100% truth. I give enormous credit to my husband's sister who chose to leave an alcoholic, abusive, serial adulterer. Rather than destroy multiple families who grew up together, married and had children together, my SIL and her husband's family made a group decision to maintain those relationships. And they did. His siblings were adamant they would not disappear from her, they were involved in the children's lives, and even our lives as in-laws. Forty years later, we have buried elderly parents together, did weddings, baby showers, baptisms, graduations, sat at hospital waiting rooms and more as extended families. But here is the catch-everyone involved made the effort to promote goodness and stability for all, especially the children (who are now grandparents themselves).
One more thought. I mentioned my parents being divorced. That happened a year after mine was finalized. My mom was the one who initiated. They had been married 39 years. (They probably should have divorced a decade — or two! — earlier, TBH). Them finally doing it blew up EVERYTHING. If you think divorce wreaks havoc on children, let me say it does the same, maybe worse, on adult children.
I mean, sure I can appreciate that my mother struggled in the marriage (my father is not an easy person) but selfishly, I wish they had both just managed to stick out, live separate lives if need be, but maintain the ‘core’ — which they somehow managed to do for 39 years so WTH?
But: nope. And so, we no longer congregate as a family. The two of them don’t speak. Neither of them has two dimes to rub together because they had to split what little they had left after paying a fortune to lawyers to split up what little they had. Neither of my sisters speak to my dad. Now my mom lives with 1 sister and I am the sole caregiver for my dad.
I resent the hell out of both of them for killing our family unit. Neither of them tried hard enough to stay together OR to find a new way of honoring the family.
Am I anti-divorce? No. But I think most people are too selfish and lack the ability to think beyond themselves to at least maintain kinship in creative ways post-divorce and that’s heartbreaking.
Grandparents divorcing and blowing up the entire family doesn't nearly get talked about as much as it should. It's not because children are adults and have left the nest that it's not going to have enormous consequences. A dear friend of ours, married with a young daughter, had his parents separate around two years ago when his father suddenly came out. It has wrecked absolute chaos on our friend's family, with Whatsapp group wars, messy financial issues, siblings taking sides, his mother so full of resentment that she'd made it her mission to ruin her ex-husband's life and his father acting like a 20 year-old cruising gay bars. Family gatherings are impossible, and so too the precious loving support grandparents are supposed to give. An absolute nightmare.
I was just saying to a friend recently that I feel like there are no good resources for staying married and reasonably happy. The secular talk is mostly pro-divorce and couched in terms of self-actualization (as you said) but Christian culture has long been, like, the opposite? Stay married because you gotta stay married, it’s so important, etc. Even talking about it as sanctification can veer dangerously close to the idea that you need to stick it out with abuse. Lots of nuance needed here for sure. Great piece.
I was rolling my eyes at Lyz's twitter rhetoric and then I decided to try reading her book. Her husband was quite abusive! I think she overgeneralized from a really horrific situation. A normie like me with a nice boring husband really cannot relate nor should I.
I appreciate this discussion. There is this whole sub-genre of books about middle-aged women having a spiritual awakening that seems to make divorce (+/- coming out as a lesbian) a requirement for spiritual awakening. I, for one, would find it really inspiring to find a book about a woman going through this mid-life feeling that so much of how I've been in the world before needs to change that I am going through and discussing the changes, shifts, and discussions that had to take place for the marriage to continue and to continue to be mutually fulfilling through that big personal change (that the other party likely hadn't explicitly signed on for except for in the generality of "to death do us part".
This is incredibly validating. My parents split a 36 year relationship the year after I got married and it did a number on every single family relationship I had. Neither of their families are big and it meant years and years of relational problems to navigate. And it wasn’t an abusive relationship. I think as a child, adults shield you from the details, but as an adult, you hear everything and it does make you question your entire life—was it all as happy as you had believed?
