If there’s one thing almost all of us can agree on when it comes to divorce it’s worrying about the kids: How will divorce impact them?
That’s the reasoning behind the wrong-headed push to make divorce harder in this country for parents of minor children and it’s why no one seems to be too upset when a childfree couple divorces (again, wrong-headed, but it’s the truth). 
And kids have their feelings about it, no matter how old they are when their parents split. A handful of young children reveal their thoughts in Bay Area filmmaker Ellen Bruno’s wonderful documentary, “Split,” which is, at times, heart-wrenching in its honesty although it’s clear that parental conflict causes them the most stress, not the divorce per se, and not being able to see their father as much as they’d like.
So I was intrigued by an article on BuzzFeed on what adult children (or at least the demographics that read BuzzFeed, the majority of which are between 18 and 34 years old, so Millennials and GenXers) think about their parent’s divorce.
Here are some choice quotes:
“Not everyone is meant to be monogamous forever and that’s totally OK. It doesn’t make you a bad person.”
“My parents got divorced when I was 21, and I learned that if you hate your spouse, you should not stay together for the sake of your kids because you’re not doing anybody any favors.”
“Looking back on it, the best moments I’ve had with my family happened after my parents got divorced and started co-parenting.”
“I’ve learned that ‘marriage’ doesn’t always mean that everything works out all happily ever after – but it does mean you still have a life together, at least in some way, if you have children together.”
These quotes give me hope.
While no one would promote divorce as being some sort of wonderful event, although it often is the route out of dysfunctional or abusive relationships and can lead to amazing transformations, what these answers illustrate is that perhaps, finally, people are taking off the rose-colored glasses about the institution as well as busting the fairy-tale romantic myths we keep perpetuating about it. Marriage can be great if you’ve married a good partner and are a good partner, or it can be a prison. It’s up to the people in it to make it good or bad; the marriage license doesn’t guarantee anything except access to legal protections.
Yes, monogamy needs to be a discussion. Yes, staying together “for the kids” rarely makes anyone happy, let alone the kids. Yes, once you have kids together you continue to be parents even if things don’t work out “happily ever after” — better learn to deal with that. What’s wrong with those messages? Aren’t they part of a much more real conversation about about what we want and expect from marriage? Who knows if these are the kinds of observations they’d have if they hadn’t been through parental divorce. Maybe the divorce made them pay more attention to their own romantic relationships. Maybe divorce was a positive thing for them.
Of course, no one wants children to be in the crosshairs while parents attempt to figure their stuff out. We want to be able to give kids the stability and consistency they need to thrive (hello, Parenting Marriage!!). But now that we don’t talk about kids being from broken homes, now that much of the stigma about divorce is gone, why are we still perpetuating myths about marriages that fall apart before the so-called perfect time — death (although we haven’t quite gotten rid of the idea of calling a marriage that ends before “death do us part” as a “failed marriage”)?
I’m not trying to put a good spin on divorce; for some people and for some kids it’s devastating, and I want to acknowledge that. I also want to acknowledge that some people who grew up with it have found positives from the experience (although I don’t quite buy into Kate Winslet’s philosophy). Both are true and neither is right or wrong.
Marriage isn’t always the answer and divorce isn’t always the problem, whether you have kids or not. You just want to uncouple as consciously as you can and stop fighting. Really, that’s it.
Interested in learning about ways to re-create your marriage? Read The New I Do: Reshaping Marriage for Skeptics, Realists and Rebels (Seal Press, September 2014). Order the book on Amazon, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook.
(polls)
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