The Good Divorce: Keeping Your Family Together When Your Marriage Comes Apart

By Constance Ahrons

It's never too late to have a good divorce

Based on two decades of groundbreaking research, The Good Divorce presents the surprising finding that in more than fifty percent of divorces couples end their marriages, yet preserve their families. Dr. Ahrons shows couples how they can move beyond the confusing, even terrifying early stages of breakup and learn to deal with the transition from a nuclear to a "binuclear" family--one that spans two households and continues to meet the needs of children.

The Good Divorce makes an important contribution to the ongoing "family values" debate by dispelling the myth that divorce inevitability leaves emotionally troubles children in its wake. It is a powerful tonic for the millions of divorcing and long-divorces parents who are tired of hearing only the damage reports. It will make us change the way we think about divorce and the way we divorce, reconfirming our commitment to children and families.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 6, 2009
• ISBN: 9780061981937

Constance Ahrons

Constance Ahrons, Ph.D., author of The Good Divorce and co-author of Divorced Families, is professor emerita from the Department of Sociology and former director of the Marriage and Family Therapy Doctoral Training Program at the University of Southern California. A senior scholar and founding co-chair of the Council on Contemporary Families, she is an internationally renowned lecturer, consultant, and workshop leader. Dr. Ahrons is director of Divorce and Remarriage Consulting Associates in San Diego, California.

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Introduction

The Good Divorce?

The Good Divorce? My eighty-five-year-old mother, looking puzzled, shook her head in disbelief. We were sitting in the living room of the retirement home in which she lived, and when a friend of hers walked in, she announced proudly: "My daughter is writing a book. It’s called Divorce Is Good." Thinking she had not heard me, I politely corrected her, only to hear her repeating her version of the title to another friend. Again, I felt the need to correct her. Again, to no avail. Until she died recently, my mother still referred to the title of this book her way. Same words, reverse order, vastly different meanings.

Every thirteen seconds, someone gets divorced. Each year, in the United States alone, over one million families experience divorce. Each year, for every two couples that get married, one couple gets divorced. Not one of these couples likes getting divorced. They agonize over it, usually for years, and say it has been the most difficult time of their lives. It ranks right at the top of the personal stress index, second only to death of a loved one. It is an extraordinarily painful experience that invades one’s whole life space.

Is divorce good? The answer is a resounding no. Divorce is what it is: a fact of our society; a social institution. Its purpose is to act as a safety valve for bad marriages. In fact, most people say that this function is the only thing that is good about divorce. For most, it is better to go through that temporary, excruciating pain than to continue to live with the permanent, excruciating pain of a bad marriage.

But if divorce isn’t good, is there such a thing as a good divorce? The answer is a resounding yes. Not only do such divorces exist, but about half of divorced couples today actually manage to end up with one. In these good divorces, couples part without destroying the lives of those they love. Their children continue to have two parents. The divorced parents continue to have good relationships with their children. The families of these good divorces continue to be just that—families.

This is a book about such good divorces. I show divorces that run counter to our stereotypes—divorces that many people find suspect. These good divorces don’t make headlines. What they do is model, for individuals and society, the beginnings of a quiet social revolution. I show how, as good divorces become more common, they will catalyze acceptance of an already existing but generally unaccepted cultural phenomenon—multiparent families that span two or more households.

It’s Never Too Late to Have a Good Divorce

Since the first edition of The Good Divorce was published in 1994, I have been surprised and very pleased by the numerous responses I have received from readers. The letters and telephone calls have been very gratifying for me as readers have told me why the book has been important to them. Almost all have said that it was the only book they read with a positive message about divorce and that they were relieved to find out that other people felt and acted in many of the same ways as they did. They shared some of their life stories, telling me about their binuclear family style and their relationships with their exspouses. In my travels around the country when I lead workshops and present lectures, people always come up afterwards to tell me their personal stories and confirm that good divorces are possible. Each story I hear is so poignant, and each surprises me, for no two stories describing the pathway to a good divorce are exactly alike.