My sister-in-law’s divorce divided my family from my in-laws. As bearers of the only grandchildren, we had many joint Thanksgivings and Christmases. My parents had hired SIL’s husband for some odd jobs and so were front and center when her infidelity burned up their marriage. My husband’s parents supported their daughter. Mine were hurt that their employee/friend was treated so badly. That was the end of joint holidays.
I wholeheartedly agree with this article. Divorce destroys the village.
I am divorced myself. It was not my choice, but it’s been 20 years now and though the early years were tumultuous (he was so angry! even though he was the one burning everything up), we have managed to maintain a very strong relationship, albeit initially for our son, but I believe also because we are friends and did always care about each other.
What’s interesting to me, thinking about the village now, is how we did each lose the other’s family. He has 3 sisters and a brother and I felt close to them, but when it fell apart I pulled back. I will still associate with the brother, and when my ex FIL was recovering from a bad fall, I went to see him in the rehab facility. But I am no longer a part of that family and that break did hurt my feelings becuz I was definitely a kind of kin keeper and made a lot of effort, but I think the sisters/mother closed ranks in favor of their brother.
On the flip side, I think my father felt the loss of my husband becuz they got along really well. Plus he was angry with him for leaving me and the baby. Time passed and I guess they all forgave him and now it’s a given that he is willing to help them when they need it. He helped move both my parents from one home to another (they’re divorced!), helped arrange a mobile mechanic to come fix my mom’s car, offered to come see a house my sister was putting an offer on.
So the connections can still be there.
However, we don’t recreate together. Gone are the dual-family celebrations, the holidays… as chaotic as they were at times, I do miss that.
I spend most Christmases alone for instance, letting my son go with his father to spend the holiday with the extended family that I can’t provide, all those cousins… I want him to have that and though it’s a sacrifice, it’s the right one to make.
Still, sometimes I think about I was the one who was left and am mostly alone. (I think that’s why, recently, my ex and his partner have taken me and my son out for MY birthday the last few years.)
Bottom line, though I am divorced, I don’t feel any real connection to some of the divorce books out recently. They don’t speak to my experience at all.
I think that because many of us no longer have a nearby village, we don't hear the advice or witness the examples of couples with great marriages that have lasted decades. The main message I hear from elderly couples is that love is an action and that when they weren't feeling “in love” for a time, they knew it would pass and worked through it. Of course, abusive situations are different. Divorcing because of boredom in midlife is so sad. In most cases, if people waited it out, it would pass, sparing the family and friends from losing connections.
Great piece. It's hard to toe the line between being pro-marriage and seen as either anti-divorce or anti-singlehood or anti-other-ways-of-living-and-relating-and-family-building, and yet I like you find myself being pro-marriage, mostly (though not entirely) because of the staggering statistics about all kinds of individual and social health outcomes. My own community is mostly kith, made of aging childless and unmarried—even mostly single—friends. Several long-term partnerships and a few marriages have broken up among us in recent years, and this has wreaked havoc on us all. As I enter my third trimester with my first child, unmarried but deeply partnered and likely to marry soon enough, I think a lot about how we can become a fulcrum for our community. This is the opposite of how I was raised in my own family. My father is the most individualistic (selfish?) person I've known closely, and opted out of 100% the difficult parts of family/home life while still reaping the benefits, until he finally left with the last of many women he had an affair with. Additionally, my family in general was rather isolated—we had no extended family in the same state and rarely had friends around. It has been a monumentall effort to turn this around in my own life!
Sometimes it's the behavior of the village and not the divorcees who create the problem.
