The Fame Lunches

by Daphne Merkin

  The implications of his argument are not entirely consoling: Was divorce my reward for not dying in childbirth? And although the historian does not address the small matter of what to do after one has escaped the institution, it seems almost a foregone conclusion that one will try to decode the experience by referring back to the original script. Marriage, that is, impels one to remarriage, if only because there seems no other way to correct the narrative rupture that is divorce.

  On the other hand, it may already be too late for me to get back in the game. “Of all the divorce statistics I read,” Wendy Swallow writes in Breaking Apart: A Memoir of Divorce, “the one I hated the most stated that if a woman was going to remarry after being divorced, she would do so in the first four years. After that, the odds went way down.” Although it may seem obvious that age is a big factor in the social life of women after divorce, given that it is an important factor before divorce, Hetherington has put in a lot of research time to reach the same conclusion. Indeed, she pronounces on the issue as though she had just retrieved it from an overlooked file: “Women who were in their late thirties or older at the time of divorce had fewer dating opportunities than younger women or middle-aged men. At the twenty-year follow-up, they were much less likely to have remarried.”

  Now, in one of those clear-eyed moments that invariably hit after midnight, I see the future rising up before me, bringing loneliness and ruin, and marking me as a divorce loser. At this point, I’ll take any postdivorce style that will have me: perhaps I could audition as a Competent Loner by polishing up my cooking skills, improving my Hints from Heloise laundry acumen, and keeping my desk neater. (Competent Loners, both male and female, are good homemakers.) Before falling asleep, I try to imagine myself as Mary McKay, an Enhancer who in six years went from being a “desperate humiliated woman” worried about paying her next bill to being a savvy entrepreneur with her own catering business. In your dreams, as they say.

  * * *

  The prevailing wisdom on divorce—and specifically the nature of its effect on children—has, like other cultural attitudes, changed along with the times. Do divorced but happier parents make for happier children, as was once thought, or is even a contentious but intact marriage better for children, as the more recent line of thinking has it? As the research has piled up over the past several decades, with recantations and modifications following each new finding, one senses that divorce has come to be a leading cultural indicator, the locus for a whole cluster of our anxieties about everything from sex to death.

  Or it may be that I am hopelessly dating myself by the intensity with which I approach the subject: perhaps, for the generation coming up, it will be just another rite of passage to be navigated, like getting one’s first job. I am referring to the marital micro-trend known as starter marriages. Such blitzkrieg unions are, their enthusiasts tell us, all the rage; they last five years at most, are childless, and are usually over and done with before either partner reaches thirty. In a book called The Starter Marriage and the Future of Matrimony, Pamela Paul predicts that these sped-up scenarios are the wavelet of the immediate future. “People will slide wedding bands on and off,” she reports, “with the same ease with which they whip out updated résumés.” There is no doubt that she is onto something marketable: herself a starter-marriage survivor—in the glittering company of Drew Barrymore, Uma Thurman, and Angelina Jolie—Paul has already appeared on the Today show. She insists that this kind of marriage is entered into with expectations of permanence. All the same, a starter marriage sounds suspiciously like a starter apartment: a provisional arrangement, a necessary first step on the road to a more gratifying marital habitation—one with a top-of-the-line kitchen and a river view.

  Divorce, then, isn’t what it used to be: the exotic condition of the daring and the derelict. There were, for instance, no more than two or three divorced families in my class when I graduated from high school, in 1971; it was a rare enough occurrence to merit, if not quite a cover-up, then a hushed-voice treatment. As an adolescent, I was struck by the domestic setup portrayed in the original version of the movie The Parent Trap, which features a divorced couple who live in different states and are the parents of identical-twin daughters (played by Hayley Mills), who meet for the first time at summer camp. When the movie came out, in 1961, it appeared risqué and modern even as it reaffirmed the shimmering ideal of the nuclear family. Of course, the film was really about marriage, not divorce; its fantasy ending of a blissful reunion suggested that, with just a little more understanding and consideration, all marital squabbles could be resolved.

  Soon enough, though, this tranquil cinematic image dissolved to a more fractious social landscape. The traditional view of marriage as a social contract based on a civic-minded ethic of duty to others began to loosen its hold sometime during the Swinging Sixties. Whereas for Tennessee Williams’s Big Daddy “truth is pain and sweat and paying bills and making love to a woman that you don’t love anymore,” a younger generation foraged for truth within its overscrutinized psyche. A new ethic stressed an individualistic duty to self, which was encouraged by the growing influence of psychotherapeutic values. People were urged to look to marriage for inner satisfaction—and, naturally, they mostly failed to find it.