One of the themes that has come up over and over again from these conversations is that it is never too late to have a good divorce. One letter in this vein came from Molly in Ohio—a grandmother divorced for twenty-one years. She told me how, after a twenty-year marriage, she and her ex hardly spoke for the first ten years after the divorce, and when they did it was hostile and accusing. Molly said for the first two years we were definitely fiery foes, then our feelings got a little less intense and we became angry associates. Then Molly went on to tell me a story that happened when they had been divorced for almost a decade. Their oldest daughter, after experiencing infertility problems for several years, gave birth to a child with Down’s Syndrome. She and her ex, and his second spouse, all arrived at the hospital to be with their daughter and son-in-law. As they all wrestled with their painful feelings and came to terms with accepting their new grandchild, her ex hugged her and said, Sarah will need all the love and support she can get. I know we’ll be there together for her.

That healing moment didn’t erase the pain and anger of all the difficult years, but it did put an end to their ongoing battles and opened the door to a more caring kin relationship. Molly went on to tell me how they spent that next Christmas together—the first in ten years—at their daughter’s home and that they enjoyed a very warm and satisfying few days. She was surprised to find that she and her ex’s wife had a lot in common, and by the end of the visit when they all left, they made plans to share the baby’s first birthday together as a family. Molly’s letter ended by telling me that she received her biggest gift when, after that Christmas, her daughter sent her a thank you poem she had written to both her parents, expressing the joy she felt in not being torn between them for the first time since their divorce.

Another story that spoke to the positive changes that can come with time was told to me on the phone by Henry, a father of four children, who divorced when his youngest son was three years old. Divorced for fourteen years, Henry was a noncustodial father who saw his children on alternate weekends. His relationship with his ex, as he described it, was nothing less than a pitched battle every time I had to deal with her. I left with a burning gut-ache that lasted for the rest of the day. For the first six years, Henry picked up and dropped off the children at school so that he and his ex, Thelma, would not have to see one another. They managed not to go back to court although they did continue to use lawyers to mediate ongoing differences, amassing considerable sums in legal fees. Their youngest son, Barry, was a high school football star and they both attended most of the games, albeit sitting as far apart in the stadium as they could. When Barry received an important award, both Henry and Thelma were present for the celebration dinner. In his acceptance speech he asked both of his parents to join him so they too could receive the award. They stood together awkwardly as he acknowledged them both; as they left the platform together they shared their feelings about how proud they were of their son. Thelma then invited Henry and his current wife to her home for a celebration party the next night. So moved by his son’s achievements, and his exwife’s invitation, Henry sat down that night and wrote her a letter apologizing for some of the angry things he’d said and done in the past. He closed by asking her to begin anew with him in establishing a more cooperative relationship. Henry ended our phone conversation by telling me, I don’t know exactly what happened. We never really discussed it. But from that time onward we’ve been able to get along. I don’t think we’ll ever be friends, but we’ve stopped attacking each other and really work at being polite.

And then there was Margaret, a woman at one of my workshops, who told me that when her exhusband of eight years had a heart attack, she went to the hospital to visit him. She didn’t want him to die with such a terrible rift between them. We married as teenagers and we lasted twenty-six years. How could I let that all be rolled up into one rotten ball? The divorce was a mess, but I still care about him. Fortunately, he lived, and they ended up having quite a good friendship. Margaret remarked, It feels so much better not to have such an uncomfortable breach with a man who used to be the most important person in my life.

Or the young woman, recently married, who told me about how happy she was because when she got married her parents resolved their fifteen year battle. When she had gotten engaged she tearfully told each of her parents that she wasn’t going to have a wedding. She couldn’t cope with the tension she felt trying to figure out whether or how to include them both. Her mother, very upset that because of her parents’ conflictual relationship her daughter was intending to elope instead of having the wedding she had always dreamed of, called her exhusband. She asked him to go see a counselor with her. The happy ending to this story is that after several counseling sessions they were able to go to their daughter together and let her know that they could be counted on to give her a wedding they all would enjoy.

