How Divorce Lost Its Cachet - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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only 11 percent of college-educated Americans divorce within the first 10 years today, compared with almost 37 percent for the rest of the population.
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“The shift in attitudes and behavior is very real. Among upper-middle-class Americans, the divorce rate is going down, and they’re becoming more conservative toward divorce.”
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It’s as if the children of Manhattan and Roslyn, N.Y., and Bethesda, Md., reflected on their parents’ sloppy divorces and said, “Not me.” For Ms. Thomas, whose parents separated when she was 12, “Divorce had pretty much defined everything in my life.” In her divorce memoir, “In Spite of Everything,” to be published this summer, Ms. Thomas recalls telling her ex-husband many times during their 16-year marriage, “Whatever happens, we’re never going to get divorced.”
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In a 2008 survey, only 17 percent of college-educated Americans agreed with the statement, “Marriage has not worked out for most people I know,” compared with 58 percent among the less educated.
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“In the 1970s, when a woman got divorced, she was seen as taking back her life in that Me Decade way. Nowadays, it’s not seen as liberating to divorce. It’s scary.”
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“Divorce was freedom. Many of these marriages in the ’70s were fundamentally unequal. With the women’s movements, they learned that there were alternatives, and that made divorce kind of a liberation.”
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In the 1970s, “the feminists, the hippies, the protesters, the cultural elite all said, It’s O.K. to drop out.” In contrast, “We made up our minds, my brother and I and so many of the grown children of the runaway moms, that we would put our families first and ourselves second. We would be good, all the time. We would stay married, no matter what, and drink organic milk.”
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divorce actually is contagious: when close friends break up, the odds of a marital split among their friends increase by 75 percent.)
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Among a certain demographic, marriage is viewed as something that, like work-life balance, yoga and locavore cuisine, needs to be continually worked at and improved upon.
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From the 1970s to the 2000s, the percentage of highly educated Americans who believe that divorce should be made more difficult rose from 36 to 48 percent.
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“The condemnation of divorce is also coming from the group that is most confident it can make its marriages succeed, and that allows them to be dismissive of divorce.”
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“The notion of divorce has become one of failure again,” said Ms. Morrison, 42, a resident of Park Slope. “It used to be, ‘You’re free, rock on!’ Now it’s, ‘You couldn’t make it work, you failed.’ ”
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“There’s a tacit or explicit recognition among well-educated parents that their kids are less likely to thrive if Mom and Dad can’t be together.”
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both her lawyer and therapist emphasized: “Divorce is completely different from when your parents split up. If your kids feel loved and they don’t see hideous behavior, they’ll be fine.”