One of my life’s sickest, saddest ironies was sitting in couples' therapy toward the end of my marriage and realizing that the main thing my husband and I had in common (aside from our devotion to our kids) was that both of us seemed to feel unheard, unappreciated, taken for granted, and mischaracterized by the other — often, it seemed, with an outrageous level of willful ignorance. We’d been trying to improve our marriage for years, and had functioned reasonably well as a unit, at least on a day-to-day level. But like a cigarette ash that defied physics, remaining intact on the end of a butt for a surprisingly long time, when it finally fell, there was just a tiny stub of our relationship left.This, it seems, is what is happening to two chunks of our country, imperfectly represented by those who voted blue and those who voted red. Things weren’t exactly a lovefest between these two groups for a long, long time, but aside from a few issues that flared up on social media (say, the shooting of a Black man by police, where one side sees racism and the other a guy who, had he behaved differently, would still be breathing), they managed to enjoy one another’s speed-recipe videos and insanely cute videos of puppies snuggling kittens.And then Election Day happened, and now we are a nation in the middle of a bitter divorce that has none of the pretentious-but-well-intentioned optimism of Gwyneth Paltrow’s “conscious uncoupling.” Online, on cable TV, and even in real life, one side accuses the other of being sore losers and tells them to “get over it” (because that always works so well when someone is emotionally devastated). The other side calls people who voted for the president elect misogynistic, among other less-than-flattering ics and ists. “Thank you so much for opening my eyes! I’m going to dedicate myself to exploring the subtle ways in which I acquiesce or even contribute to rape culture!” said no one ever. Both camps are alternately shouting and pivoting the conversation (“Well, what about the time YOUR candidate did THIS?”) and assuming zero nuance in the other’s thinking.Engaging on Facebook has given me couples’-therapy-pleather-couch flashbacks more than once. One Republican voter I spoke with on a friend’s thread was furious that people assumed, because the president-elect proposed policies that would ban Muslims from entering the country and boasted about sexual assault , for example, that she must be racist and sexist since she voted for him — and this disdain was in fact why she ended up supporting him. She insisted that she, too, is against treating people with disrespect and feels misunderstood. “Perhaps you can understand why, after months and months of being called 'evil' or 'Hitler supporters,' we moderate Republicans are tired of the name-calling,” she wrote. Another poster answered that he’d never call anyone names, but he said, “I will not forgive and forget that you contributed to making the U.S. more dangerous for my daughters…and regardless of WHY you chose to vote for Trump, you DID vote for someone neither mentally nor emotionally capable of governing patiently, wisely, or courageously.”