SoloMio

I had a 50s mom and a 50s alcoholic dad. She very courageously kicked him out when I was 12. I think it was really a wake-up call effort that backfired--she thought it would shake him up and he'd get sober, but didn't happen.

She was Catholic, and I went to Catholic school, and the stigma was very real about divorce. I remember feeling completely like a black sheep in my class and I never, ever told my friends (although of course, they knew).

At the same time, I knew then, and know now, what a courageous gift my mother gave me--because my life did a 180 and I was filled with joy for years after my father left.

Very soon after the divorce, my mother remarried. Part of the reality of living in the 50s was the financial stability women had ONLY if they were attached to a man. After the divorce, my mother was only able to get a minimum wage job and our standard of living plummeted. We sold the car, we had little food.

So she did what women had to do back then... she remarried a man (10 years her junior--yep, Mom was a cougar). A stable guy, even though she met him in AA. He was a great stepfather for several years until he fell off the wagon.

Mom ditched him, too, and then picked another guy in AA.

So she clearly didn't want to be married to an active alcoholic, but she clearly needed to be married. I do think it was more of a 50s thing--the stigma, the financial difficulties of being single were very real.

So while your mother's comments seem crazy, it's easy for me to understand.

sojourner

Choublak:

I'm sorry my post was confusing. When I referred to "the other woman," I meant the friend's mom at church who looked ill when your mother made that comment.

I did not in any way mean the situation where your father was cheating on your mother, and I am sorry that my post was confusing in that way. Please accept my apology in that and know that I did not mean to cause you any more painful feelings about that than what you already have experienced.

Sojourner

Programmatic

When I got married I made a public vow to God to remain committed to this specific relationship in this specific way even when it was painful.

So, for me, the question is whether or not I am a man of my word.

MyBetterWorld

I think those vows are a contract though.......when an alcoholic (or anyone else for that matter) breaks those vows through cheating, abuse, alcoholism, or anything else........they are the one in breach of said "contract"

You can't really question being a man or woman of theirword if that man or woman is being abused.......makes it seem like a woman or man who is being abused, cheated on, etc., needs to endure that rather than "break their word".

JMO

Tuffgirl

Thanks for this - although I have divorced once and remarried, I considered myself to have integrity and uphold my word. But sometimes, circumstances trump my being able to hold true to my word, i.e. its no longer a healthy nor beneficial environment, especially if there is only one person working to make it healthy.

There used to be more benefit to being married - like significant tax breaks and savings on services like insurance. When I called my insurance company to change the address when I separated from the RAH, they told me it would increase my premiums. By a whopping $3.50 a month. One less Americano at the coffee stand for me...

lillamy

My parents have been married for over 50 years.
When I started cautiously voicing concerns about my marriage, my dad told me that there are only two acceptable reasons for divorce: Abuse and substance abuse. "Everything else," he said, "it's your duty to work through. But those two, you've got to save yourself."

sirpher

Smart parents - actually I got (mostly) that same thing from my mom about the only two acceptable reasons for divorce, just never saw the last reason about saving yourself in print before and that makes complete sense.

SoloMio

I know what you are saying, and that is part of why I have stayed in my own alcoholic marriage for 35 years, for what it's worth. I don't know if it's integrity that kept me here or some less noble motive like fear. (Although I must say that I am not hanging on like a martyr--I still love my husband and am content with my decision to stay married)

Here's a great passage from Esther de Waal's book Living With Contradiction: An Introduction to Benedictine Spirituality:

So to me, divorce is that cauterizing, amputating act that will provide the distance for the person to be able to be themselves. You are thus honoring your commitment to them by standing aside in some cases.

choublak

That's okay! I'm pretty much desensitized to it anyway.

Maybe, who knows.

akalacha

I'm old, I admit it. As a kid I remember many arguments between my parents with my mother often threatening divorce. But they never did. When I was older I asked my mom about it. She said that the threats of divorce were made in times of extreme frustration but she could never go through with it because she still loved my father. I got married in the 70's. I was never religious but always had a spiritual connection with my HP. I took my marriage vows seriously - for better or worse. He was not an A, but had other problems. I managed to stick it out through all of the problems, trying to make things work. But the first time he hit me was also the last. I left the next day- I had tremendous feelings of guilt but I also knew I had to do what was best for myself. It wasn't easy as even in those days people had perceptions of divorced women as somehow being ¨bad¨. But I managed to make it on my own and have never regretted it.

nicam

What?! That's crazy, I honestly didn't think it was like that anywhere in America. When teaching abroad in rural Asia there was a stigma about single women over 30, but ever there it had dissipated quite a bit with the current generation.

