In a prominently featured book extract entitled ‘The Divorce Generation’ published in last weekend’s Wall Street Journal, author Susan Gregory-Thomas discusses the impact of divorce on her generation, Generation X. 

Unfortunately, since it is part of a memoir, Gregory Thomas’s article provides a rather narrow account of the issue.

Those belonging to Generation X (defined as being born between 1965 and 1980) were raised during the peak divorce years in the United States. 

As Gregory-Thomas describes it, her childhood, like that of many of her peers, was characterised by inattentive parenting by scarred, deserted mothers; underage drinking, drug use, and even mental illness.

The divorce rate in the United States has declined since its peak in 1980, and the author believes that this is because children of divorce want to avoid their parents’ mistakes. 

(Other possible reasons for the decline, whether immigration from more marriage-inclined cultures, changing religious attitudes, or other causes, are not discussed).  In Susan Gregory-Thomas’s case, she recounts how determined she was to avoid divorce (especially after she had had children) but how she ended up divorcing her husband and father of her children anyway. 

While she feels that she and her husband had a better divorce than her parents did, and her ex-husband is much more involved in the lives of his children, she is still clearly ambivalent and regretful about having divorced. 

It is impossible not to be struck by the sadness of her story, which truly is emblematic of so many late-20th-century American (and not only American) lives.  Perhaps in her book, In Spite of Everything: A Memoir, Gregory-Thomas fleshes out some of the reasons why even though she and her husband ‘did everything right,’ divorce still ‘came.’ 

The passive way she describes divorce as arriving, rather than being willed, reminded me of the way one might describe cancer as ‘coming,’ despite one’s healthy diet and lifestyle.  This deterministic outlook may be understandable; as the child of divorce, Gregory-Thomas writes, ‘I don’t know what makes a good marriage.’ 

But embracing determinism ultimately blinds people to the consequences of their own actions.  Gregory-Thomas’s in-laws, a long-married Catholic couple whose fidelity she clearly respects, told Gregory-Thomas and her husband-to-be not to live together before marriage, but the young couple did not listen, thereby increasing their chances of divorcing. 

Many more couples in recent years have chosen to cohabit but never to marry, despite having children, and these relationships are even less stable than marriages—a point with which Gregory-Thomas fails to engage.