nesters in the US rediscovering their old hobbies and passions after their children become adults and start to move out.
This story is a specific example of a woman in her early forties I spoke with who was in the thick of this such a divorce. Her husband fell in-love with someone else and decided to divorce her. Different individuals have different journeys, but her story illustrates some of the tensions and opportunities Indonesian women in such a scenario might face and how they might navigate it. I will refer to her by the pseudonym Putri.
—
Putri had been married to a man for about twenty years, but her husband had been having an affair with another, younger woman for about five years. When Putri and I spoke, he recently decided he wanted to get a divorce so that he could marry this woman. This has left her in a precarious position. She is now in her early 40s and has spent most of her time living as a housewife.
While they were in the process of finalizing their divorce, the husband tried to get married to his new wife. Having two wives at the same time is not allowed in Indonesian law, but he tried to specifically get a Muslim marriage, and the practice of the local religious community seemed to allow it. In Indonesian law, a man cannot marry multiple women, but in Muslim law in Indonesia, that is allowed. The process to submit a divorce for the Indonesian government typically takes about two months. Then a few days after the divorce was legal in Indonesian law, he and his new wife signed the paperwork to marry under Indonesian law. This was in itself very difficult for Putri, seeing her husband so quickly remarry and be with someone else.
They have three kids. In Indonesian law, the kids basically get to decide which parent they move in with after a divorce, and she strongly thinks that they will choose her because she’s the parent they have always been closest to. She said that her husband was an absent father. She is worried about them, though, about how they will process the divorce. Neither she nor her husband told them that they are getting divorced until right the weeks before it happened, and they probably haven’t told them about the affair with their new stepmother.
Putri has a remote gig job online and invested in a local shop her friend started. Both of which she said will give her enough money to get by. She has been a housewife for many years but started her work about 2-3 years ago (around the time she learned about the affair). She said if the divorce had happened back then, she wouldn’t be able to get by since she didn’t have any income independent apart from her husband, but now, she will be financially okay on her own.
Over the last several weeks, she has been a conflicting stew of emotions. She spent several weeks crying. Then, she will have times when she feels really angry and times when she feels compelled to move on and do something fun. Other times, she feels paralyzed and can’t motivate herself to do anything. Sometimes, she even feels like she wished she could sit down with him and see if there’s a way to make it work between them.
She plans to use this time of being divorced to rediscover her passions. She used to write Indonesian pop songs, which is something she wants to go back to. When she was around 19, she was in a band as the lead singer, but all that ended when she married this man. She is good at writing the chorus lines but bad at writing the verses. Her ex-husband (who works in the music industry) would help her make the verses and rest of the song based on her choruses.
She also wants to use this time to travel. She joined a hiking group that hikes once a week while her kids are at school. She also recently went on her first solo trip over the weekend as a way to test the waters for more travel and get her kids used to having her be away for a few days. At the same time, she feels incredibly anxious/scared about doing all this. Some moments, her eagerness to venture out wins, and other moments, her worry takes control. She said many Indonesian women want to go forward yet feel paralyzed by anxiety about doing so at the same time.
She also said that she had a pattern, rooted in her abusive father, of anxious attachment. When she was a kid, she would attach herself to her father, and then when she was around 19, she then attached herself to her boyfriend in the same way who eventually became her ex-husband. She isn’t used to being by herself or focusing on her needs.
At one point, I asked her what she wanted in her life, and she said she wanted her kids to grow into great, well-adjusted adults. I responded saying that wanting your kids to grow up well-adjusted made total sense as a parent. That’s important. But I asked what she wanted for her life, not what she wanted for their lives. She said she has struggled figuring out what she wants in life. Usually, she ends up focusing on how to provide the needs and desires for those around her instead of what she wants for her own life. She tends to lessen her needs in her family and other social environments as a way to ease the tension, not articulating any desires she has but going with what they want to keep the peace and maintain stability. This seems to be something she wants to work on during her time by herself after this divorce. She wants to figure out what she wants for herself. But like one might expect, she also feels incredibly anxious about it.
On top of this, she said Indonesian society stigmatizes divorced women. People tend to view divorce as emblematic of a failed marriage. Even worse, when a couple gets divorced, they usually by default blame the wife instead of the husband for that failure. She sometimes feels really anxious about what others will think of her and how they will treat her as a divorcee. Multiple Indonesians have said that divorced women can be highly stigmatized and outcasted in society, something that both hurts their standing in the community, job prospects, and other important things in life. She has no real choice but to go forward. She thinks getting divorced from him is still worth it to her even if others think ill of her since separating from him will enable her to find happiness in life.
—
Her story illustrates a few patterns among middle-aged women who get divorced. Like her, many marry in their early- or mid-twenties only to drift apart from their husbands into the point of divorce by their forties. When young, the women had many hopes and passions in life that they often put on hold to stay at home as a wife. Now that they are divorced, they must rebuild their lives both emotionally and materially. They also go through a period where they rediscover themselves in the process, reacquainting themselves with the personal passions and professional interests that they loved as their youth. They often say that the experience has taught them the importance of being true to themselves and not sacrificing themselves for anyone, reflecting on how naive it was for them to do so when they first got married when they were young.