Posted on 01/15/2026 5:04:09 PM PST by DoodleBob
If you ever want to get an interesting – sometimes shocking – glimpse of today’s culture, try reading the advice columns that populate many of the nation’s newspapers. A letter to Slate’s “Dear Prudence” column caught my eye today.
The letter writer explained that a friend (“Chrissy”) in her late 30s was still dealing with the effects of her parents’ divorce, roughly 25 years after it had happened. Chrissy’s “heart was irrevocably broken, and she lost all trust in relationships,” which, of course, made the idea of a long-term commitment difficult for her to navigate.
The writer of this letter, also a child of divorce, expressed her disgust at Chrissy for not moving on emotionally. She said that Chrissy’s home had been a loving one and that the divorce had been amicable, while her own home had been abusive and the divorce had been messy. Prudence responded that it is indeed time for Chrissy to get over her parents’ divorce, and furthermore, that continuing a friendship with Chrissy would be toxic for the writer.
It’s likely true that Chrissy needs some help processing and accepting her parents’ divorce, but those who callously dismiss her “stuckness” are just ignoring the lifelong trauma that divorce can bring to a child’s life. I can’t help but wonder: how many of the problems that we see in society today – hookups, single parenthood, children and teens with psychological problems, anger and rage, etc. – have their roots in the divorce mindset (and practice) that permeates our society?
I can almost hear in response the usual talking points about how amicable divorces aren’t harmful to children, or how children who are in rough homes are better off when their parents divorce. But I wonder if that is really true.
According to Leila Miller, children of divorce – even so-called good divorces – have many untold stories. She tells these stories in her book “Primal Loss: The Now-Adult Children of Divorce Speak.” In talking to these people, Miller found that many are besieged by unsettling feelings, feelings that they often hide from their parents, who have enough of their own baggage to deal with. Parents may eventually move on from their first marriage, but children have a much more difficult time, as the divorce erases part of their own history and sense of place, particularly as many children of divorce live like vagabonds, traveling back and forth from one home to another.
Fear of abandonment and difficulty navigating future relationships is another problem that children of divorce encounter. As one middle-aged woman told Miller:
I believe [the divorce] instilled a fear of abandonment in me with regard to all of my relationships. I developed problems trusting people to be there for me, believing that when the going got rough, people would leave me. I never learned any skills for solving conflict in relationships. As much as I desperately craved intimacy and love, the closer someone came to me, the more terrified I was of getting hurt, or worse—abandoned. I unconsciously sabotaged relationships, as I didn’t know how to receive and accept real love …
Perhaps the struggles of Chrissy, in the “Dear Prudence” letter, are more legitimate than her irritated friend was able to see.
Unfortunately, Miller’s findings aren’t outliers. Elizabeth Marquardt, herself a child of divorce, presents similar views in her book “Between Two Worlds.” She tries to bust the myth of a “good divorce” such as Chrissy’s parents had. “Advocates of the ‘good divorce,’” she writes, “refuse to recognize that our childhoods were dominated by frequent sad departures.” Endure that for any amount of time as a child, and you might soon become calloused and removed from the world. That or just an emotional wreck.
The work of Miller and Marquardt might seem strange. After all, divorce is nothing new. We’ve lived with it for ages, and family breakups are a dime a dozen – over 630,000 divorces were reported by the CDC in 2020 alone.
But that’s exactly why we need to talk about it. We’ve become far too comfortable with divorce, and we don’t speak out against it for fear of stepping on toes. But we shouldn’t be silent, because the fallout of divorce affects all of us, even those who come from intact families. Because divorce is so prevalent, everyone has multiple friends and contacts who are children of divorce, and thus everyone encounters the associated difficulties: the fear, the abandonment, the displacement, the inability to deal with feelings that have followed these poor children into adulthood.
Years ago, some relatives of mine went through a divorce that threw their children into the displacement and confusion that come with parental separation. In recent years, the effects of that divorce have been playing out in those children as they try to navigate their adult lives. Seeing this turmoil, their mother sadly said, “If I had known what my divorce would do to my children, I never would have done it.”
