Becoming an Ex: The Process of Role Exit

By Helen Rose Fuchs Ebaugh

The experience of becoming an ex is common to most people in modern society. Unlike individuals in earlier cultures who usually spent their entire lives in one marriage, one career, one religion, one geographic locality, people living in today's world tend to move in and out of many roles in the course of a lifetime. During the past decade there has been persistent interest in these "passages" or "turning points," but very little research has dealt with what it means to leave behind a major role or incorporate it into a new identity. Helen Rose Fuchs Ebaugh's pathbreaking inquiry into the phenomenon of becoming an ex reveals the profundity of this basic aspect of establishing an identity in contemporary life.

Ebaugh is herself an ex, having left the life of a Catholic nun to become a wife, mother, and professor of sociology. Drawing on interviews with 185 people, Ebaugh explores a wide range of role changes, including ex-convicts, ex-alcoholics, divorced people, mothers without custody of their children, ex-doctors, ex-cops, retirees, ex-nuns, and—perhaps most dramatically—transsexuals. As this diverse sample reveals, Ebaugh focuses on voluntary exits from significant roles. What emerges are common stages of the role exit process—from disillusionment with a particular identity, to searching for alternative roles, to turning points that trigger a final decision to exit, and finally to the creation of an identify as an ex.

Becoming an Ex is a challenging and influential study that will be of great interest to sociologists, mental health counselors, members of self-help groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous and Parents Without Partners, those in corporate settings where turnover has widespread implications for the organization, and for anyone struggling through a role exit who is trying to establish a new sense of self.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Nov 22, 2013
• ISBN: 9780226160535

Book preview

EX

1

Defining the Issues

Most of us in today’s world are exes in one way or another. We have exited a marriage, a career, a religious group, a meaningful voluntary organization, an institutional way of life, or perhaps a stigmatized role such as alcoholic or drug user. For some types of role exit society has coined a term to denote exiters: divorcé, retiree, recovered alcoholic, widow, alumnus. This is usually the case for exits that are common and have been occurring for a long time. Exits that have been around long enough to have been named are usually institutionalized in that they carry with them certain expectations, privileges, and status. In addition to these institutionalized exits, however, there are numerous exits that are simply referred to with the prefix, ex: ex-doctor, ex-executive, ex-nun, ex-convict, ex-cult member, ex-athlete. The one thing all exes have in common is that they once identified with a social role which they no longer have.

The process of disengagement from a role that is central to one’s self-identity and the reestablishment of an identity in a new role that takes into account one’s ex-role constitutes the process I call role exit. While at first glance there may seem to be little in common between ex-nuns and transsexuals, ex-doctors and ex-convicts, or divorced people and ex-air traffic controllers, they have all experienced role exit. The purpose of this book is to explore the role-exit process as it is experienced by people who have left a wide array of roles. I argue throughout the book that role exit is a basic social process, as basic to the understanding of human social behavior as socialization, social interaction, or role conflict. Regardless of the types of roles being departed, there are underlying similarities and variables that make role exit unique and definable as a social process.

One of the reasons role exit has not yet found its way into the social science literature is because its widespread occurrence is a characteristic of only the past thirty years or so. Except at times of war or political upheavals, in earlier periods of history people were much less mobile in terms of role changes. They stayed in one marriage for a lifetime, prepared for one occupation which they followed regardless of how satisfied or dissatisfied they were, identified with the religion of their upbringing, stayed quite close to home geographically, and were not exposed to a variety of self-help groups that can become anchors for identity formation or transformation. In other words, role exit, while it did occur in cases of widowhood, unemployment, or ostracism from a group, was much less common than it is today.

In modern society, understanding role exit is every bit as important as learning how we become socialized into groups since most individuals in society experience several major role exits in the course of their lifetimes. Statistics on contemporary family trends are simply one indication of how widespread role exits are with regard to familial roles. The divorce rate today is almost three times what it was in the 1960s (Blumstein and Schwartz 1983). Demographers project that half of first marriages now taking place will end in divorce. Related to the rise in divorce rates is the increasing number of single-parent families, particularly female-headed households which rose from ten percent in 1960 to about fifteen percent in 1979 (Gross and Sussman 1982).

Behind these statistics are the personal lives of people who are experiencing the pains and sense of freedom associated with disengaging from and becoming an ex in relation to that role. Throughout this book I will present the lives of people we interviewed who had experienced role exit, many of whom were still establishing their identities as exes and learning to deal with their previous role identities.

Sociological Characteristics of the Ex-role

Being an ex is unique sociologically in that the expectations, norms, and identity of an ex-role relate not to what one is currently doing but rather to social expectations associated with the previous role. While statuses such as physician, wife, professor, and executive place one in the social structure on the basis of current occupancy, an ex-status derives meaning from contrast with the status previously held. What an ex-nun, ex-prostitute, ex-wife, ex-executive, and alumnus have in common is the fact that these individuals once occupied societally defined positions which they no longer occupy. While expectations regarding appropriate behavior on the part of various ex-statuses differ, there are characteristics of the ex-role that are generalizable beyond issues unique to the various roles exited.

Every ex has been involved in a process of disengagement and disidentification. Disengagement is the process of withdrawing from the normative expectations associated with a role, the process whereby an individual no longer accepts as appropriate the socially defined rights and obligations that accompany a given role in society. The individual removes him- or herself from those social expectations and no longer accepts them as relevant. Integrally involved in the process of disengagement are shifts in a person’s role sets, in the collection of people occupying particular roles that are associated with an individual in a given social role. A wife, for example, is involved with an array of other people simply because of her role as wife. These include her husband, his family, his friends, their mutual friends, his business associates, neighbors, etc. In the process of disengagement, expectations of the wife shift on the part of these individuals. Usually, too, association with these people shifts in terms of either frequency or character.

Disengagement is a mutual process between the individual and relevant role-set partners. As the person begins to remove him- or herself from the social expectations and associations with members of a previous role set, they in turn usually begin to withdraw from the exiting individual both emotionally and physically.

While disengagement refers to disassociation from the rights and obligations associated with a given role, disidentification refers to the process of ceasing to think of oneself in the former role. Disengagement leads to disidentification in the sense that individuals who withdraw from the social expectations of given roles begin to shift their identities in a new direction, that is, they begin to think of themselves apart from the people they were in the previous