6 DIVorCe wItH DeCenCY
become another such milestone—with people referring to their
lives as either “BS” (Before the Split) or “AD” (After Divorce).
Divorce meets Broadway, Oscar, and Grammy. Divorce now per-
meates modern American society. Let’s look at a few examples.
Ronald Reagan was our first “divorced” president. Turn on the
radio and you’ll hear the country music classic “D-I-V-O-R-C-E.”
We’re all familiar with the ubiquitous articles on failed relation-
ships in every magazine from Cosmopolitan to Reader’s Digest.
Old pro-love ballads like “We Can Keep It Together” have been
replaced by cynical lyrics like “Love Stinks.”
We watch wrenching movies like Starting Over, An Unmarried
Woman, The Last Married Couple in America, and The War of the
Roses. Another popular entry in this subspecialty of marital movie-
making was The First Wives’ Club, which seemed to have struck a
particularly raw nerve among our nation’s expanding sisterhood
of divorcees.
As Abigail Tafford, the witty, insightful (and herself divorced)
author of the classic best seller, Crazy Time: Surviving Divorce,
writes: “The old myths and manners of marriage are gone. You
start to wonder what’s ‘normal’ these days. With life expectancy
of about seventy-five years for both men and women, ‘til death
do us part’ is a commitment more and more people find they can’t
and—more interesting—don’t want to keep.”
Divorce is now big business, and divorce-related cottage indus-
tries have sprung up all over the country: singles bars, personal
trainers, mental health clinics, boutique health clubs, psycholo-
gists, diet centers, Club Meds, cosmetic surgeons, singles’ web-
sites, marriage counseling institutes, not to mention thousands
of divorce lawyers—all intended to assist the divorcing parties
through the various stages of their divorce rite of passage.
Where has the All-American Family Gone?
A marriage without conflicts is almost as inconceivable as a nation without
crises.
—André Maurois
In the past, when it first became thinkable, divorce was viewed
as a prerogative to be dabbled in by the very rich, or a forced