My colleagues helped me get through the divorce

• When Karl Dunn began the divorce process, he received support at work from other divorced men.
• As a gay man, Dunn says he was shocked to connect deeply with so many straight peers.
• He credits the experience with helping him learn the biggest lessons about DEI on the job.

The Monday morning after I proposed to my husband, I found myself the recipient of an impromptu engagement party at the office.

It was 2012 and I had been working for a year as an executive creative director at a huge advertising agency in LA. I’m a gay man, and while my straight coworkers have never intentionally made me feel excluded, at that moment—wearing my new ring and drinking champagne out of paper cups with those co-workers, many of them married – I suddenly felt like them. equal. To organize the big moment, get down on one knee and pop the question – all of us guys now had this experience in common.

For the first time in my life, I felt “in”. It got even better once I got married. I would mention “my husband” and feel just as equal as anyone else who mentions their husband. I know I shouldn’t say I need the validation of the straight world, but I loved how it felt—while also hating how much I loved it.

So when I got divorced five years later, it felt like a bit of a crash landing when I had to take the ring off and go back to my patchy normalcy.

Little did I know that I was about to find a new brotherhood in a different group at work: straight men who were also getting divorced.

My lifelong enemies saved my life

I think this will ring true for a lot of gay men my age: I’ve had a lifelong distrust of straight guys.

They were the ones I tried to emulate for years growing up. They beat a lot of us in high school. They end up writing laws that make my entire community suffer. They also gave me trouble at previous jobs. For many of us, they were the enemy.

I know there are a lot of great people out there – some of my best friends are straight guys – but even with them, I feel envious of the ease with which they seem to move through this world.

So imagine my surprise when I discovered that it was straight men at work, the ones getting divorced or already divorced, that I was relying on to get me through the breakup.

I realized that the failure of my relationship had made me an outcast in some parts of the gay world. Marriage was still a fairy tale for many gay men, and I blew the fantasy away. Once a total stranger in a gay bar, when he heard I was getting divorced, shocked me by saying, “Thanks for ruining it for the rest of us.”

Within weeks, straight men—my peers—became my greatest supporters, advisors, and most unlikely allies. And I was for them too.

We met at the “divorce bank”

It started with James. There was a straight guy in my office who had gone through a terrible divorce. I didn’t know him at the time, but desperate for help, I asked him for advice. And so I was introduced to an unofficial club – the straight guys’ divorce club.

We were from all over the company, from the mailroom to the C-suite. Our group had men from every ethnicity, four different religions, multiple generations, and both sides of the political divide. They were American-born and immigrant men like me.

As a group, we would meet informally at the “divorce bench” just outside the office, which was really just the smoker’s bench, to exchange divorce information, tactics, and updates. After some time we got to know each other, we started talking even more openly and without fear. I got advice on how to best work with lawyers, how to act in the office, how to manage feelings of anger and loss – basically, how to survive.

Divorce became the great equalizer and his survival was our shared goal

As we shared and listened deeply, our diversity of experiences and thinking seemed to fuel us. In this DEI microcosm of up to eight men depending on the day, I didn’t agree with everything. Many of us could have canceled each other out in another life, still married. I’ve definitely had some difficult discussions with the more religiously conservative guys about my homosexuality.

But here’s the thing: we were imperfect allies, and that was okay.

We could only talk to each other using the reference points we had from our individual lives, so our questions were often awkward, ill-informed, and sometimes even offensive.

And therein lies the DEI gold. In this group, only people who were complete strangers to each other could see each other so clearly.

The power to be unlikely allies

A guy going through a divorce who had never had a gay friend in his life wanted to know if he could ask me “about some gay stuff.” Nothing was off the table in our group so I said yes.

He asked how we—my ex-partner and I—decided who was the “man” and who was the “woman” of the relationship.

This is, in my opinion, one of the most offensive things you can ask of a homosexual. But instead of reacting, I remembered the trust we had built, took a deep breath, and asked if he was talking about sexuality?

He clarified that he meant emotionally and explained that his girlfriend always shared his feelings and wanted him to open up more. He told me he wanted to, but he fought because he wasn’t raised that way. He asked me, “When there are two guys, how does anyone know where I am?”

With that one question, he (unknowingly) helped me discover why my last five relationships ended. What could have easily been seen as a homophobe and would have him written off or fired was actually him asking for help. He hoped that we gay guys had found something that he could learn to become a better partner for his girlfriend – a better man.

His question really helped I become a better person. As I thought about it more, it started to change the way I love. In my new relationship, I make sure my boyfriend always knows where I stand emotionally, and he does the same for me.

I learned the biggest lesson in DEI

Our differences were a gift and we never let them overcome our undying respect for each other. In the end, it was the radical trust I had with this coworker and the rest of those men who were getting divorced that helped me shed my lifelong fear and bias toward straight guys.

The great irony is that while we had this incredible open culture at this bank outside the office, when we went back in, that same kind of honesty probably would have gotten us all fired. Even though I didn’t work directly with any of these men, it was great to know that this invisible network was throughout the building. I am grateful that my divorce threw me into the care of the people I feared the most all my life.

Now, I speak and give workshops about how organizations can use the biggest lessons I’ve learned about DEI: We don’t have to agree on everything to still respect each other. Conversations help break down biases. And it is diversity of opinion that can help us all understand ourselves in ways we never imagined.

Karl Dunn is the author of “How to burn a rainbow” and a keynote speaker advocating the power of diversity of thought in organizations. Lives between Berlin and Los Angeles.