Would that we could all have the same epiphany.
Mine was bad at the time.
But it turned out to be a very good decision.
“I retreated to peace and quiet as best as I could.
25 years of chaos was enough.”
Thankfully, there is no chaos in my life.
After my divorce I cheated with an old friend since grammar school.
He had been married and divorced eight times to seven different women by the age of 53.
He said never again.
That was 25 years ago. I don’t know what happened since.
‘ He had been married and divorced eight times to seven different women by the age of 53.’
That sounds insane to me.
I’ve read that the OT teaching is not so much as being against divorce as much as it is about fair treatment and not putting your partner through the wringer.
Very easy to paint with a broad brush.
In my case, after ten years my wife decided she was “not being fulfilled” and ended our marriage over my stringent objections.
At that time we had two children, 8 and 3.
It was a miserable experience throughout, but as each child came into their teens, they chose to break with her and come live with me (and their new stepmother).
Each now publicly states it was the best decision they ever made, and 1) Blames their mother for the breakup, and 2) credits their stepmother for guiding them toward the success they now have.
Neither attended their biological mother’s funeral.
A very good divorce
“That sounds insane to me.”
He also thought so. But he kept a good attitude.
Some divorces involving children are wonderful. If a parent is abusive, an addict or alcoholic, the kids are under horrible stress and often mimic that behavior when they grow up. Or even as teens. And their understanding of “love” can be quite warped.
Money isn’t isn’t necessarily a factor, as addicts and alcoholics may be quite wealthy.
Yes, I was one of those kids.
Yes, it is called no fault divorce with no children under age 21.
That sounds like it was brutal.
I dated a psycho and didn’t seriously date again for ten years.
You realized that more of the people out there had pretty big problems, unless they lost their loved one to having passed on.
No divorce is good. Some are at least peaceful but the family unit is still broken up.
It was brutal.
She was a covert narcissist that sabotaged every aspect of the relationship, lied incessantly and without shame, purposely broke, damaged or broke things on purpose to get a reaction,turned friends and family against me , all because she had her issues, as we all do.
Problem is, she had absolutely no desire to fix the situation as it was her way of dealing with her trauma.
That just perpetuated that trauma to the next generation.
Yes. Many instances. And not just for one sex.
Redundant I am.
Same here.
My house and life are now peaceful. My son has suffered for it though, but there was nothing I could do to hold it together. She was determined to leave.
She regrets it now and tried to come back but once trust is gone its gone.
Some are good for children.
In bad marriages kids can learn wrong things about men and women, how to treat one another, become confused about what love actually is, and come to regard abnormal things as normal. And of course be played against a spouse, and be used as pawns and excuses by one spouse against another.
This is why DiCaprio has it right, for him.
I was quite happy with my cheating ex-wife leaving, whom I was scared to divorce because men don't get custody, but when she left it was a relief. I shouldn't have doubted God, I got custody. LOL And then I met a lady in church who volunteered to help watch a kid in church some of us were looking after while his mother was in the hospital. I figured she'd be good for my kids too.
And she's a gorgeous thing I've now been married to for 19 years.
Yes. My friend divorced her husband. They did not work as a married couple. He was bad with money and too messy. She lost her attraction to him. She was a nag as far as he was concerned.
But they became best friends once divorced and they each had their own place. She took care of him when he became ill. They went a lot of places together until then- hockey games, out to dinner, watched some shows together.
He passed away six months ago. She feels like she lost her best friend because she did indeed lose her best friend.
,,, children are adaptive if each parent shows the other respect and doesn’t use the kids as a weapon. When you take vows to love, honour and be there for each other it’s perfectly in line with how you’re thinking on the wedding day. It’s a balance that gets out of balance and is too often unable to recover. The use of children by a parent to win against the other parent usually indicates the personality that’s at fault - or simply unable to do the best for anyone beyond themselves.
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