My family is very eccentric and always told me the opposite. From my grandmother's mouth, "NEVER get married, and whatever you do don't ever have kids. Men and kids are the two biggest pains in the a**." She'd tell me this right in front of her husband and children. HaHa! The older I get the more I tend to agree with her jaded yet comical opinions.

Isollae

My father was the one like this in my childhood. Such a beautiful person. He had an identity outside of 'husband' and 'father' before his health fell apart...but after wards those words came to define him. I wonder if he feared losing my mother because of his health problems.

Isollae

Wow...these words are like a punch in the stomach. That is exactly the beliefs I grew up with and I still believe in them heart and soul.

But...I also want to live. I really believe that my hubby could have killed me that one time. I'm sure he'd disagree if I tried to talk to him about it. Concussion is another word for brain damage and my brain is all that I am. Without it, I can't have beliefs to uphold.

I don't see that HE has left me with any way to be true to my commitments.

Not 'my commitments'. But to the commitment to stay with him. My other commitments are intact.

fedup3

Nowhere in the Bible does God say it's ok to be abused by your spouse. I think He loves us too much to expect us to be abused by anyone whether it's a spouse or a stranger. If you think about the vows you said when you got married nowhere does it say "I will stay whether you abuse me or not"! End of story. No one here who has been abused by their alcoholic spouse should feel the least bit guilty because they left or divorced their abusive spouse for their saftey and that of their kids.

lillamy

Isollae, I spent my entire life in the church, too. And I think that kept me in my marriage longer than I otherwise would have stayed. Because it was a promise, a commitment.

So leaving, for me, was also a hard spiritual journey. Because it involved figuring out whether I was allowed, by the God I believed in, to leave.

My journey was too winding and long to recap here -- but the basic point I came to was this: Either God expected me to stay in my marriage and die, or God allowed me to use my free will and leave. A god who expected me to stay in an abusive marriage where I would eventually be killed was not a god I recognized.

So I left all the Bibleverses about "wives, obey your husbands" and all the things pastors had said to me over my entire life, and I focused on a study of who God is. On God the Father. And ended up with a new way of looking at it. Me and the Lord, we have an understanding: if one of my children was harming another one of my children, I wouldn't love either of them less; but I would also not require the abused child to stay and put up with the abuse. I would want the abused child to get out of harm's way. And I would want the abuser-child to see that loss of relationship is a real live consequence of abusing another human being.

When I dropped everything "experts" had said to me about God, and focused on who I know God to be -- dropped the "thou shalts" and focused on my relationship with God -- things were much less complicated and repressive.

lillamy

Oh, and as for the initial title of this post -- "Society is in pairs" -- I think that's less and less true. I think in my generation (I'm moving rapidly towards 50), it's much less weird to be single than it was in my parents' generation. And if I look at friends who are 10-20 years younger, it's even less weird -- to not be married, to not be in a long-term relationship, to choose not to have children.

I do think in my parents' generation, it was generally assumed that there was something "wrong" with someone who wasn't married.

Programmatic

There are a few ways to look at this paradigm shift.

One might say that the American mindset has become more liberated.

One could also argue that the nuclear family has been systematically destroyed and the offspring of 1950's white America has been encouraged to either not reproduce or to provide subsequent offspring with iconoclastic "parents".

Thumper

Since I needed to use a dictionary before I could reply I should maybe stay out of this, lol, but my completely unsupportable opinion is that it has more to do with equal rights. Women no longer have to stay in an abusive or unhappy marriage just to survive. They don't have to wait for their husbands to die before they can live in safety and peace. They don't even have to have a husband to have child - which was fairly unthinkable not to long ago.

However - I think the entire framework fell apart a bit. The collapse of the nuclear family is not a good thing. The pendulum swings and I hope we (as a society) can find a more middle ground soon.

lillamy

I get your point, Programmatic, and I agree that it is ideal for children to have the comfort of growing up with two committed, healthy parents.

But if the parents aren't healthy, it's better for children to grow up with one sane parent than with two utterly unhealthy ones. And it's better for an adult to be alone than to be forcibly yoked together with a person destroying their life piece by piece. And if individuals breaking free from abusive relationships affects society in a detrimental way, then there's something fundamentally wrong with society.

LaTeeDa

It's about way, way more than just abuse. It's about this romantic notion that love conquers all. You can make promises to your spouse and your god, but the minute the government licenses and sanctions it, it is most definitely a contract. Anyone who has ever been divorced knows this all too well. I believe it would be in the best interests of society to educate young people about this fact before they go off all starry-eyed thinking that it's only about love and loyalty and finding a "soulmate." Dang, I guess that makes me some kind of iconoclast.

L