I have been utterly shunned from my ex-husband's - and therefore half of my children's - family because I initiated the divorce. I am comfortable with my reasons for having done so but I will forever be The Bitch Who Broke Apart The Family to them. (They have their own skeletons which I am too classy to mention to anyone, but, they are certainly not perfect themselves.) I will of course carry the guilt of having done so for all my days, and I accept that. The sad thing is that it doesn't have to be this way forever, but they insist upon it, and the only people it hurts are the children, and also children who were born later who had nothing to do with any of it. My older children's father, my ex-husband, refuses to speak to me in any fashion other than over email, and if I take them to see any of their relatives on that side, I drop them off in the driveway of the house and they walk up alone. None of those people will come out of the house even to greet the kids (now all teens and young adults, to be fair) if I'm there, or my second husband or the two children we had together. And they refuse to acknowledge or tolerate any discussion of my older kids' younger siblings. It's so absurd and childish and petty because the only people they are hurting are their own kids/grandkids/nieces who ALSO love their half-siblings and mother and stepfather but feel that they can't mention them around their dad or his family.
I would be entirely happy to be civil to these people; I have no beef with any of them and they were my inlaws for many years and it's not their fault my marriage to their their brother/son failed, but I can't force them to do the same for me, nor see that their rigid peasanty DEAD TO ME behavior is not hurting me but hurting people who are innocent in all of this.
Do you know Terry Real? He's a couples therapist who talks about the results of excess individualism within relationships. His most recent book is Us: Getting Past You and Me to Build a More Loving Relationship.
But I love your point about it affecting more than children, but whole fabrics of relationships built up together. Anecdotally, the divorces of my parents siblings (and recently, the friends of some of my in-laws) have seen the exact drifting to one "side" you describe. The children, yes—often to the side of the mother—but even from a distance the friendships always appear very strained and awkward to navigate. Especially in Grey Divorce, where you've built a life and village over several decades together.
Love this:
"But also, I choose to continue loving my wife because — among innumerable other reasons — we are part of a community that depends on us. It’s a community that, like all communities, can only exist if everyone thinks about people other than themselves. Community cannot exist if everyone always chooses her or himself."
I feel like I saw this on a smaller and less earth-shattering scale in and after college when long-term dating relationships ended. Even when there was a desire on the part of myself and my husband to remain friends with both parties, this rarely happened, and when it did, it often came with (a) a long span of time passing with no contact with one or both parties and/or (b) conflict with the one party that any relationship was maintained with the other. Sometimes both. And while it often feels (or is branded) "selfish" to "make the break up about you," there is a real loss for parties who are external to the relationship itself, but who are still affected by its end, and that loss needs to be grieved. I've seen situations where a relationship (dating or marriage) breaks up and somehow both parties lose contact with their (same/shared) village--it's not that the village takes sides, but awkwardness or confusion or just the busy-ness of life gets in the way of the village showing up to support, and both parties find themselves isolated in the wake of the divorce.
A Montague-Capulet child might have produced a type of truce. Marriage as a bridge between communities will struggle to coexist with a culture that fails to produce children. Shared grandchildren are a testament to peace, with both families having a vested interest in the other in the form of their own future. As it stands, there is first the betrayal of your circle's input and share in your life, then a terminus of all your culture and values. Quietly, people know this, and a similar problem arises with divorce, especially with unequal custody. A coworker of mine once commented that she last saw her paternal grandparents (who were first generation) not just before her parents' divorce, but just before her mother remarried. This carries both the sadness that they believed they were no longer this child's family, and the beauty that they held expectation their grandchild would now be in a new one. Obviously, this story is open for darker interpretation, but as your piece points out, we are also a little blithe with our expectations for communities once we decide to corrode them.
I feel bad for the children. The children of divorced parents in my personal life, had bizarre behavior that could even rival the behavior of single mother raised children. I blame the culture and society for allowing divorce to get so rampant. We went from one man one woman forever to get as many divorces as you want to now: marriage is rare.
In my religion, we teach that family and marriage is eternal. That the relationship is not just a promise between 2 people but that it's a bond that connects generations before and after. That doesn't prevent our people from ever divorcing, but it does help convey and convince us of some of what you describe: that the sphere and influence of marriage goes beyond the choices of the two people involved and beyond the 4 walls of their home.
