If you came from Mars and tried to analyse British or American society through novels, you’d think our society was preponderantly full of middle-aged, slightly alcoholic, middle-class, intellectual men, most of whom are divorced from their families and have nothing to do with children.
I worked all the time. Every moment I wasn’t working, I was home with my family. I got divorced. And now I’m doing it all over again, and I’ve learned that the key is, I’ve got to work less.
I just loved being divorced from my own wretchedness.
My family, growing up, we really didn’t have tradition because my parents divorced when I was 11.
My parents got divorced when I was around a year old. My dad was essentially a nonentity in my life until I got to be about 16 or so. My mom was a flight attendant for PanAm, so I moved all over the world. London, Rio de Janeiro.
My daughter Stacia was born when I was 31, after I was divorced from David, and she was my gift to myself. She was just a joy because I didn’t have the stress of a male irritating me, and I vowed that I would make absolutely certain that between her and me there would be a clear line of communication at all times.
I think even if you haven’t been divorced, you can hopefully relate to having to navigate through a really difficult time and see how you can get through to the other side and how you can stay positive, even if there’s some really bad stuff happening.
When I started to write music that was completely divorced from any sort of idea of commercial success, the real me started to come out. Normally, a musician in a session for a pop record would have to discard a lot of ideas because they won’t fit, because they’re not commercial.
I had what you could call a chaotic childhood. My parents divorced when I was 2; I went back and forth between my mom’s and dad’s houses for years. But, you know, my parents tried to do the right thing. As crazy as everything was, and as much fighting and everything, there was always a feeling of support from them.
What I think is amazing is not that 85% of people who get married under the age of 25 get divorced, it’s that 15% of them stay together. How did they manage to pull that off? You almost can’t wait too long. It’s the single simplest measure to predict divorce.
I remember I had a psychologist that I worked with in Phoenix tell me one time that the loss of a job and the loss of one’s wealth is more devastating to most than losing a loved one or getting divorced. And that really hit me.
We tend to think of divorced or complicated families as a modern invention, and that is not at all true. You only have to read the Greek myths to see broken homes, widows, divorce, stepchildren, children trying to get along with new parents.
My parents were divorced when I was 2, so I don’t remember much about them being together.
In my own life, my parents divorced when I was young. I lived with my dad, not with my mum, after they got divorced. And it’s been part of my life.
When my parents were divorced in the late ’70s, early ’80s, the climate was that you should screw over your ex as much as possible – get the worst lawyer in the world, all that. That’s not what people are out to do anymore. It feels cruddy to try and destroy each other just because you’re breaking up.
‘Dear Mr. Henshaw’ came about because two different boys from different parts of the country asked me to write a book about a boy whose parents were divorced, and so I wrote ‘Dear Mr. Henshaw,’ and it won the Newbery, and I was – it’s been very popular.
If we had been less reliant on technology and the security that we enjoy in being divorced from what we used to know, maybe things would have turned out differently.
What good am I? I can’t have kids. I can’t cook. I’ve been divorced three times. Who would want me?
My parents were divorced when I was a young teenager, and I was raised by a single mother after that. So, I understand the difficulties that families have. I understand single parenting.
I never thought I would be divorced.
Just because you’ve been divorced doesn’t mean you’re not still a family.
I was married for 18 years to a woman who wanted me to get sober for all 18 years and I never did. She finally came to her senses and divorced me.
Getting married and divorced really is a learning experience.
My dad was in my life, and he was actually a very positive influence on me in my life. He was always there. He was a great dad. But my parents divorced when I was 5, so I grew up in a single-parent home.
David and I were divorced in 1980, and there has been silence between us ever since. Despite our decade of marriage and a child together, I was airbrushed out of his life. He never demonstrated any affection or gratitude after we parted. He fired anyone who mentioned my name.
People don’t get married to get divorced. Maybe people weren’t meant to be together forever.
It’s not marriage that I crave. Many of my friends who have married are pretty miserable. Within a year and a half, most of them are either unhappy or divorced.
My mom and dad divorced when I was 8 years old, but my Dad never left my life. We would go over there on weekends and he’d be playing his guitar, listening to Bobby Blue Bland and B. B. King and KBLX radio while he was out in the garage painting custom cars.
I think you can be depressed and flourish, I think you can have cancer and flourish, I think you can be divorced and flourish. When we believed that happiness was only smiling and good mood, that wasn’t very good for people like me, people in the lower half of positive affectivity.
I am a mother and I have been divorced, and I love fashion and the Upper East Side.
I got engaged, married, and divorced in 15 months in Hollywood, so, you know what I’m saying? We’re out here putting rings on it! That’s what our generation does, we put a ring on it, you know what I’m saying?
There are things that are hard about coming from a divorced family, but having two houses is not one of those things.
If you have been divorced once – male or female, but especially for females – and you’re over 40 you’re actually a commodity. It means you were able to commit once, and you’ll do it again.
Images in the 20th century had a unique power where image became divorced from reality, and often more important than reality… Buildings were judged – at least by members of our own profession – more by the way they looked in magazines than by the satisfaction people felt when using them.
Divorced from the cosmos, from nature, from society and from each other, we have become fractured and fragmented.
My parents getting divorced gave me the opportunity to play for my granddad and to meet my wife. I fell in the draft but I ended up in Dallas.
Maybe it’s because my mother divorced and my grandmother divorced, so maybe I’m frightened deep down. But then I also feel there is no real need. Why do I need to get married? To reassure me? No I don’t need reassurance.
Do the bishops seriously imagine that legalising gay marriage will result in thousands of parties to heterosexual marriages suddenly deciding to get divorced so they can marry a person of the same sex?
I remember my daughter coming back from school one day and saying that the teacher had asked anybody whose parents were divorced to put their hands up. I felt angry but also guilty. And you feel sort of terribly responsible in that sort of situation.
As a society, we’ve evolved, and we’ve recognized that the American family structure has undergone enormous changes. Divorce is all around us, and who among us doesn’t know someone who is divorced or has been impacted by divorce. It’s not as scandalous as it was.
I don’t watch ‘American Idol’ – that’d be like getting divorced from somebody and then hanging out with them.
When I was a kid, people who got divorced were people who had no gumption.
That whole business of having two homes, and that divided loyalty bind that kids get into. I mean, my parents were divorced – though I was adult – but I still grappled with being responsible to both of them.
I was alone a lot as a kid, because my parents were divorced.
I found my feet in my 40s: got divorced at 40, two years of drinking, and then, at 42, I became sober. My 30s were the most boring phase.
When I grew older and awkward, when my parents divorced and life had gone all to hell, Demetrie stood me at the wardrobe mirror and told me over and over, ‘You are beautiful. You are smart. You are important.’ It was an incredible gift to give a child who thinks nothing of herself.
To say that a family is happy I think is to diminish it, taking out what is interesting. Growing up, I don’t think my family was any happier or unhappier than anyone else’s. My mother and father should have been divorced or never even married. On the other hand, I remember many moments of happiness.
My dad had just come back from Vietnam, and I think he had PTSD that he never treated, in that sort of macho-denial way. So they were divorced by the time I was 2, and my mom tried to raise me and my younger sister by herself. That proved very taxing, so there was a lot of moving around.
I assumed I’d never be divorced.
Unlike most divorced parents, whose interactions are confined to the topic of the kids, people still sharing a house have to talk about clogged sinks and moth infestations.
