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By Tova Hartman & Charlie Buckholtz
Thirteen-year-old Candice* found out about her mother’s serial infidelity two years after her parents’ divorce, in a game of truth-or-dare with some friends. Several of them had it on good authority that the reason her parents split up was that her mother had cheated on her father. Was it true? Candice had tried to hide her shock. This was the first time she had ever heard it suggested that her mother had been unfaithful; much less that that was the reason her parents divorced. When she told her friends, No, it wasn’t true, she detected snickers of pity and snarky shared glances of disbelief. As if it wasn’t really a question, but an open secret that everyone knew except her.
As soon as she got home, she confronted her father. “She just couldn’t believe I would betray her trust like that,” Benny recalled in an interview about his divorce experience. When Benny and his wife Marina had told their kids about their decision to divorce, they’d committed to “putting the children first,” and agreed that the way to do this was to “not involve them.” So they did not share any of the actual reasons for deciding to end their marriage of sixteen years and breaking up the only home Candice and her siblings had ever known. Instead, they delivered the standard boilerplate divorce talk:
We decided together…we don’t blame each other…we’ve tried to work on it, but it’s not working…it’s not about you guys…you didn’t cause it and you can’t make it better…we’ll always be your parents and this has nothing to do with how much we love you…
Two years later Benny found himself trying to explain to his hurt, bewildered daughter that the lie they told her and her siblings was for the sake of protecting their relationship with their mom; it was what they thought was best in the long run. But six years after that conversation, he can still vividly recall his daughter’s response. “She didn’t thank me for protecting her. She just wanted to know how she could ever trust what I told her again.” It was a trust, he said, that he has had to work hard to try to recover, and worries might never be fully restored.
* * *
The cultural consensus on how parents should speak to their kids about the decision to divorce can be distilled into a catechism of two ostensibly complementary commandments: 1) Put the children first, and 2) Don’t involve the kids. “Children do not need to know the details of why you have split up or of any ongoing issues between you,” warns a representative article by a clinical practitioner (“Putting the Children First: Managing the Impact of Parental Divorce/Separation on Children”). “If they see their parents moving on,” she concludes, “they are able to do the same.
Adhering to this approach is known as taking the “High Road”—a path forged in good faith by enlightened baby-boomers intent on rectifying the clueless narcissism they perceived in the generation that raised them. Still, like any truism left too long unquestioned, the notion that children must be denied any knowledge of the reason for their parents decision to split up (much less any hint of their parents feelings about the divorce), has developed festering social and psychological side-effects to which fathers, in their relationships with their children, are especially vulnerable.
This is something we discovered over the last five years of conducting a longitudinal study of men’s experiences with breakups. What we found is that while the obligation to take the High Road theoretically devolves on both parents, the brunt of its enforcement—the raised eyebrows of friends and family; the pervasive shame of failure at fulfilling the duties of one’s prescribed social role, and the accompanying loss of status—sits squarely, and heavily, on fathers.
The reason for this imbalance has everything to do with masculine (and feminine) stereotypes. The ennobling stoicism and self-control required by the High Road are the direct outgrowths of our society’s standards for what it means to be a Real Man. In order for a divorced man to be considered a Good Father, he is required to hide feelings of shame and betrayal, and remain emotionally unknowable to his children.
Mothers, for the most part, are also told to take the High Road, but when they don’t, it is because they are being Women. They may be judged as catty, or bitchy, or indiscreet; but they are still very much women. Men are told to take the High Road, and when they don’t, they are not simply jerks—their manhood itself is called into question.
* * *
It’s a sad-if-predictable historical irony that the holiday conceived as a sincere effort to counter negative social depictions of men has evolved into a celebration of masculine stereotypes. The commemoration—introduced in the early 20th century with the lofty intent of celebrating dads for their role as nurturing caregivers, by a grateful daughter whose widowed war-hero father had raised her and her five siblings alone—was observed locally and sporadically for several decades without catching on nationally. It was only in the 1930s when trade organizations purveying traditionally masculine products (tobacco, cologne, razors, and of course the ubiquitous tie) realized it for the sales bonanza it was, and began aggressively marketing it on a national scale while lobbying for its adoption as a national holiday – securing its place in the national imagination while gutting it of its founding value.
This is why, on the day ostensibly dedicated to appreciating them, men are bombarded with images of themselves as flatulent couch potatoes, borderline alcoholics, gluttons of junk food, or harried workhorses who seek nothing more from home and family than a little peace and quiet—or more specifically, to veg out in front of the TV. Not all the stereotypes are negative, per se – the other major greeting-card genre of fatherhood features earnestly ennobled, sepia-toned “everydads” who are always there for their kids with a sympathetic ear and a word of encouragement.
Of course, we know that even positive stereotypes are no less of a straight-jacket than their negative counterparts, and tend to be more heavily policed.