At a lecture I gave recently, a man and woman came up to me afterward and announced proudly that they had finally become friends again after twenty-two years. How did that happen? I asked. My youngest granddaughter gave me a long lecture and told me how upset she was that we both couldn’t come to her birthday party, and then she told me about a fight she had with her friend and that they made up. And after all, my little granddaughter said, if she could do that, we should be mature enough to. She embarrassed me into it. So I called Mildred and invited her to lunch. The rest is history.

I have been fortunate to hear many more stories of divorced parents who after many years resolved their long-standing rift and emerged with a better relationship. Although it doesn’t always heal the children’s hurt or repair the psychological damage that the ongoing conflicts or bitter cold wars may have caused in the initial years, it does open up the possibility that the distress will not continue to escalate in the future. No matter what age, or how long ago the divorce occurred, children still benefit from a rapprochement between their parents. Divorce impacts the family on intergenerational levels and even grandchildren are affected by their grandparents’ relationships. As with many intimate relationships in our lives, resolving long term conflicts can heal early wounds. Divorced spouses can reap incredible rewards even if it has taken many years to shift a very negative relationship to a more positive one. Even though I will say this several times and in several different ways in this book, it bears repeating: Divorce is not an event that ends with the legalities; it is a process that lasts for the rest of your life.

Throughout this book I will share with you bits and pieces of my own personal divorce story. I am now divorced from my children’s father for thirty-one years. It was a divorce that began very badly. Over the years, as we became more emotionally distant from our anger and each of us moved on with fulfilling and productive lives, we learned how to be together and celebrate important events with our children. We never discussed our marriage, nor our divorce, nor our battles of the early years following the divorce. But as the years progressed and we built a new history as cooperative but distant kin we began to accumulate new stories about our binuclear family gatherings and shared the joys and sorrows of our children’s lives.

Unfortunately, my exhusband died unexpectedly about a year ago. I happened to be with my daughters when in the early evening their stepmother called to tell them that their father had died very quickly of a heart attack. The several days that followed are somewhat of a blur now, but during that night we needed to make many decisions, including plane reservations and child-care arrangements for my three-month-old twin grandchildren. My daughters wanted me to go to the funeral with them and I very much wanted to be there to support them and offer whatever help I could during the painful days ahead. I was unsure about how their stepmother, Susan, would feel about my presence, and decided I would go with them and make further decisions about my participation based upon her wishes. When I arrived, Susan said I’m glad you’re here, and as we embraced and I expressed my sadness for her loss, I was grateful for her generosity in welcoming me.

Over the next few days, as the extended family gathered for the funeral and formal days of mourning, I realized how important it was for me to be there. Not only to support my daughters and to be with them in their grief, but because I, too, was grieving. As the extended family and high school and college friends arrived, I was greeted as family. We reminisced about my exhusband during the twelve years that I had been an integral part of his life, and many warm memories that had been clouded by the bad years—both in the marriage and after the divorce—resurfaced. I don’t know if people who attended the funeral thought that anything was strange or inappropriate about my presence as a member of the family, or that the warmth Susan and I shared was strange, but I do know that it felt very right and very important for me to be there. In the year since his death my daughters and I have talked many times about those painful days and I realize how important it was for me—and for them—to have shared that part of their lives. I also feel my own sadness and loss, especially on those occasions with the children and grandchildren that we would have shared. I was surprised to realize that I also feel the loss of him as my coparent. I have reached for the phone several times over this past year wanting to talk with him about something related to our kids, later feeling lonely that I couldn’t.

