ΧΩΡΙΣΤΕ ΚΑΙ ΞΕΠΟΥΛΙΣΤΕ

ΑΥΤΑ ΣΥΜΒΑΙΝΟΥΝ ΣΤΗΝ ΑΝΤΙΠΕΡΑ ΟΧΘΗ ΤΟΥ ΑΤΛΑΝΤΙΚΟΥ, ΕΔΩ?

By KATHRYN SHATTUCK

GABRIELLE TORELLO drowned her wedding band — the cheap one — in the Hudson River, stuffed the diamond rings and earrings her ex-husband had given her into a pair of old shoes at the bottom of her closet, and treated herself to some commemorative sparkle, like the ring she bought when she survived her first court date.

“It makes me very happy every time I wear it,” said Ms. Torello, a communications consultant in Hackensack, N.J. “It was such a bad time that I don’t want to wear anything from that period in my life. I really wanted a new beginning.”

Jay Johnson, upon discovering that his girlfriend was two-timing him with one of his friends, simply packed everything she had given him — all the letters and boudoir pictures and sappy sentiments — into a box and mailed them to his rival with a note that said, “Good luck, Dave.”

“Hopefully, he gleaned something,” said Mr. Johnson, a ventriloquist whose show, “The Two and Only!” just opened on Broadway. “I know that they weren’t together all that long.”

And then there is Ellen Barkin, who on Tuesday will unload some $15 million worth of possessions at Christie’s, the detritus from her marriage to Ronald O. Perelman, in a move that may strike some as coldly pragmatic.

Still, when it comes to divorce, as the celebrity divorce lawyer Raoul Felder pointed out: “Sentiment goes out on the courthouse steps. Sentiment is yesterday’s news.”

In an age of unparalleled acquisitiveness, the quandary of what to do with the accumulated belongings of a relationship has become a predictable ingredient in the noxious stew of separation and recovery. Do you erase all traces of a love gone wrong, or recreate yourself within the debris?

“How acrimonious the divorce is — that’s probably the first issue that plays into the decision of whether to purge or not,” said Anya K. Luchow, a divorce mediator and psychologist in Tenafly, N.J. “The second is what their basic personality style is, divorce aside. Finally, economics are a big function in divorce. It’s easier for someone of wealth to part with objects they don’t need for survival.”

In other words, she said, “there is no rule.”

“I see it as an issue of control, especially for people who are being left,” she added. “For them in particular, dealing with the mementos is a way to gain some sort of control over a situation that, until now, has been beyond their control.”

That often includes a detoxification of that symbolic marital nest, the bedroom.

“The mattress and the sheets are the first to go,” Ms. Luchow said.

Some people will continue to divest their homes of furniture, artwork and photographs until nothing remains of the people responsible for their misery.

“I certainly don’t recommend doing that when a child is involved,” Ms. Luchow said. “I try to help people remember that as angry as they are and as much as it’s not working now, they need to hold on to some of the nice memories they have for the children’s sake.”

Marla Maples kept her daughter, Tiffany, in mind when she rid her life of certain objects given her by Tiffany’s father, Donald J. Trump.

“I did sell my engagement ring through an auction, and I donated a big part of it to my charity, Spirituality for Kids,” Ms. Maples said. “It was a big decision, because, of course, having a daughter, I wanted to make sure she was O.K. with it.”

Ms. Maples also put a sports car and a fur coat on the block at eBay, but she kept the wedding album, some family portraits and a stash of tender letters.

“I spent a third of my life with him at the time, so it carried a lot of weight,” she said. “I feel like it will be Tiffany’s choice later on to decide what she wants to hold on to of Mom and Dad.”

In “The Ex-Wives Club,” a makeover series for those left in the lurch, coming to ABC this winter, Ms. Maples will dispense her hard-won advice alongside Shar Jackson, who was dumped by her boyfriend Kevin Federline for Britney Spears, and Angie Everhart, who was engaged to Sylvester Stallone for two months and married to Ashley Hamilton for three.