Ultimately, all stereotypes devolve into the vertiginous oscillation of a false (and thus unwinnable) dichotomy that demands to be treated as fact. Stereotypical fatherhood imagery is no different. Ask any divorced dad who’s ever been congratulated for taking the High Road, while suffering silently with the untold inner pain that it cost. Kobe, the head of an international NGO in his late-40’s whose couples therapist handed him and his wife a handbook with a script for how to speak to their kids at each stage of their divorce. He paraphrased the instructions from memory: “Sit with them together and communicate that you’ve both decided together, you children didn’t do anything to cause it, etc. Afterwards, never use the kids as leverage in your fights, never blame or badmouth each other to or in front of them, etc.”
Kobe followed the therapist’s instructions to a tee. His wife, however, did not – a fact he only discovered after it had already begun to impact his relationship with his kids. What he found was that she had been impressing on them that the reason for the divorce was that their father, whose career required a good deal of travel, was never home. But while that may have been a factor in her dissatisfaction, the more immediate cause of the split was that she had fallen in love with someone else.
Kobe still didn’t correct his children’s charged misconception about his responsibility for the breakup. The law of putting the children first simply forbade it; in fact, he did just the opposite. To “keep up appearances for the kids,” he signed onto the narrative that his ex only met her new boyfriend after they had gotten divorced. They agreed that when Kobe moved out, she would wait two months for her new boyfriend to move in. Meanwhile, his kids had begun to eye him with an air of critical suspicion, and lash out at him in troubling moments of unexpected hostility, particularly when the subject of his work travel came up.
He was traveling the High Road, and the air was getting thin.
* * *
According to the men we interviewed for our study, the impact of divorce on fathers is rarely acknowledged or discussed. Beyond the psychological trauma of the divorce itself, the unceasing pressure of rigid social expectations about how to behave afterwards complicated their fathering and deeply damaged their relationships with their kids.
Kobe’s story exemplifies a significant pattern that emerged in the stories of the men we interviewed. While “Don’t involve the kids” theoretically applies to both parents, there is typically more leeway for women to tell their stories, while men remain silenced by the threat of being stripped of their manhood. The perils of the High Road are not limited to instances of both cheating and badmouthing. David’s ex never cheated on him, nor did she leave him for someone else. Still, she openly disparaged him to their daughter, who began to angrily echo her accusations in conversations with David and adopt a generally hostile, contemptuous attitude towards him.
Things got even worse, David reported, after he began what would become a serious, long-term relationship. “At home her mother tells her I’m a monster, all I care about is my ‘girlfriend.’ Then the next time she sees me it’s, ‘You left us! You ruined our life! Mommy’s doing badly, and all you care about is your girlfriend!”
While we can easily understand the intended benefits of “Don’t involve the kids," have we examined the costs of lying to them over time? Have we considered that putting kids in a situation in which they know that what their parents are telling them is off – but they also know they can’t speak about it because their parents will shut down the conversation – causes many to start second-guessing their perceptions and instincts, or worse?. They are being told things that contradict what they have seen and experienced, and their ability to ask about it has been silenced. Not exactly an environment conducive to a healthy and nurturing parent-child relationship.
* * *
Over and over, the men we interviewed emphasized the value of protecting their children. They all expressed the desire to be Good Fathers and Honorable Men – and they also know exactly what that requires. Maxwell, another man who hid his ex’s affair from his children as they grew to blame and resent him for the divorce, put it perhaps most concisely. “I felt I had to protect the children. That was my goal in life….All the advice was do not tell the kids, that’s the wrong thing. And I am a good guy….and they blamed me, but we don’t say bad things about mom.”
Maxwell’s daughters were preadolescent when he got divorced, though he never mentions their age as a factor in his choice to take the High Road. Parental adultery is a charged topic for any parent-child dynamic, and ultimately how and when to introduce it is the parents’ judgment call to make. Age is obviously a key factor, and individual circumstances must be given due consideration. But to invoke such pragmatic and sensible considerations is in many ways to miss the point of the High Road, which is to cut off any such conversation before it can begin.
In Maxwell’s case, it seems he had accepted the dubious proposition that a parent can never tell their child, I’m hurting, I’ve been hurt – because the moment you start to share your feelings, you transgress the imperative of not involving them. And in the process he significantly compromises their ability to maintain an authentic relationship.
If we want authentic relationships with our children, we have to begin by being authentic ourselves. Of course, it is never appropriate to share intimate details with a child, but in a sensitive and age-appropriate way, we can show them that we are human beings too, and that we can experience pain without allowing it to curdle into bitterness, hostility, or simmering passive-aggressive resentments.
After Candice confronted Benny about his ex’s infidelity and called him on his lie, Benny offered Candice a new deal. “I said, from now on I promise to always tell you the truth. But there will be times that you ask me things I feel uncomfortable answering. Instead of lying because of my discomfort, I will say, ‘I don’t feel comfortable.’ On the one hand not all questions get answered, but on the other, there’s no bullshit.”
*All names have been changed.
Tova Hartman is a professor of Education and Gender Studies at Ono Academic College. Charlie Buckholtz is a freelance writer and coauthor of several books. Their previous book was a psychological study of Talmudic tales (Oxford), and their forthcoming explores the psychological trauma and gendered social pressures that emerge from men's experiences of being 'left' by wives or significant others.
