If there are no kids involved, the final effect is virtually the same: you have lost a loved one, so why are reactions so different when people are told one thing and the other?
Because separating with a partner where the relationship didn’t work out is different than having your loving partner die. Without some further elaboration it’s not clear what you are missing about the difference.
Presumably in the case of a divorce, you don’t actually love the person you’re losing any more.
Divorce is usually by choice, widowhood much more rarely so.
It is the difference between quitting a job and being fired, or between dieting and starving.
Right. Unless we’re talking about one of those relatively rare “We still love each other, we just can’t live together” divorces—in which case the big difference is that you still have the option to see and talk to your ex.
If you were someone who hated your husband and didn’t want him in your life any longer, I suppose widowhood might be preferable to divorcehood. Otherwise, I don’t understand why this would even be a question.
As someone who has been widowed but not divorced, I think they are actually very similar experiences, though obviously I’m guessing about the divorce part.
In most circumstances, the end of a marriage involves a ton of grieving and readjustments. I don’t think the experience of these things I much different if hte marriage ends through death or divorce. And even the most voluntary divorce is still a loss. It’s an admission of failure for some people, a tragedy for some others.
There is a lot of judgment brought to bear on the divorced, even now when it is so common.
Yeah… generally speaking, either way you’ve lost a person you loved, and a relationship that was important. That may have happened some time before the divorce, but the divorce drives it home.
Unless you’re part of the very common situation where one party wants the divorce and the other doesn’t and is destroyed by it. My father is still bitter over forty fucking years later.
That was me. I’ve been divorced for ten years now. Last night was the ex’s birthday. I went out to dinner and then a club with her and her boy friend and a couple of mutual friends. We had a great time.
When I was about ten, my parents got divorced. When I was fifteen, they remarried each other.
My dad died last year. I’m pretty sure my mom’s marriage with him isn’t coming back from that.
With respect Miller that sounds a lot more interesting than this thread.
This is not so much a debate as a request for opinions.
Off to IMHO.
It is fashionable to mourn death, or at least appear to, and to hate the living.
A few local idlers sometimes sit and talk on the bench in front of my supermarket. One day I overheard them when the subject of the ex of one of them came up, and there were some general insulting remarks. “She was alright”, said the one she had abandoned, finally. “I couldn’t give her what she wanted so she found someone who could. God bless her.” Sometimes when the wise speak, it is not who you expect it to be. She was not the same as dead, to him.
That’s a great way of putting it and matches my case exactly. We had a great ten years or so and then a crappy five years. Her boy friend, who I love, is so great for her. The previous one not so much but he and I got along great as well.
It’s fashionable to appear to mourn the death of a loved one?
Now, if your spouse died on the way to finalizing the divorce…
In a divorce, if you are the dumper presumably you don’t love the person anymore. If you are the dumpee, people recognize that you will likely realize that being with someone who doesn’t love you generally sucks.
With death, its assumed you had a mutual relationship of love.
In a spouse’s death, there’s rarely a reason to blame the departed. In a divorce, there’s bitterness and the feeling that it’s the other spouse’s fault. Sometimes, there’s lots of anger, bitterness, and blame, and sometimes toward both parties. Friendly, polite divorces are seldom seen.
People become divorced due to their own actions where as, except in the case of murder, widowhood is not due the widow’s actions.
I think death of a spouse must be worse than divorce (I’ve only been through the latter), but there is one area in which I think it must generally be harder to be divorced: in-laws. My ex immediately started a new relationship and pressured his family to cut me out; they didn’t entirely but they did stop being my family and downgraded to acquaintances in short order. I lost more than one person when he walked out.
Some in-laws manage to maintain a family-like relationship with the ex, but there are others where it all gets too messy or awkward.
I think what jtur88 meant was that it’s “fashionable” for other people (not the loved ones of the person in question) to judge and attack someone while they’re alive, but to “not speak ill of the dead” when someone dies. I may have misunderstood, and I don’t know if “fashionable” was the right way of saying it, but that’s what I thought he was trying to say. (I think jtur88 is a he, but I can’t remember for sure.)