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As a child, I felt defensive whenever a friend’s parent would look at me with pity. I could hear their thoughts in their concerned gaze: Your parents are divorced? Your life must be miserable.
I didn’t feel miserable. My parents didn’t fight. I was closer to both my mom and my dad than many of my peers with married parents. Two parents who were no longer married seemed far less misery-making than some of the other family dynamics I saw around me—alcoholism kept secret, mistrust and lying, even violence at home.
When my husband and I decided to split, forty years later, I was surprised by some of the very same negative sentiment surfacing. This was in 2012. Family life had changed dramatically. Half my forty-something friends in New York City hadn’t married at all. And yet, the fear of divorce persisted, and the conviction that our child’s life would be destroyed if our relationship no longer included marriage.
I began researching divorce, wanting to know why this negative view has lasted well into the new millennium. Why wasn't my own experience as a child as devastating as that of some around me? Also, I wanted to know how my parents divorce had affected me, really. Perhaps it left lasting scars I couldn’t see?
What I discovered was that many of our fears about divorce are based on the facts of an earlier era, not to mention inflammatory and even biased reporting, conflated stats, and outdated or inaccurate studies. One of these studies, purporting to show that women lost 70-percent of their standard of living in divorce, turned out to be so faulty, its own author retracted it.
Divorce has a bad reputation for other reasons, too. It’s incredibly difficult to untangle two lives. We've all seen horrible battles between former-weds that last for years, or even decades. We probably all know children derailed by their parents’ anger and preoccupation and instability.
But the biggest thing I learned during my past three years of research? When it comes to divorce, how you do it matters. It isn’t marriage or divorce that leads to a child’s happiness, but rather having good relationships with parents who are not embroiled in fighting, as the best meta-study on the topic, by University of Cambridge scholar Michael Lamb, shows. And this is something we can all work on, in marriage and in divorce.
The more I researched this topic, the more passionate I became about our need to expand our definition of a “good family” to include those with parents who aren't married. I also became increasingly committed to the effort to strive toward bringing our best selves to all our relationships—those with our children and with a former partner.
Fortunately, there are more tools available today than at any time in history to help us all protect our families, move past anger, and shore up our sense of security and stability. Here’s my first video that explains my mission a little further.
Please share with anyone you think might benefit from it. My book, Splitopia, is available for preorder. You can also sign up for my weekly posts at wendyparis.com, and follow me on twitter @wendyparis1. For more information, write to me at wendy@wendyparis.com.