  The real boost to what Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, in her book The Divorce Culture, calls the “sad business of marital dissolution” arrived roughly with the Beatles, when it was discovered that all anyone needed was love and that obligations—including those toward one’s children—could go take care of themselves. Any economic and psychological harm to women and children was serenely overlooked, and, with the passage of the first no-fault divorce law, in 1969, in California (a state, fittingly, with a divorced governor), this song of the self grew louder. The imperative to keep a strained marriage afloat “for the sake of the children” morphed into an imperative to end a strained marriage for the sake of the adults—and, it was blithely assumed, for the greater happiness of the offspring involved. This liberating, 1970s view was reflected in books with titles such as The Courage to Divorce and Creative Divorce: A New Opportunity for Personal Growth. In The Future of Marriage, the sociologist Jessie Bernard went so far as to declare that a woman had to be “slightly ill mentally” in order to suffer the indignities of a traditional marriage.

  In the 1980s, an inevitable backlash started. We began to hear about the punctured self-esteem of the “maritally challenged” children of divorce. These worries, in turn, meshed with the more conservative climate of the Reagan years to create a revisionist perspective—what might be called the new stoicism—according to which a bad marriage was seen as ultimately less pernicious for children than divorce. Finally, there was the publication, in 1989, of the bestselling Second Chances, by the clinical psychologist Judith Wallerstein. After studying sixty families in the Bay Area, she arrived at gloomy and guilt-inducing conclusions about the damage suffered by children of divorce. The book, which is anecdotal and impressionistic in character, offered the most effective challenge to the meliorist view of the previous decade. From these disparate trends, a new consensus was joined together.

  In time, it was put asunder as well. Wallerstein was widely faulted for her failure to use a control group: she interviewed mopey, disgruntled children from divorced homes but didn’t compare them with children from intact families, many of whom are, of course, mopey and disgruntled, too. And then there was the question of self-selection. Parents who volunteered for the study may have been drawn by the offer of free clinical treatment. A disproportionate number—around 50 percent—were seriously disturbed; in the first write-up of her research, Surviving the Breakup (1980), Wallerstein described them as “chronically depressed, sometimes suicidal individuals, men and women with severe neurotic difficulties.” Another 15 to 20 percent had even more extreme problems. As Andrew J. Cherlin, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins, has pointed out, “Troubled parents often raise troubled children.”

  Given that Wallerstein based h
er findings on repeated personal interviews, one has to wonder, too, about the way preconceptions shape perceptions. Researchers have found, for instance, that schoolteachers who watch a videotape of an eight-year-old boy are more likely to conclude that he has adjustment problems when they are told his parents are divorced. We see, in short, what we expect to find. In Wallerstein’s most recent opus, The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25 Year Landmark Study, co-written with Julia M. Lewis and Sandra Blakeslee, and published in 2000, she shifted her focus to the delayed impact of marital breakup: her somewhat troubled children have become even more troubled adults, who have difficulty entering into and sustaining marriages of their own. Though this time she made an effort to consult a comparison group, one isn’t entirely surprised to learn that, say, the statistics about second-generation divorce rates don’t fully support her doom-ridden pronouncements. The continuing popularity of her arguments among conservative commentators suggests that, in the Kulturkampf over divorce, children have, willy-nilly, become conscripts—ideological proxies in Pumas and Petit Bateau T-shirts.

  It is plainly as an antidote to Wallerstein, who remains the most influential of the divorce theorists, that Hetherington advances a cheerier assessment: that the majority of the children of divorce—75 to 80 percent—do surprisingly well. “Most of the young men and women from my divorced families,” she declares, “looked a lot like their contemporaries from non-divorced homes.” As in all such wobbly but firmly stated arguments, little weight is given to the countervailing facts she has collected: that a significantly higher percentage of children from divorced families than from non-divorced ones—25 percent, as opposed to 10—had serious adaptive difficulties, and that it took six years for “the cloud of anxiety and depression that hung over children in the first year” to disperse.

  From Hetherington’s perspective, every bump is a boost. Indeed, she can sound unsettlingly like a Chinese fortune cookie: “Don’t focus on the past, focus on the future.” As long as you have “competent-caring” children—Hetherington even offers a typology for the children of divorce—your marital breakup will leave them adept at conflict resolution and sensitive to the emotional needs of their peers. “Coping with the challenges of divorce and life in a single-parent family seems actually to enhance the ability of some children to deal with future stresses,” she writes. These scenarios may be less slaphappy than those of the 1970s liberationists, but one gets the feeling that for Hetherington, no less than for Wallerstein, empirical research has become something of an Easter-egg hunt, where you find only what you’ve already planted.

  * * *

  It’s hard to sustain the faith that social science will guide us toward any deep wisdom about marriage and divorce. Too often, it seems, the rhetoric of rigor conceals an impassioned agenda. And the acrimonious claims and counterclaims can reproduce the atmosphere of a divorce court as petitioners battle for custody of the truth. Maybe that’s why in the past several years the vicissitudes of marriage have been taken up more convincingly by memoirists and essayists, who eschew the realm of mutating statistics and tendentious conclusions for the open acceptance of bewilderment. The only certitude they offer is that one person will feel guilty about leaving and the other person will feel humiliated at being left. The precipitating cause is often, but not always, sexual faithlessness, and betrayed wives still seem more the norm than cuckolded husbands.

