Because I had a messed up childhood, I grew up all over the place; with relatives, at boarding school and with family friends. The families in question have one thing in common. They all ended with DIVORCE!
Divorce in a Romantic Comedy?!
The word ‘divorce’ has for me has become synonymous with tremendous failure, egoism, sexual gratification at any price, laziness, stupidity, pride and lots of similar types of negative words.

It makes me want to cry when I think of married couples I respected and looked up to who broke up their homes and marriages causing pain and sufferering to themselves and those close to them. For me personally it meant being tossed around with no real place to call home.

Here is a list of people whose divorces affected me (and them, no doubt!):

• My own parents, (Bengt and Lisbeth)
• Uncle and Aunt (Eva and Bo) who I used to stay with (paternal).This one was the hardest.
• Uncle and Aunt (Irene and Björn) who I used to stay with (maternal) After 35 years of marriage!
• Family friend in Spain (Evelyn)whom I used to stay with (she had been a divorcee for a decade when I stayed with her, but she still mourned the divorce.)
• One of my best friends Anna who foolishly cheated on her lovely husband, causing the divorce!
• My step–grandparents(not biological)
• Parents of friends as I was growing up. Many friends of mine had a bedroom in both parents’ house. A recurring theme was that they forgot toys and school books at the other parent’s house..

Enough with the divorces! There are plenty more examples but I don’t want to be a bore. These were the ones I cared the most about. A variety of reasons caused the break-ups. Infidelity (male and female), arrogance, temper, stupidity, vanity etc.

Here is the problem: The people I listed above are the majority of married people that I ever knew well, or cared about! They were my role models… And all their marriages ended in divorce.

The marriages of both my maternal and paternal grandparents survived and flourished until one party died – an inspiration and a model to take after I think. I have an idea of what made their marriages last, but I am not sure I understand it completely. Both my grandmothers have given me miscellaneous pointers.
The former lovers now try to hurt each other
“What God has put together, let no man take apart….?!” People either don’t know this statement from the Bible, or don’t care about it. And what about the promises that people make in church. when they get married? I suppose it doesn’t matter much to most people since they (including the ones I listed) are not religious anyway.

I don’t believe that divorce is a horrible sin in the way that Catholics do. But I think it is a pretty bad thing in the eyes of God and for those affected. I think people resort to it far too easily. When divorces first started to happen in the 1960s, it was like a floodgate. People started to divorce for things that previously would have amounted to a challenge or a problem to overcome in the marriage.

People (particularly women) cannot feel safe and secure in a marriage that they know is statistically unlikely to last. They will then feel it is necessary to have a backup-plan in case they get dropped by their partner. This means there is less intimacy in relationships now than 50 years ago when divorces where more or less socially unacceptable. Back then people knew that their marriage would last for the rest of their life.
……
Although I was actually engaged to a guy (James) not so long ago, I feel as if I have practically become a commitment-phobic as a result of all the divorces I have witnessed. (The reason for the break-up of my engagement has nothing to do with any of this though… I discovered James didn’t quite know what team he was batting for, as they put it…. Quite off-putting.)

Anyway, I am practically a commitment-phobic because of how much I dislike divorces. I really don’t want to have to experience a divorce. I certainly wouldn’t marry I guy whom I thought was likely to want to swap me for a newer model ten years on, or whom I thought I couldn’t love and respect for the rest of my life. If I was married, it would take quite a lot for me to want to get divorced. I’d have to fear for my life, feel completely suicidal, or be faced with some currently unimaginable horror in order for me to consider it.

I can’t understand this ‘Use them, then bin them’ approach to other human beings, particularly somebody you have loved and been intimate with. When you marry it is ‘for better or worse.’ That means that fights, having feelings for somebody else, financial problems, being bored by the other person or whatever it could be is not a not valid reason to get a divorce.
1970s Divorce Film
It is difficult for me to understand exactly how men see it, but actually, men are the ones being abandonded in many cases. Women who have their own income get tired of their husbands and think ‘enough of cleaning and cooking for this loser! I can support myself and I’ve had enough’… Or they have a really strong libido and feel unfulfilled…. Or they feel un-appreciated, un-loved and seek these emotions outside of their marriage. Or they discover that he wasn’t a knight-in-shining-armour after all, and feel cheated.

In the past, when women were less independant, they were much less likely to instigate a divorce. Was it better that way? Very tough question. Obviously I wouldn’t wish it on any woman to be locked by fincancial circumstances in a physically or mentally abusive situation.