Although I no longer have a coparent, our binuclear family continues. My daughters have half siblings, a stepmother and a whole paternal extended family. Having spent considerable time with all of them during the days preceding and following my exhusband’s funeral has made me feel like they are indeed family. Although I have not seen any of them since then, my daughters tell me about their comings and goings and I have no doubts that we will share some future events together. Like extended families, we will come together occasionally for holidays and perhaps weddings and other celebrations.

The Binuclear Family Study

This book is based on my landmark longitudinal study of family relationships after divorce. Funded by the National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH) and the University of Wisconsin, this groundbreaking research is the first of its kind to study normal divorced families.

During the initial stages of the study I developed the concept of binuclear family. A binuclear family is any family that spans two households. Nuclear families have one nucleus, one shared household; binuclear families split into two nuclei, two households, each headed by one parent. The family continues to be a unit even though it shifts from a nuclear structure to a binuclear one.

Ninety-Eight Normal Binuclear Families

Interestingly, most of the research funds in this field are apportioned to those who study mental illness rather than mental health. The result is that the vast bulk of the studies and clinical literature about divorce has been based on families with some psychiatric history, families with some identified problem or dysfunction. In contrast, my study was based on ninety-eight normal families from the midwestern United States. The study is unique because I selected the participants randomly from the public divorce records, from the pool of all divorces in 1978 in one Wisconsin county. (The appendix contains a further description of the methodology and sample characteristics.) The idea was that by using a random sample, I would find families of divorce that were actually the norm in a certain geographical area, not families whom I supposed represented all families of divorce.

When I first proposed to do this study, the NIMH review committee expressed grave doubts that, through this random selection process, I could find sufficient subjects—families in which both exspouses would agree to participate. Although two prior longitudinal studies—Judith Wallerstein and Joan Kelly’s much publicized Marin County study of sixty families and Mavis Hetherington’s Virginia study comparing forty-eight divorced families with forty-eight married families—also interviewed both spouses, their subjects were not randomly selected. Wallerstein and Kelly advertised for their sample and offered them a clinical intervention program as part of the study, and the Hetherington sample of four-year-olds and their parents was referred by lawyers and schools. After a year of testing out the viability of my approach—in Wisconsin, Illinois, and California—I proved not only that it was possible, but also that it was crucial to use a random sample if we wanted to accurately document the divorce process and its aftermath.

Why Study Both Exspouses?

The inclusion of both exspouses was an important aspect of this study. As much attention as divorce has received in recent years, it is surprising that the relationship between exspouses has remained such an anomaly. In fact, my study was the first to have the relationship between exspouses as its major focus.

Most of the prior research—and even most of the current research, including large-scale survey studies—relies on the responses of only one partner. Although women are usually the spokespersons for the family, they still provide only one side of the story. As a clinician, I knew from years of experience that couples (whether married or divorced) usually hold very different views of their relationship. To form a complete picture of the divorce process requires the perspectives of both exspouses.

Two Pictures of the Same Divorce…Two Different Divorces

As I expected, differences in the two halves of an excouple’s story emerged; in fact, once their names were deleted, we often couldn’t tell who had been married to whom. Partners differed on such essential details as when they first separated, who had decided to divorce, what were the reasons, how involved fathers were with their children, the amount and regularity in payment of child support, and the actual time each parent spent with the children. One father said he spent every Saturday with his children and his former wife said he rarely saw them. A mother said she had sole custody of the children and her exspouse said they had joint custody.

As you will see, some of these discrepancies were truly individual differences, some were gender differences, and some were adversarial or positional differences sparked by a legal battle over custody.

Mapping the Families Over Time

Over the course of six years, my graduate assistants and I interviewed these 196 parents three times, at one, three, and five years after their divorce. We began each set of interviews by constructing a diagram—a map of that family’s kinship network—and expanded the map as the families changed configuration through such factors as remarriages and new births.

