"I only want to do this once"

Love Language, part 3: On fearmongering about divorce

This is the third essay in a series on the language of romance. You can find other essays here and here. Subscribers: you’ll get one more essay tomorrow, plus a weekend conversation thread. If it’s not your thing, don’t break up with us. I promise not to fill your inbox this much every week, that would be exhausting for everyone.

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My parents were divorced when I was in second grade, and I can’t recall ever wishing they had stayed married. They were unfriendly to each other, talked negatively about each other, and they seemed so different. How could that work?

I can recall, however, wishing my family was more normal. None of the adults in my life had the language to talk about the many different shapes a family might take (it was the 90s!), and only a few of my friends had divorced parents. But it never occurred to me to use the term “broken family” to characterize my home life, even though there were certainly parts of that life that were chaotic, a mess, unstable— financial ups and downs, addiction, emotional trauma. None of that, however, made me think that if only my parents had stayed together, if only they had toughed it out and “held the family together”, we would have been better off.

The “broken family” comes up a lot on dating shows as the figure of failure par excellence—the dark side where no one wants to end up, the outcome everyone is trying to avoid at all costs. There’s often a sense that within each of us there is a version of ourselves that would hurt everyone, if only we let our guard down. That within every marriage are two deeply buried potential antagonists, waiting in the wings to fuck things up for purely selfish, unreasonable reasons. One has to be very careful about choosing the right mate and marrying at the exact right time, to kill or ward off these spirits. “I only want to do this once,” the contestants say repeatedly, wringing their hands.

Underneath this fear of failure, of choosing wrong, of things not going as planned, and of life getting away from us are of course a lot of assumptions. We are not far here from the language women often use when they have affairs or seek separation from what outwardly looks like a good family life, such as “blowing up my life.” The assumption: divorce explodes, destroys families, and is always a form of hurt.

Sometimes people on these shows are weighing a conflict between wanting “a family” or spouse—or at least a fantasy of these things— and an internal awareness that they just “aren’t ready.” What we want— or think we should want—doesn’t always align with what we actually want, or are capable of.

Others feel that because their childhoods were painful or chaotic or “not normal” they are unworthy of love. In this season of The Bachelorette, the “broken family” has become a main character: both Jenn and one of her suitors, Marcus, have bonded over their traumatic childhoods, which included abandonment and unstable home lives, the kind that left Marcus feeling like there was something wrong with him. In previous episodes of Love is Blind, broken families have also been blamed for men’s emotional immaturity. Sometimes, a little bit of gender analysis comes up in these conversations, such as when men talk about their father’s behaviors, which they don’t want to replicate. But largely, people who “aren’t ready” are seen as immature commitment phobes.

Many people today believe that romantic love is an avenue toward healing one’s personal childhood trauma. Today, the language of love is filled with discussion of attachment styles and re-parenting our inner child. Love, of any sort, can heal us. But that healing can also happen in friendship, in community, in art, in meaningful participation in the world.

I also think we need to consider how this idea that marriage can act as a panacea for childhood pain mimics arguments we hear from moderate and far-right commentators and politicians who claim marriage can heal all of our social and political wounds. Books like Brad Wilcox’s Get Married argue that marriage is what we need to “defy the elites” and “save civilization,” while pundits like David Brooks and think tanks like the IFS claim that marriage makes everyone happier.

In an essay for New York Magazine on “the return of the marriage plot,” Rebecca Traister wrote last year:

It’s not just the think-tank-economist-columnist class prescribing the marriage cure. It’s also hard-right commentators and politicians pushing policies aimed to re-center (hetero) marriage as the organizing-principle of American family life by reversing the progress — from legal abortion to affirmative action to no-fault divorce — that has enabled women to have economic and social stability independent of marriage. This desire was voiced most evocatively last year by conservative radio host Steven Crowder, who bemoaned the fact that his ex-wife had “decided that she didn’t want to be married anymore, and in the state of Texas, that is completely permitted.”

Since then, of course, JD Vance’s 2021 comments have also resurfaced. In a conversation at a Christian school not too far from where I grew up, Vance said that “one of the great tricks” of the sexual revolution has been to instill in people the idea that they might be “happier in the long term” if they leave violent or unhappy marriages. This was in response to a heavily loaded question posed to him about why married people no longer “stick it out in tough times.” It was a very weird (in the truest sense of the word!) interview, in which Vance acknowledges that there are economic reasons for a kind of general crisis of masculinity— but then also asserts that marriage is sacred, and that seeing marriage as a “business relationship” (which is, you know, the origin of marriage) is somehow new and bad. The economic effects of marriage on women are obviously not discussed.

Instead, Vance answers that, well, the problem now is that people think they can just “shift spouses like they change their underwear,” and while it may work out for “the moms and dads” (all married people have children?) “it really didn’t work out for the kids of those marriages.”

As a “child of divorce,” I find the idea that divorce is fundamentally bad for children—that it’s always a source of disaster and destruction— not just damaging, gendered and politically motivated, but also completely outrageous. As Kathryn Jezer-Morton wrote recently, for some, divorce makes people better parents. And of course, as

lyz

has written, women’s happiness, equality and safety matters, and marriage has not proved to be a great provider of those things for women. Conflict and unhappy parents hurt kids, not divorce.

Obviously, we still have a lot of work to do around cultivating a positive, “healthy” image of divorce—one beyond the image of the broken family and the blow-up. But I think it’s possible for a marriage to be meaningful and beautiful, even when it ends before people die.

Even though I never wanted my parents to be married, I also never wished they hadn’t married. When they expressed sentiments like that, I felt implicated. Obviously, the best part of their marriage had been the creation of me (and my sister, I guess)!

But I also knew they had a love story, and though it was often discussed in grumbled tones, because my parents believed the message that divorce was their failure, part of me understood that at one time, they had loved each other, and offered each other something they both needed. My mother had run away from home— from her own “broken family”— with my father. They had found a way to make it on their own. They had children, built a house and a business together, and though in time all that went away, and they hurt each other, the only time their love story felt tainted, for me, was when I witnessed them stuck in a vague guilt I didn’t understand—the kind that came from comparing themselves to others, and to what they thought an unbroken family should look like.

Jenny Holzer again, queen of love truisms.

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Okay, discuss! How has the image of the “broken family” and fearmongering around divorce affected you? And of course, be nice to each other.

Tomorrow, we discuss “the ick”!