On that note, I share with you two pieces I found recently.
First, a segment from NPR that talks about a museum that honors soured relationships, which is a bittersweet look at breakups.
The other, a much longer read, is this Newsweek article on the first American generation that grew up in divorced households. I believe that my generation of Indians, whose kids will be the first Indian generation of this type, should definitely go through it, because the similarities are amazing.
In the real Valley of the 1970s, families weren't coming together. They were coming apart. We were the "Divorce Generation," latchkey kids raised with after-school specials about broken families and "Kramer vs. Kramer," the 1979 best-picture winner that left kids worrying that their parents would be the next to divorce.
The change had begun in the '60s as the myth of the nuclear family exploded, and my generation was caught in the fallout. The women's rights movement had opened workplace doors to our mothers—more than half of all American women were employed in the late '70s, compared with just 38 percent in 1960—and that, in turn, made divorce a viable option for many wives who would have stayed in lousy marriages for economic reasons. Then in 1969, the year I entered kindergarten, Gov. Ronald Reagan signed California's "no fault" divorce law, allowing couples to unilaterally end a marriage by simply declaring "irreconcilable differences."
Reminds me of this quote from Santayana.