Ninety-six of the ninety-eight families remained in the study for the entire period. The fact that all but two of the families (one dropped out due to the death of a child) participated for five years is remarkable—most longitudinal studies lose half their participants over the years. Many of the interview subjects told us they continued to participate because this was a pioneering project, that they wanted other divorced couples to learn from them, that they learned a lot just from our interviews, and that no one had ever before asked them about what was good, perhaps even better, in their lives after their divorce.

An unintended—but even more interesting—reason was that this study helped its participants to feel more normal. When we asked certain questions, they realized that others were explicitly communicating about the divorce process in the same way that they were implicitly thinking about it. In one section of the interview, we used statements printed on cards instead of verbal questions—statements such as, Sometimes I wish my ex was dead, and I want to punish her (or him) for all the wrongs done to me. The subject sorted the cards into five piles, labeled always, often, sometimes, rarely, and never. Just recognizing the unsayable (there was a lot of laughing and crying during this part of the interview) helped people to see that their feelings were not outrageous, crazy, or, it turns out, unthinkable.

These in-depth interviews allowed me to learn how divorce changed these families, to find a range of normalcy, and to compare and understand how, five years later, some spouses had managed to uncouple without causing psychological harm to their family whereas others had not. To better understand the complexities of how divorced families function, and the reasons for these complexities, we also interviewed ninety-one new partners who joined these families as stepparents. In total, my graduate students and I interviewed 287 people several times over five years. They each told us from their very personal perspective what living in a divorced family was really like.

The couples in the Binuclear Family Study have now been divorced for twenty years. The 201 children who were part of our ninety-eight original families now are all over twenty-one years old. Most of these families have had at least a couple of major transitions, such as one or both parents’ remarriages and probably some second divorces; some of the children are themselves married, and perhaps even some of them have experienced their own divorces. Not only don’t we know how the adult children of the Binuclear Family Study are faring and whether their parents’ divorce has had a major impact on their current lives, but we don’t even know very much about how any children many years after divorce are doing.

To shed some light on how young adults feel about their parents’ divorce many years later, I am planning another stage in the study. Now, twenty years later, I want to ask the young adults what meaning their parents’ divorce has in their current lives. Does the divorce still impact them? If so, how is it related to the kind of relationship their parents have with one another? Has the divorce affected their relationship with either of their parents? If a parent remarried, what kind of relationship do they have with their stepparent? Does having divorced parents affect how they themselves feel about marriage? Did their age at the time of divorce affect how they feel about the divorce? These, and many more questions like these, will be asked and will help us as parents better understand the $$$ng-range implications of our intimate decisions. These interviews will form the basis for my next book, tentatively titled Divorce and Remarriage: The Children Speak Out.

Cross-National Study

In 1981, I presented a paper reporting preliminary findings from the first interviews of the Binuclear Family Study at an international sociological conference. There, in Leuven, Belgium, I met, for the first time, a group of European social scientists who were collaborating on a research project organized by the Vienna Centre. Much to our surprise, we found that our studies had very similar designs. In all the countries—Finland, Sweden, Hungary, Denmark, The Netherlands, Poland, and Norway—both exspouses were participants in the research; as in the Binuclear Family Study, all had dependent children.

Several months later, I was asked to join the Vienna Centre research project. Meeting twice a year, over the next three years we analyzed our data from a cross-national perspective.

We expected to find vast differences between families from different countries. Our actual findings came as quite a surprise. Allowing for the differences in the legal processes, cross-culturally, the emotional adjustment processes were remarkably similar.

Supplementary Studies

In addition to the major longitudinal study of binuclear families and the cross-national study, my examples, case stories, and conclusions are drawn from many other sources. Over the past fifteen years I have conducted several smaller studies about divorce from different generational and sample perspectives: a study of forty-one joint-custody parents from San Diego County who were interviewed at two different intervals postdivorce; a study of seventy-eight grandmothers who experienced the divorce of a son or a daughter; and a study of thirty young adult children between the ages of nineteen and twenty-five who had recently experienced their parents’ divorce.

