Why I’m Divorced (And Why You’re Next) (Hartford Advocate)
Sep 7th, 2024 by Viviane
I’ve seen two movies lately, one very funny ( Wedding Crashers ) and one infuriatingly stupid ( Must Love Dogs ), but both baffling in their lockstep to happily-ever-afterland. Why does romantic love, the kind that doesn’t occur in life except fleetingly and disappointingly, still play to the crowds? I give the impecunious boat-builder and the petit bourgeois schoolteacher five years at the outside — he’s not going to keep her in end-tables. And Daddy’s Little Girl will have ditched the immature arriviste long before that.
Why, in an era when men and women can barely achieve détente, in a First World where everyone suffers from attachment disorder, are we still ponying up for marriage? On the HBO series Six Feet Under a show I adore because all the characters behave abominably at all times, yet never manage to have more than a millisecond of fun men and women can’t stay married or remain faithful from one week to the next. We’re not quite that bad, we HBO viewers, but we’re getting there.
I’m no historian, but it doesn’t take a Paul Johnson (author of A History of the American People ) to tell us why it’s so hard to stay married. We live too long. Marriage is a naturally polarizing process that causes one person to detest, over time, what the other person loves. Only after a couple divorces do they move back toward the center, where their interest in one another began. (I knew a man who left his wife because of the endless chintz and throw pillows. I went to visit him once in his new Bauhaus apartment, but he couldn’t really talk he was too distracted by trying to choose the right tassels for his new Salamandre curtains.)
There’s no incentive to stay married and wait for our children to grow up and come work in the family business, because they won’t. If we’re really, really lucky, they’ll place a few calls and drive us to the nursing home. There’s no hardship significant enough to keep us dependent on each other. No famine, polio, Indians. If the hardest thing in your life is that your husband won’t pick up the dry cleaning, are you likely to hang in until death do you part? Surely not, when at the first sign of disappointing behavior helpful friends and therapists pipe up: “You can do better.” Mutual funds do better, not humans. But why stick with the dope on the next pillow when there’s Kate Winslet and George Clooney on cable to fill the twilight hours? And there’s no sexual inequity to keep one party in line. In the bad old days, one person — the woman — took all the shit. Now who ya gonna call? (more…)