Hunh - maybe.* But I didn’t see it that way.
I honestly read the OP
as asking: are kids in single-parent homes better off than kids from homes that would *become *single-parent homes if only the tension-filled feuding parents would just divorce already.
(bolding mine, above)
Yeah, yeah, you and your cites and research and whatnot. What’s that compared to anecdotes drawn from personal experience?
First off, I’d already read Sandra Tsing Loh’s piece long before I saw it in this thread. In that piece, it becomes clear that:
She did NOT divorce her husband because she hated him. In her own words, he’s a good man.
She and her husband WEREN’T fighting like cats and dogs! So, this is NOT a case of a toxic marriage where the kids had to watch their parents screaming and cursing at each other.
She cheated on her husband and divorced him mainly because, well, she was horny and getting bored with him.
Does THAT make a difference in the way you answer the OP’s question? It SHOULD, but I’m betting that for many of you it won’t.
I urge you to read Sandra Tsing Loh’s entire article. THEN, once you grasp the essence of her thesis (moden men are overly domesticated wimps who are too busy cooking and taking care of the kids to give their sex-starved wives the multiple orgasms they need and deserve), bear in mind that this is the same woman who gave a rave review to Joan Sewell’s book “I’d Rather Eat Chocolate.”
Sandra LOVED that book, which was all about a wife who hated sex, and the “compromise” solution she found for pleasing her randy young husband (the “solution” involved him looking at a lot of porn). At that time, Sandra was ranting about the selfishness of men who insist on having sex with their wives, when the wives just want to be left alone with a Ghirardelli sampler and a good book. She asked, in exasperation, why it’s assumed that women with low libidos have a problem, when the real problem is that men are TOO horny!
Apparently, in Sandra’s view, men are the bad guys when they want sex more than their wives do, but they’re ALSO the bad guys when they don’t want sex as much as their wives do. She thought it was wonderful when Joan Sewell told her husband “Leave me alone, and go wank to porn on the PC,” but now thinks it’s horrible that her friends’ hubbies are looking at porn on the PC instead of putting the moves on their own wives!
I don’t know Sandra or her husband, so I have no way of knowing what really went on in their marriage. But it’s hard not to feel sorry for her husband, who was apparently wrong, in her eyes, no matter WHAT he did sexually!!!
All readers and posters on the SDMB have their own experiences, and will probably project their own experiences onto those of Sandra Tsing Loh. But they shouldn’t.
If your Dad was abusive toward your Mom or your Mom threw furniture at your Dad, I’m sorry for you, but your experiences have NOTHING in common with those in the original post.
Sandra Tsing Loh is NOT a woman who’s sparing her children agony by getting them out of a toxic environment or away from a violent alcoholic Dad. She’s a woman who’s broken up her family and taken her kids away from their loving, devoted father because she was bored with the decent man she married, and got the hots for someone else.
She broke up her family on a whim, and is now reassuring herself that children are resilient, and men are pretty much unnecessary anyway, so this won’t have any real effect on her kids.
I call BS.
It might depend on why they hate each other.
There’s no question that it’s bad for children to grow up in a household in which the parents hate each other. However, if they hate each other because they are, in general, hateful, bitter, impossible-to-get-along-with people, it’s not clear that the children would be better off with either one of them separately.
I can imagine a couple that simply fell out of love and “stayed together for the kids” quickly growing to resent and hate each other. Remember that there is an opportunity cost for staying with someone you don’t like. It prevents you from actually finding someone you could be happy with.
Old couple, well into their nineties, went to a divorce lawyer and announce that they want a divorce.
The lawyer askes in an amazed tone, "Why in the world do you want a divorce at this stage of life? You’ve been married for at least 75 years - why a divorce now???
Little old lady, in an appropriately quavering voice, answers, “We just wanted to wait until all the children were dead.”
A few days before he went off the air for good, Johnny Carson told a similar joke, with approximately the same setup, but a different punchline.
When asked why he was leaving the “Tonight” show, Johnny said:
A 100 year old man went into court, and filed for a divorce from his wife. The judge looked over the paperwork and said, “Well, Mr Jones, everything seems to be in order, but I have to ask… you’ve been married for 80 years. Why are you seeking a divorce NOW?”
The old man shrugged and said, “Enough is enough.”
No. My husband and his five siblings came from a household in which the parents didn’t really love each other, but stayed together for the sake of the children (and some other reasons, possibly), and all of the kids came away with pretty fucked-up ideas of what adult relationships should look like.
Just a note, I typed out the above paragraph before looking at the rest of the thread, and am unsurprised to find that several other people have made similar observations.
Yeah. I’ve never once in my life heard someone say, “Thank God my parents stayed together for my sake alone. I mean, I did have to listen to them fighting all the time, and they did cheat on each other, and man oh man were dinner conversations ever tense and awkward, but, y’know, it was better than the alternative.”
:rolleyes:
Again, have you READ the OP?
The couple in question WASN’T fighting all the time! As far as their children, friends, and neighbors, they seemed like an ordinary, happily married, middle-aged couple.
Sandra Tsing Loh’s sons won’t grow up saying, “I’m sure glad my parents split up, because it was so tense watching them squabbling every day.” But they MIGHT grow up thinking, “Why did Mom do that to Dad? He was good to her. He did everything she SAID she wanted a man to do. How could she turn around and stab him in the back like that?”
Other posters have pointed to toxic marriages and wondered “What lesson does that teach the kids?”
Well, what lesson has Sandra Tsing Loh taught her kids? That women can’t be trusted! That they’re lying bitches who SAY they want a man who’ll be kind and nurturing, but who REALLY want cheap dirty sex? That their own mother thinks men are pretty much unnecessary?
The OP actually came up after a fair amount of discussion of the Atlantic article (which I personally hated with the fire of a thousand suns, but that’s another story), and I was curious not about the case of parents who can agree to some kind of amicable mutual unhappiness (although I have a very hard time seeing how that would work in the long term), but about parents who in fact hate each other.
For the purpose of those studies, yes.
I have a related question which also doesn’t seem easy to study. What about those couples who love each other but express it in completely dysfunctional ways? I’m thinking of my Grandparents from Hell, who have gone from being one of those who like to fight so they can make up to just fighting; there was also sexual abuse involved (and she always ends up deciding it’s the victim’s fault) but I don’t know how much that’s linked to the yell-to-get-heated strategy.
I read the OP. I didn’t read the Atlantic Mothly article linked in the OP. Does that really change things? I don’t know who this Sandra Loh is.
I was responding to the OP asking about “compare[ing] children in single-parent families with children in the sort of tension-filled families that could result from parents who otherwise would have divorced staying together for the children’s sake.”
To me, tension-filled = fighting all the time.
So, that’s all I was responding to. Nothing I said had anything to do with Sandra Loh or any of the details of her life, since, as I said, I have no idea who she is.
Does that help? Your confusion confuses me.
Kindness, nurturing, and cheap dirty sex are not mutually exclusive. And methinks you are underestimating the effect that having one’s husband tell you that because you’ve gained some weight over the years, he is now sexually uninterested on you, can have on self-esteem, and consequently on the warmth level in one’s marital relationship.
Besides, a drastic change in a sexual relationship like that is often a sign of deeper issues. And don’t you think it’s pretty unfair in what is supposed to be a two-way relationship to decide unilaterally that the relationship is no longer going to include sex?