In dozens of additional interviews for this book, I have met scores of other parents and children. Because the participants in the Binuclear Family Study were mainly white, middle-class midwesterners, I wanted to broaden my understanding by interviewing people from different ethnic and geographic backgrounds, in different stages of the life cycle.

My twenty-five years as a therapist also add richness and depth. A unique intimacy and trust is generated over several years of hard work on a relationship. At times I will draw upon client stories as well.

The ideas for this book have been with me for a long time, as far back as 1976 when I first started studying divorce. I was teaching at the University of Wisconsin then and beginning my research about divorce and its aftermath. In my private practice as a family therapist at the time, I was also seeing more and more people who were dealing with the terrifying disorganization that divorce brings. In both spheres of my work life, now, as I did then, I see people who have good divorces, people who have bad ones, and those whose divorces have elements of both. In my personal life I have also experienced divorce, both its good and bad dimensions. I have lived the family and role permutations that are the aftermath of divorce: I have been a single parent, a second wife, and a stepmother; I’ve been an adversarial exspouse and a friendly one; I’ve done the research at the personal as well as the academic level.

This book is meant to be the companion piece to Divorced Families, the academic and professional training book I co-authored in 1987 with Roy H. Rodgers. It comes in response to the many divorced people—students, clients, colleagues—who encouraged me to write a book that speaks more directly to them. A book that, for a change, looks at the good news and not just the bad news about divorce.

My greatest hope is that The Good Divorce will be a powerful antidote for millions of divorced parents: an antidote to the negativity of society about divorce. If you are tired of hearing only doomsday reports, if you’re tired of having your home labeled as a broken home, if you’re tired of being the scapegoat for many of society’s major problems—this book is written for you.

In this book I challenge society’s traditional view—that divorce is one of life’s greatest failures. Binuclear families make up a major part of our society today. These families want to know—and deserve to know—how to function in the best possible ways available to them, how to minimize the stress, and most of all, how to feel normal.

All names and identifying characteristics of individuals mentioned in this book have been changed to protect their privacy. The stories themselves are real, and the quotes, although sometimes edited, retain the speaker’s original message.

1

What’s Good in Divorce

VALUING FAMILY

MY OLDER DAUGHTER got married twenty-five years after her father and I divorced. A large family group took part in the ceremony, including my exhusband, his wife, their two children, and my younger daughter. Looking at the video, I see two proud and happy parents walking their daughter down the aisle. From these images of smiling, laughing people, a stranger could never tell that this couple had not been husband and wife for the past twenty-five years, unless, fast forwarding to the altar scene, they noticed the three beaming parents to the right of the bride. In this scene we three parents stand together tightly holding hands, laughing and crying, deeply moved. This family constellation is like many others around the world—families in which one or both sets of parents are divorced.

Those who witnessed our stormy, acrimonious parting in 1965 would never have predicted that my exhusband and I could share the wedding of our child politely, let alone joyously. No-fault divorces didn’t exist back then. To be released from an incompatible union, one of us had to prove the other undeniably at fault. We needed to produce a clearly demonstrable reason to end it, such as adultery or abuse. Already engaged in a furious, pitched battle, we were forced by the no-fault issue to raise the stakes still higher. We knew that the one proved to be at fault would be socially shamed, and probably economically penalized as well. Worst, he or she would be considered responsible for destroying our family’s chance to live the American dream. I was the one who left, and for two miserable years my husband and I battled constantly over custody, visitation, and child support. There were private detectives, a kidnapping, several lawyers, and two years of legal fees that took me the next ten years to pay off. That painful time of my life was over thirty years ago, and even today it is hard to write about.

Some things have changed dramatically since I joined the ranks of the formerly married. Between 1966 and 1976 the divorce rate in the United States doubled. While demographers disagree about their projections of divorce rates in the twenty-first century, they agree that we will never return to pre-1970 rates. In the next century, between four and six out of every ten marriages in the United States are projected to end in divorce.