  Catherine Texier’s Breakup, an anguished chronicle of the final year in a tumultuous eighteen-year marriage—her husband leaves her for his book editor—is a case in point. The narrator flails about, trying to figure out when and why “our little world of the two of us” fell apart, setting down her feelings of rage and pain, her bemused sense that she has wandered into the wrong movie, the overworked genre of the woman scorned: “I sit down on the bed next to you and ask you the classic question (we are back in the bad screenplay, uttering tired clichés): are you having an affair?” She experiences her suffering as inevitably compromised by the fact that she’s seen this picture before: “Some women lacerate the guy’s best suits with a razor blade, cut up his boxers to shreds. I visualize pouring bleach all over your Agnès b. shirts. Streaking your Armani and Hugo Boss jackets with Day-Glo paint.”

  The narrator of John Taylor’s memoir, Falling, appears, by contrast, too stony, and his side of the story too convenient, by his own admission. All the same, his book offers a rare glimpse into the maelstrom of feelings that divorce elicits in the less emotionally articulate sex, as well as a demystifying look at the time-honored strategy of “compartmentalization” that men purportedly resort to in order to deal with conflict. “As complications branched out in my life, as my approach to my marriage became more dutiful and formal, I decided that the theory of the unified personality was a fiction,” Taylor writes. “I subscribed instead to the Japanese theory of the masks of life: the mask of the father, the mask of the husband, the mask of the employee.” The book is compelling precisely because Taylor makes no attempt to airbrush out the incriminating details, including the fact that his wife developed Parkinson’s disease during the course of their eleven-year marriage. In one scene, set in the office of the therapist of a woman he is having an affair with, he rationalizes his behavior: “I didn’t want to leave my wife and child, I said. I felt I had a duty to support them, particularly in light of my wife’s condition. On the other hand, I didn’t see the point of remaining faithful. In a loveless marriage it seemed an exercise in futility.” But only a few pages later, while on a picturesque summer vacation with his wife and daughter, the narrator seems genuinely baffled at finding himself stuck in a deadened marriage, kept alive only by the “excuse” of shared parentship. The dilemma is no doubt an age-old one; what makes this a book of our time is the lack of shame in the recounting.

  * * *

  In Arnold Bennett’s 1906 novel Whom God Hath Joined, a woman who starts a legal action to divorce her adulterous husband finds him reaching for the moral upper hand:

  “You must think of the children,” he insisted, with a pathetic air of wisdom and authority […]

  “It will cling to them all their lives,” said he.

  “What will cling to them all their lives?”

  “The scandal of the action—if you let it go on.”

  His wife is undeterred. “People like you are apt to give too much importance to scandal,” she tells him. “I’ve thought a good deal about the scandal, and it seems to me that it will only be like an illness. It will cure itself.”

  But has the cure—the social acceptability of divorce—given rise to an even graver illness? That’s essentially James Q. Wilson’s argument in The Marriage Problem: How Our Culture Has Weakened Families. As feminists and other misguided sophisticates have given the no-fault divorce cultural as well as legal currency, he maintains, they’ve only led their less privileged fellow citizens into the mire. What seemed advanced and adventurous in Marin County yields misery and mayhem in South Central L.A. Wilson wants us to consider the civic consequences of our faddish allegiances. “Our society has managed to stigmatize stigma so much so that we are reluctant to blame people for any act that does not appear to inflict an immediate and palpable harm on someone else,” he writes. “We wrongly suppose, I think, that shame is the enemy of personal emancipation when in fact an emancipated man or woman is one for whom inner control is sufficiently powerful to produce inner limits on actions that once were controlled by external forces.” Except that shame is an external force; pretty much by definition, it’s a social sanction, not a psychological barrier. The sanctimonious philanderer of Bennett’s novel was correct in identifying his wife’s petition for a divorce, rather than his own affair with the governess, as the scandal.

  Whatever Wilson’s overreachings or Wallerstein’s methodological weaknesses, though, the new stoics get one thing right. Divorce has very little to recommend it. Aside from the disorienting upheaval in a familiar if not necessarily blissful way of life, a divorce, especially i
f it involves children, often leaves bloodshed in its wake. The ferocious wranglings that catch the media’s attention tend to have mega millions at stake and frequently hinge on surreal demands for child support. But I would guess that few divorces manage to avoid a hostile atmosphere, marked by petty and vengeful impulses: the sums may be smaller, but the bitterness is not.

  * * *

  In the end, I don’t think there is any way of getting around the failure that divorce represents; however confused our sense of direction, our children want the old, linear plotline. Despite our wish to suspend narrow judgments of what constitutes a normal family, children are inherently conservative. They love the reassurance to be found in not breaking the mold, and they cling to an idyllic and intransigent image of family life. In this enchanted version, it is always a spring day some time before the divorce revolution, in some suburb where the neighbors are friendly behind their white picket fences and where kids sit down to a home-cooked dinner every night with two parents, one male and one female. Grown-ups, meanwhile, long ago consigned this picture to the dustbin of nostalgia for what probably never was. How sweet, we tell our children. How fake, we tell ourselves.