Divorce – it’s not such a downer anymore.
According to a new book aimed at the young, childless and soon-to-be-single, the breakup of your marriage may be one of the major growth experiences of a lifetime.
Or, as early divorcees Kay Moffett and Sarah Touborg, both 35, write in “Not Your Mother’s Divorce: A Practical, Girlfriend-to-Girlfriend Guide to Surviving the End of an Early Marriage” (Broadway Books, $12.95), divorce is “the worst experience [you’ve] ever been grateful for.”
That most Gen-Xers are no strangers to broken marriages – many of them having survived their parents’ – doesn’t make divorce any easier. Or any less infrequent.
The authors quote Pamela Paul’s book, “The Starter Marriage,” which suggests that the personal and social tumult of the “Me” generation spurred Gen-Xers to embrace the traditions their parents spurned.
They yearned for stability, and marriage – with its promise of “for better or worse” – seemed the way to find it.
“Maybe it’s a way of trying to create an ideal family they don’t have,” speculates Marion Gindes, a Manhattan psychologist whose specialties include divorce-related issues.
As the book points out, Hollywood, as usual, is way on top of the trend. Drew Barrymore, J.Lo, Angelina Jolie, Uma Thurman and Julia Roberts are just a few to have wed and fled.
“We’re the first generation to have such widespread divorce among our parents,” says Touborg, 35, an executive editor at Prentice Hall in New Jersey.
“It made us more determined to make our own marriages work – and that much more disappointed when they didn’t.”
The old self-help books didn’t cut it, she says. They were “overly earnest and borderline cheesy, with titles and covers that neither of us could envision handing to the cashier.”
Or, as one of the 30 women they interviewed said: “There were a lot of depressing books like ‘The Childless Woman,’ things to make you feel worse – but there wasn’t anything to make you feel better.”
Enter “Not Your Mother’s Divorce.”
Straightforward, upbeat and reassuring – albeit with one too many calls to embrace “your inner teen/adult/Henry David Thoreau” – it tells you all you need to know about letting go and going it alone.
There’s helpful advice on controlling costs with your lawyer, tips for not letting guilt drive you to giving away all your marital, material possessions and even post-divorce etiquette: Do tell your ex that you’re getting married again – but not via e-mail.
And then there are chapters about dating again – something Moffett, a Web editor and corporate writer in San Francisco who married in her 20s and “amicably” divorced in her 30s, found overwhelming: “When you’re married, you have no idea what it’s like to be out there,” she said. “You’re in the nosebleed seats looking at the dating arena and laughing at how weird it is. Once you find yourself in it, you have no idea what you’re doing. I felt I had to learn everything people knew in their 20s, in my 30s. And as great as your married friends are, they have no clue!”
While divorce these days has lost much of its stigma – what with half of all marriages ending up that way – “the cult of marriage,” as Touborg calls it, has never been stronger, thanks to Trista and Ryan and the countless reality TV shows they spawned, online dating and the “Today” show’s annual, on-air weddings.
Indeed, it was the pressure not to be “the last single standing” that drove a Manhattan fashion executive – Maeve, as she’s called in the book – to marry, at age 30, a man she had little in common with.
After 4½ difficult, “distraught” years, they divorced. And though she was the one who initiated the divorce, she says, she still felt devastated.
“You still feel sad, you still feel like a failure,” she says. “I think it would have been nice to have stories about people living happily on the other side.”
Page Sargesson agrees. Now 28 and a jewelry designer in Manhattan, she was living in San Francisco when her marriage unraveled.
She married at 26, having been “swept off her feet.” Soon after the wedding, for reasons she doesn’t care to discuss, the relationship quickly fell apart. “Things change,” she says, glumly. “Things continue to change.”
She met Moffett, who gave her a galley copy of “Not Your Mother’s Divorce,” and read it. Twice.
“Unless you’ve been through it, you really don’t know how to take the first step – legally, socially. Reading the book was like going through group therapy.”
Screenwriter and humorist Bruce Feirstein (“Nice Guys Sleep Alone”), who also wed and divorced young, once compared first marriages to “warm-up frames in bowling alleys – they don’t count.”
Touborg laughs but disagrees. “As hackneyed and trite as it sounds, [getting divorced] is part of what made me what I am today,” Touborg says. “More assertive, and with a sharper sense of humor.”
Like many of the women she and Moffatt interviewed for the book, Touborg has since remarried. She had a baby last summer and, she says, “has never been happier.”
“Every woman we interviewed said, ‘As horrible, as difficult as [divorcing] was, I really like what I’ve become.’ They felt they tapped strong reserves of joy and resilience.”
One woman summed up the life-after-divorce sentiment this way: “I’m just going to have a different happily ever after.”