Auction houses have traditionally been the refuge for those suffering from what John L. Marion, a former chairman of Sotheby’s North America, called the Three D’s: division, divorce and death.

But the equation works well only for women like Ms. Barkin and Ms. Maples, whose wealthy husbands bought major adornments for them, said Mr. Felder, the divorce lawyer. And even they don’t get an even trade.

“With the jewelry, there’s always a rude awakening, because the Van Cleef diamond ring, when you want to sell it back to the store, is worth 25 percent of what your husband paid,” Mr. Felder said.

“It’s fair to say when there’s an important jewelry collection,” he said later, “most women get rid of it because it usually represents a considerable amount of money that they can use to get on with their lives.”

The fashion designer Anait Bian didn’t want to wear the diamond ring an old boyfriend bought for her during a trip to Paris, but she didn’t want to sell it either.

Then one day Ms. Bian’s mother brought a fortuneteller to her house in New York. “She said: ‘You have to look around you. Something in your house been given to you, and it’s got bad energy,’ ” Ms. Bian recalled.

Despite her certainty that the woman was a scam artist, Ms. Bian handed over the ring.

Alas, the fortuneteller called several days later and said the ring was so tainted she had had to purge it herself.

“I thought it was an interesting way of getting rid of it,” Ms. Bian said. “I thought that if she had brought it back, it was meant to be mine. Then I could wear it without any doubt.”

Sometimes the universe has a way of telling you that something is over even before you realize it yourself.

Only weeks before Gail Greiner and her husband separated, she returned home to find that a shelf in her cupboard had collapsed, leaving her wedding china smashed on the floor.

“My son, poor guy, went about trying to salvage it and talked about how we could glue pieces together,” said Ms. Greiner, a writer and editor in Palisades, N.Y. “But I found that with the demise of my marriage came the end of my sentimental feelings about a lot of things, including my wedding china. I swept it up and put it in the garbage, telling my son that it was just ‘things’ and not that important. As soon as he saw that I was O.K. about it, he was, too.”

Still, there are those who manage to move on alongside certain reminders of the past. When the publicist Liz Derringer divorced, she discovered that although she could part with her husband, the rocker Rick Derringer, she was loath to part with his things, particularly his Les Paul Jr. guitar.

“It wasn’t that we were so in love by then, but it was all those years of memories that we had together, and our journey through the 60’s and 70’s,” she said. “We’re friends now, but we weren’t for a long time. When I look at those mementos, they make me really happy, and really sad. It’s so gut-wrenching, it really is, when you spend that much time with someone.”

Judy Steinberg turned that nauseating feeling into a series of symbolic gestures to help women move on with their lives after a breakup, in her book “Fabulous After 50 and Sexy at 60!” (Plume, 2006, written with Raechel Donahue), “because even if it’s amicable, it still shreds your self-esteem,” she said.

Ms. Steinberg should know. When her own marriage to the comedian David Steinberg ended after 24 years, she hit him where she thought it would hurt most — his vanity — by igniting a stack of his head shots in the parking lot of his favorite restaurant.

“Seeing that Chiclet smile go up in smoke was elevating, to say the least,” she said.

She decided to write a book about getting over the relationship when she learned that her ex-husband’s girlfriend had written one titled “How to Survive Your Boyfriend’s Divorce.”

“In my own case, I found my strength at the gym,” she said. “I started lifting weights at 57, and I started to behave like someone who was strong again.”

In the end, she, too, purged. “I didn’t have JAR jewelry, but I sold some coats and a lot of clothes — whatever I needed to do to launch myself into my own life,” she said.

“I read that she is going to start a new film company,” Ms. Steinberg said of Ms. Barkin. “And moving past the horror of being dumped so publicly is the perfect way to use that money. What could be more rewarding?”

She lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper.

“And it’s the best revenge.”

MAY THE FORCE BE WITH YOUCopyright © Demetrios the Traveler
(Brexians lair)