Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of graphic violence, sexual violence, drug use, addiction, emotional abuse, and death.

The Perfect Divorce centralizes Sarah Morgan and Bob Miller’s relationship and divorce to explore the consequences of breaking a loved one’s trust. Sarah and Bob have been together for roughly a decade, but they no longer trust each other in the narrative present. Sarah has filed for divorce because she discovered that Bob was cheating on her. Aware that Sarah is capable of hurting those who wrong her, Bob no longer trusts Sarah after he learns that she’s aware of his infidelity. As soon as trust breaks down between the couple, Sarah and Bob are incapable of coexisting. They not only stop living together and begin divorce proceedings but also pursue elaborate plans to destroy one another. Their separate and overlapping desires to ruin each other’s lives capture the unsustainability of intimate relationships that lack trust.

On the surface, Sarah and Bob’s marriage was founded on mutual trust, secrecy, understanding, and protection. However, as the novel unfolds, Sarah’s and Bob’s respective first-person narratives reveal that Sarah has never trusted Bob, and Bob has never trusted Sarah. Sarah has kept Bob close to her since Kelly Summers’s death and Adam Morgan’s trial, but she has never believed she could be truly close with Bob. Meanwhile, Bob has believed the same about Sarah, leading him to take defensive measures like keeping the knife from Kelly’s murder instead of destroying it per Sarah’s instruction: “I knew from the very beginning I had to have an insurance policy with Sarah, something to guarantee she could never do to me what she did to her first husband Adam” (52). The knife is a symbol of Bob’s mistrust: He has never fully embraced Sarah as his equal and has always feared that she would betray him for her own gain. Throughout the novel, he repeatedly wishes that he “knew what she was thinking, what thoughts [are] coursing through that brilliant, diabolical mind of hers” so that he could understand her true motives (92). However, because he finds her inaccessible, he continues to doubt her and seek her death. Meanwhile, because Sarah believes that Bob’s interests have always been selfish, too, the couple’s relationship has been founded on deceit and suspicion. As a result, when the couple faces the Ryan Stevens conflict, they attack each other instead of working together.

Sarah and Bob’s relationship dynamics suggest that if the individual doesn’t have trusting intimate relationships, she will end up on her own. This proves true for both Sarah and Bob. Sarah does everything in her power to destroy Bob, and Bob ends up dying alone, without knowing the truth surrounding Stacy Howard and Carissa Brooks. Sarah triumphs over Bob and ends up back on her own at the novel’s end with the confirmation of her lifelong suspicion: Men can’t be trusted, and, as a result, intimacy with them is impossible. Because she is so convinced of this, Sarah never extends trust to Bob, preventing the development of intimacy and creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. With the disintegration of Bob and Sarah’s relationship, the novel probes how lack of trust erodes the possibility of true intimacy.