Every generation has its life-defining moments. If you want to find out what it was for a member of the Greatest Generation, you ask: “Where were you on D-Day?” For baby boomers, the questions are: “Where were you when Kennedy was shot?” or “What were you doing when Nixon resigned?”
For much of my generation””Generation X, born between 1965 and 1980””there is only one question: “When did your parents get divorced?” Our lives have been framed by the answer. Ask us. We remember everything.
When my dad left in the spring of 1981 and moved five states away with his executive assistant and her four kids, the world as I had known it came to an end….
True dat. Would-be self-actualized women have no capacity for conciliation whatsoever. They expect men to yield when ever the relationship conflicts with their inclinations and sense of identity. Think of the criticism of the book, Eat Pray Love. Here’s a big reason for the decline in marriage.
[blockquote] We were together for nearly eight years before we got married, and even though statistics show that divorce rates are 48% higher for those who have lived together previously, we paid no heed.
We also paid no heed to his Catholic parents, who comprised one of the rare reassuringly unified couples I’d ever met, when they warned us that we should wait until we were married to live together. As they put it, being pals and roommates is different from being husband and wife. How bizarrely old-fashioned and sexist! [/blockquote]
Apparently the author missed the direct connection between “his Catholic parents” and their being “one of the rare reassuringly unified couples I’d ever met.” What is completely missing from her analysis is any religious element whatsoever. I suspect that what contributed to his parents’ marital success was more than just not living together first as “pals and roommates” as she seems to think.
As one whose parents went through a most amicable divorce in the 1960’s (they even used the same lawyer to represent them both), I can assure you that the damage done to the children of “amicable divorces” is just as real and no less destructive than what the author experienced as a result of her parents’ non-amicable divorce. There is no way to do divorce right.
BTW, our church is filled with any number of young adult children of divorce — and a very large number of them from evangelical homes. We also have a very active healing ministry, which is restoring to the lives of these young people what the locusts of divorce have devoured. My husband of thirty years and I are among several older couples who serve them informally as spiritual mothers and fathers, providing the guidance and stability of what Christian marriage looks like. The resulting marriages here are strong and filled with grace, in part because of the church’s encouragement and commitment to marriage as being the very image of the love between Christ and the Church. We attended the wedding of one of these adult children of divorce yesterday, and we marveled at the deep healing the Lord has done over the past few years. The sermon focused on the love of Christ and how they are to be as Christ to one another, serving one another in love, humility and forgiveness. This is the element missing from the author’s concept of stable marriage and in our experience it is the core component, without which things fall apart despite the best of intentions going in.
The pretense all along has been that “it’s the best thing for the
kids”. Hah ! It’s always the way of the world to make the innocent
pay a very heavy price for the sins of others. That’s the way it
truly is, but our society lacks sufficient honesty to state that.
Good article, though.