100% truth. I give enormous credit to my husband's sister who chose to leave an alcoholic, abusive, serial adulterer. Rather than destroy multiple families who grew up together, married and had children together, my SIL and her husband's family made a group decision to maintain those relationships. And they did. His siblings were adamant they would not disappear from her, they were involved in the children's lives, and even our lives as in-laws. Forty years later, we have buried elderly parents together, did weddings, baby showers, baptisms, graduations, sat at hospital waiting rooms and more as extended families. But here is the catch-everyone involved made the effort to promote goodness and stability for all, especially the children (who are now grandparents themselves).
Wow that is incredibly beautiful. A real testament to the nuance that’s available to us.
One more thought. I mentioned my parents being divorced. That happened a year after mine was finalized. My mom was the one who initiated. They had been married 39 years. (They probably should have divorced a decade — or two! — earlier, TBH). Them finally doing it blew up EVERYTHING. If you think divorce wreaks havoc on children, let me say it does the same, maybe worse, on adult children.
I mean, sure I can appreciate that my mother struggled in the marriage (my father is not an easy person) but selfishly, I wish they had both just managed to stick out, live separate lives if need be, but maintain the ‘core’ — which they somehow managed to do for 39 years so WTH?
But: nope. And so, we no longer congregate as a family. The two of them don’t speak. Neither of them has two dimes to rub together because they had to split what little they had left after paying a fortune to lawyers to split up what little they had. Neither of my sisters speak to my dad. Now my mom lives with 1 sister and I am the sole caregiver for my dad.
I resent the hell out of both of them for killing our family unit. Neither of them tried hard enough to stay together OR to find a new way of honoring the family.
Am I anti-divorce? No. But I think most people are too selfish and lack the ability to think beyond themselves to at least maintain kinship in creative ways post-divorce and that’s heartbreaking.
Grandparents divorcing and blowing up the entire family doesn't nearly get talked about as much as it should. It's not because children are adults and have left the nest that it's not going to have enormous consequences. A dear friend of ours, married with a young daughter, had his parents separate around two years ago when his father suddenly came out. It has wrecked absolute chaos on our friend's family, with Whatsapp group wars, messy financial issues, siblings taking sides, his mother so full of resentment that she'd made it her mission to ruin her ex-husband's life and his father acting like a 20 year-old cruising gay bars. Family gatherings are impossible, and so too the precious loving support grandparents are supposed to give. An absolute nightmare.
I was just saying to a friend recently that I feel like there are no good resources for staying married and reasonably happy. The secular talk is mostly pro-divorce and couched in terms of self-actualization (as you said) but Christian culture has long been, like, the opposite? Stay married because you gotta stay married, it’s so important, etc. Even talking about it as sanctification can veer dangerously close to the idea that you need to stick it out with abuse. Lots of nuance needed here for sure. Great piece.
I was rolling my eyes at Lyz's twitter rhetoric and then I decided to try reading her book. Her husband was quite abusive! I think she overgeneralized from a really horrific situation. A normie like me with a nice boring husband really cannot relate nor should I.
I appreciate this discussion. There is this whole sub-genre of books about middle-aged women having a spiritual awakening that seems to make divorce (+/- coming out as a lesbian) a requirement for spiritual awakening. I, for one, would find it really inspiring to find a book about a woman going through this mid-life feeling that so much of how I've been in the world before needs to change that I am going through and discussing the changes, shifts, and discussions that had to take place for the marriage to continue and to continue to be mutually fulfilling through that big personal change (that the other party likely hadn't explicitly signed on for except for in the generality of "to death do us part".
This is incredibly validating. My parents split a 36 year relationship the year after I got married and it did a number on every single family relationship I had. Neither of their families are big and it meant years and years of relational problems to navigate. And it wasn’t an abusive relationship. I think as a child, adults shield you from the details, but as an adult, you hear everything and it does make you question your entire life—was it all as happy as you had believed?
My sister-in-law’s divorce divided my family from my in-laws. As bearers of the only grandchildren, we had many joint Thanksgivings and Christmases. My parents had hired SIL’s husband for some odd jobs and so were front and center when her infidelity burned up their marriage. My husband’s parents supported their daughter. Mine were hurt that their employee/friend was treated so badly. That was the end of joint holidays.