In the case of some relatives of mine, the woman felt superior to the husband in some ways (she eventually became more successful in her career). While away on a conference, she fell for another man and eventually split her family with two small children! When I asked her about it, she said that she had lost her respect for her husband since she had much more ‘drive’ than him. I know where she’s coming from with this, but surely she must have spotted that before she married him! He never showed much drive but he is a very nice person indeed, and he is not exactly a pauper.
Marriage as a hobby…?
A close friend of mine came visiting me in London in panic after a horrific fight with her husband of only a few months. She had been flirting with his best friend…! She said her husband had been neglecting her - this was her justification for the flirt with the other guy. Her husband was a successful politician who travelled a lot. Listening to her ramblings I felt she was just being self-centred. The fight had been about his statement that he felt she should be home when he returned from his work trips. Big deal! She had got into the habit of partying on town with her single friends instead though and got angry at his demand.

While staying with me she was constantly recieving text messages from both her husband and his friend… Comical but sad! She read them out to me as they came in. The husband’s texts were sweet and caring - the friend’s texts were raunchy… It was very clear that the friend was interested in one thing only… The fact that he was making a move on his best friend’s wife clearly showed that he had no personal integrity and decency worth mentioning. My friend didn’t see it that way though and kept repeating how attracted she was by him and what a pig her husband had been.

On the whole, her husband was a great guy - immensely talented and always nice and friendly. My friend looked down on his somewhat provincial family though and felt socially superior. Although she left me with the intention of making up and apologizing to her husband, her marriage felt apart a few months later.

My friend then changed her mind and realised she loved him deeply! I recieved some phone calls from her wanting advice on how to get him back… But her husband had had enough and nothing worked. He must have been upset about it though. Lots of people saw him drowning his sorrows at ‘Cafe Opera’, a top night club in Stockholm. The whole thing was very sad.

As for men, I don’t know exactly how they think about divorces, but I am well aware that men have a hard time not fantasizing about other women on a regular basis. I guess that for many men, the temptation eventually becomes too strong, and the grass seems greener on the other side of the fence… It probably doesn’t help if his wife is constantly nagging him (men seem unable to stand a bit of nagging!) Also if the woman lets herself go. It’s sad but true; a big part of what really matters to men are looks… (But sometimes I see pictures of somebody’s wife and their mistress alongside of eachother and notice that the wife is better looking than the mistress! What’s going on there?)
Another Film with a Divorce Theme
It does not necessarily seem that men will want a divorce just because they have a fling with another woman. Judging from stories in media it seems that they can quite happily have a mistress situation going on for years without wanting a divorce at all… I don’t think a woman would be able to keep that up.

As for men and marriages, my impression is that men seem to mainly want some level of respect and appreciation from their wife, for her to take care of her looks and not not subject him to nagging. Sometimes I think men are easier to please than us women give them credit for. Women occasionally leave their husbands because they fail to meet the level of success and status that the woman had expected. When I grew up, a friend of my parents got caught with some serious tax-evasion and eventually had do declare personal bankruptcy. His wife then divorced him! I think such a scenario is very uncommon with men. They would not dump a woman for not being successful enough, or for not making enough money.

A common pattern with men and divorces seems to be: Husband has an affair for whatever reason. Wife realises and goes off her head about it, leading to a divorce one way or another. It’s hard to imagine what it must be like for a married woman to realise that her husband is having an affair. Apparently lots of women in France aren’t all that concerned about it and get on with their business waiting for it to pass. How would I react and what would I do? I’d like to think I’d keep my head cool and take some kind of positive and well-measured action. I don’t know for sure how I’d react, but as a rule I tend to think before I act.

If I was married, I would be very much on the ball, avoiding things that I knew could cause problems in the marriage. I would be actively doing things that I thought could be good for the marriage. And since any guy I married would be a) smart and b) committed to the concept of marriage, I’d expect him to make some kind of an effort too. I would also be forgiving about mistakes, if they were genuine mistakes and not repeated.

I wouldn’t want to be in a situation where I felt it was my duty to always be perfect though. If that was the case, then how could I enjoy the marriage? I once dated a guy who kept repeating how ‘perfect’ I was… He kept listing my virtues, starting with looks, career and cooking skills. It made me feel rather uneasy. Although at that particular time in my life I was capable of looking and behaving ‘perfect’ most of the time,(I am well-drilled…) I was aware that I couldn’t keep it up indefinitely. There is plenty of ‘bad’ stuff about me (more on that some other time..) and I knew that he would find serious cracks in my supposed perfection sooner or later. I dropped him before he got a chance to do that! Nobody is perfect, male or female.

Am I naive in my condemnation of divorce? Perhaps all these divorces are completely un-avoidable and the alternative would be a planet filled with completely miserable people trapped in marriages that were destroying them. I don’t think so though. I think both genders are loosing out terribly because marriage has become such an unstable institution.

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