The cold fact of divorce has not dampened our ideal of marriage. About half the marriages that took place in 1993 in the United States were remarriages in which one or both partners had been divorced. Dramatic legal reforms, such as no-fault and joint custody, have replaced the punitive and moral stance of earlier years. Today, divorce is on the verge of becoming acceptable; serial monogamy has become a popular lifestyle. But the social shame somehow lingers.

The Good Divorce Is Not an Oxymoron

When I tell people the title of this book I usually get one of two distinct reactions. Either I hear a knee-jerk response, an incredulous: Isn’t saying ‘good divorce’ a contradiction in terms, like saying ‘sweet sorrow’ or ‘cruel kindness’? The other set of people—increasing in numbers lately—say, It’s about time. Finally. We’re tired of hearing only about the horrors of divorce. We need models to help us do what we want—and need—to be able to do. These listeners invariably have a story about someone they know (it might even be themselves) who fits the definition of the binuclear family. They’d just never put a name to it. They go on to describe some family with this strange relationship where they and their new spouses and all their respective kin spend Thanksgiving or some such holiday together—and everyone seems content.

The good divorce is not an oxymoron. A good divorce is one in which both the adults and children emerge at least as emotionally well as they were before the divorce. Because we have been so inundated with negative stories, divorce immediately carries with it a negative association. Even though we have difficulty conjuring up positive images of divorce, the reality is that most people feel their lives improved after their divorces.

In a good divorce, a family with children remains a family. The family undergoes dramatic and unsettling changes in structure and size, but its functions remain the same. The parents—as they did when they were married—continue to be responsible for the emotional, economic, and physical needs of their children. The basic foundation is that exspouses develop a parenting partnership, one that is sufficiently cooperative to permit the bonds of kinship—with and through their children—to continue.

If people are going to divorce and remarry (and even redivorce) in droves, as by all predictions they are, then structuring a good divorce process, family by family, has become absolutely essential. Our sanctioning the process must be incorporated into our dreams of the good life, not treated as the root cause of all of our social nightmares.

Healthy Language, Normal Families

Sanctioning divorce means, first of all, developing a healthy language in which we can speak about it—words such as binuclear that can reflect images of a healthy, divorced family, rather than words such as broken home. I chose the term binuclear family because I wanted it to parallel nuclear family. Quite simply, I wanted to normalize families of divorce by putting them on the same par as nuclear families.

Because our language for families of divorce is so clouded by negative perceptions, I have chosen not to hyphenate words such as binuclear, exspouse, exhusband, exwife, stepparent, stepkin, stepfamily. The hyphens imply that these words are additions or modifications of other words. In this book these terms are accepted as complete within themselves. Perhaps we’ll feel a bit itchy at first with such a language modification, but—as with any other change in the norm—in time we’ll grow comfortable with it.

The terms exspouse, expartner, and stepparent aren’t perfect, as they pejoratively describe people who lack a relationship and are substitutes for parents, but since they are the terms in common usage, I’ll use them too—with hopes that soon we shall come up with better words.

Eskimos have many words for snow, but we have pitifully few words to describe the relationships that exist between people previously bonded by marriage, now bonded through children. The terms ex, former wife, and former husband are in wide use, but all of these rely on past relationships to define the present. Margaret Mead, in 1971, wrote, The vulgar ‘my ex’ is all that we have to deal with the relationship which may involve twenty years and five children. We should be able to do better—and soon. It is over two decades later and we still haven’t even begun to name these significant relationships. When we do, we will be well on our way to reintegrating a huge, partially disenfranchised portion of society.

To recognize families of divorce as legitimate, we first have to shatter a deeply ingrained myth—the myth that only in a nuclear family can we raise healthy children. Society still sends us the message: "To raise children effectively means they have two heterosexual parents, and only two. Single-parent families, gay and lesbian families, binuclear families, and stepfamilies are all bad and abnormal. The only normal family is the nuclear family."

This nuclearcentric