I wholeheartedly agree with this article. Divorce destroys the village.
I am divorced myself. It was not my choice, but it’s been 20 years now and though the early years were tumultuous (he was so angry! even though he was the one burning everything up), we have managed to maintain a very strong relationship, albeit initially for our son, but I believe also because we are friends and did always care about each other.
What’s interesting to me, thinking about the village now, is how we did each lose the other’s family. He has 3 sisters and a brother and I felt close to them, but when it fell apart I pulled back. I will still associate with the brother, and when my ex FIL was recovering from a bad fall, I went to see him in the rehab facility. But I am no longer a part of that family and that break did hurt my feelings becuz I was definitely a kind of kin keeper and made a lot of effort, but I think the sisters/mother closed ranks in favor of their brother.
On the flip side, I think my father felt the loss of my husband becuz they got along really well. Plus he was angry with him for leaving me and the baby. Time passed and I guess they all forgave him and now it’s a given that he is willing to help them when they need it. He helped move both my parents from one home to another (they’re divorced!), helped arrange a mobile mechanic to come fix my mom’s car, offered to come see a house my sister was putting an offer on.
So the connections can still be there.
However, we don’t recreate together. Gone are the dual-family celebrations, the holidays… as chaotic as they were at times, I do miss that.
I spend most Christmases alone for instance, letting my son go with his father to spend the holiday with the extended family that I can’t provide, all those cousins… I want him to have that and though it’s a sacrifice, it’s the right one to make.
Still, sometimes I think about I was the one who was left and am mostly alone. (I think that’s why, recently, my ex and his partner have taken me and my son out for MY birthday the last few years.)
Bottom line, though I am divorced, I don’t feel any real connection to some of the divorce books out recently. They don’t speak to my experience at all.
I think that because many of us no longer have a nearby village, we don't hear the advice or witness the examples of couples with great marriages that have lasted decades. The main message I hear from elderly couples is that love is an action and that when they weren't feeling “in love” for a time, they knew it would pass and worked through it. Of course, abusive situations are different. Divorcing because of boredom in midlife is so sad. In most cases, if people waited it out, it would pass, sparing the family and friends from losing connections.
Great piece. It's hard to toe the line between being pro-marriage and seen as either anti-divorce or anti-singlehood or anti-other-ways-of-living-and-relating-and-family-building, and yet I like you find myself being pro-marriage, mostly (though not entirely) because of the staggering statistics about all kinds of individual and social health outcomes. My own community is mostly kith, made of aging childless and unmarried—even mostly single—friends. Several long-term partnerships and a few marriages have broken up among us in recent years, and this has wreaked havoc on us all. As I enter my third trimester with my first child, unmarried but deeply partnered and likely to marry soon enough, I think a lot about how we can become a fulcrum for our community. This is the opposite of how I was raised in my own family. My father is the most individualistic (selfish?) person I've known closely, and opted out of 100% the difficult parts of family/home life while still reaping the benefits, until he finally left with the last of many women he had an affair with. Additionally, my family in general was rather isolated—we had no extended family in the same state and rarely had friends around. It has been a monumentall effort to turn this around in my own life!
Sometimes it's the behavior of the village and not the divorcees who create the problem.
I have been utterly shunned from my ex-husband's - and therefore half of my children's - family because I initiated the divorce. I am comfortable with my reasons for having done so but I will forever be The Bitch Who Broke Apart The Family to them. (They have their own skeletons which I am too classy to mention to anyone, but, they are certainly not perfect themselves.) I will of course carry the guilt of having done so for all my days, and I accept that. The sad thing is that it doesn't have to be this way forever, but they insist upon it, and the only people it hurts are the children, and also children who were born later who had nothing to do with any of it. My older children's father, my ex-husband, refuses to speak to me in any fashion other than over email, and if I take them to see any of their relatives on that side, I drop them off in the driveway of the house and they walk up alone. None of those people will come out of the house even to greet the kids (now all teens and young adults, to be fair) if I'm there, or my second husband or the two children we had together. And they refuse to acknowledge or tolerate any discussion of my older kids' younger siblings. It's so absurd and childish and petty because the only people they are hurting are their own kids/grandkids/nieces who ALSO love their half-siblings and mother and stepfather but feel that they can't mention them around their dad or his family.
I would be entirely happy to be civil to these people; I have no beef with any of them and they were my inlaws for many years and it's not their fault my marriage to their their brother/son failed, but I can't force them to do the same for me, nor see that their rigid peasanty DEAD TO ME behavior is not hurting me but hurting people who are innocent in all of this.
Do you know Terry Real? He's a couples therapist who talks about the results of excess individualism within relationships. His most recent book is Us: Getting Past You and Me to Build a More Loving Relationship.
Sara Dietz on here shared this with me a while back (this is a reminder to read it, myself). It's a book collecting the thoughts of now-adult children of divorce: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5c6467c8b7c92caf2540b798/t/5cbf9fbdf9619a79feeb6cb2/1556062149312/DigitalBook_PrimalLoss.pdf
But I love your point about it affecting more than children, but whole fabrics of relationships built up together. Anecdotally, the divorces of my parents siblings (and recently, the friends of some of my in-laws) have seen the exact drifting to one "side" you describe. The children, yes—often to the side of the mother—but even from a distance the friendships always appear very strained and awkward to navigate. Especially in Grey Divorce, where you've built a life and village over several decades together.
Love this:
"But also, I choose to continue loving my wife because — among innumerable other reasons — we are part of a community that depends on us. It’s a community that, like all communities, can only exist if everyone thinks about people other than themselves. Community cannot exist if everyone always chooses her or himself."
I feel like I saw this on a smaller and less earth-shattering scale in and after college when long-term dating relationships ended. Even when there was a desire on the part of myself and my husband to remain friends with both parties, this rarely happened, and when it did, it often came with (a) a long span of time passing with no contact with one or both parties and/or (b) conflict with the one party that any relationship was maintained with the other. Sometimes both. And while it often feels (or is branded) "selfish" to "make the break up about you," there is a real loss for parties who are external to the relationship itself, but who are still affected by its end, and that loss needs to be grieved. I've seen situations where a relationship (dating or marriage) breaks up and somehow both parties lose contact with their (same/shared) village--it's not that the village takes sides, but awkwardness or confusion or just the busy-ness of life gets in the way of the village showing up to support, and both parties find themselves isolated in the wake of the divorce.
A Montague-Capulet child might have produced a type of truce. Marriage as a bridge between communities will struggle to coexist with a culture that fails to produce children. Shared grandchildren are a testament to peace, with both families having a vested interest in the other in the form of their own future. As it stands, there is first the betrayal of your circle's input and share in your life, then a terminus of all your culture and values. Quietly, people know this, and a similar problem arises with divorce, especially with unequal custody. A coworker of mine once commented that she last saw her paternal grandparents (who were first generation) not just before her parents' divorce, but just before her mother remarried. This carries both the sadness that they believed they were no longer this child's family, and the beauty that they held expectation their grandchild would now be in a new one. Obviously, this story is open for darker interpretation, but as your piece points out, we are also a little blithe with our expectations for communities once we decide to corrode them.
I feel bad for the children. The children of divorced parents in my personal life, had bizarre behavior that could even rival the behavior of single mother raised children. I blame the culture and society for allowing divorce to get so rampant. We went from one man one woman forever to get as many divorces as you want to now: marriage is rare.
In my religion, we teach that family and marriage is eternal. That the relationship is not just a promise between 2 people but that it's a bond that connects generations before and after. That doesn't prevent our people from ever divorcing, but it does help convey and convince us of some of what you describe: that the sphere and influence of marriage goes beyond the choices of the two people involved and beyond the 4 walls of their home.