The Divorce Generation Grows Up

It's been more than a quarter century since the Grant High class of '82 donned tuxes and taffeta and danced to Styx's "Come Sail Away" at the senior prom, and nearly four decades have passed since no-fault divorce laws began spreading across the country. In our parents' generation, marriage was still the most powerful social force. In ours, it was divorce. My 44-year-old classmates and I have watched divorce morph from something shocking, even shameful, into a routine fact of American life.

But while it may be a common occurrence, divorce remains a profound experience for those who've lived through it. Researchers have churned out all sorts of depressing statistics about the impact of divorce. Each year, about 1 million children watch their parents split, triple the number in the '50s. These children are twice as likely as their peers to get divorced themselves and more likely to have mental-health problems, studies show. While divorce rates have been dropping—off from their 1981 peak to just 3.6 per 1,000 people in 2006—marriage has also declined sharply, falling to 7.3 per 1,000 people in 2006 from 10.6 in 1970. Sociologists decry a growing "marriage gap" in which the well educated and better paid are staying married, while the poor are still getting divorced (people with college degrees are half as likely to be divorced or separated as their less-educated peers). And the younger you marry, the more likely you are to get divorced.

Yet all these statistics fail to show the very personal impact of divorce on the individual, or how those effects can change over a lifetime as children of divorce start families of their own. When we were growing up, divorce loomed as the ultimate threat to innocence, but what were my peers' feelings about it now that they were adults? What I wanted to know was how divorce had affected our class president and Miss Congeniality, the stoners and the valedictorian. Did it leave them with emotional scars that never healed, or did they go on to lead "normal" lives? Did they wind up in divorce court, or did they achieve the domestic bliss their parents had sought in suburbia? I decided to open my yearbook, pick up the phone and find out. These are their stories—or at least their side of their stories, since each breakup is perceived so differently by every family member.

Grant High School was built in 1959 to educate the first wave of the Valley's baby boomers; by the time I arrived in 1978 the school had more than 3,000 students. With its low-slung buildings and long hallways of orange-painted lockers, it's the kind of campus you've seen in a hundred movies—think "Fast Times at Ridgemont High." My best friend at Grant was Chris Kohnhorst, who, like me, was editor of the student paper, the Odyssey. I'd met Chris in fifth grade, when we bonded over our identical "Fat Albert" lunchboxes. He was the first kid I can remember encountering whose parents were divorced. His mother was a teacher and his father was an actor (to this day I rib him about his dad's guest appearance on "The Bionic Woman"). They'd separated in 1970, when Chris was in first grade. "The rift that split them eventually split up three children as well, as my older brother went to live with my father during high school and my younger sister and I stayed with our mom," Chris says. (Along with new divorce laws, custody rulings changed in the '70s—no longer was it de facto that kids would stay with their mothers—and that led to a whole new round of conflict in broken families.)

In seventh grade, Chris and I entered junior high and took an ancient-history class taught by his mother. We called her Mrs. Kohnhorst, though we wouldn't call her that for long: during the semester she married another divorced teacher and became Mrs. Hannum. Chris kept his father's last name and tried to avoid discussing the new family arrangement. Simple things, like filling out enrollment cards, "became opportunities to feel stigmatized," he says. "Every new form was another chance for me to suffer a minor psychological trauma. Scandalized, I wondered who was reading the cards and pondering why I had parents with two different last names," Chris says. "There were the questions in my mind of whom I would list as my father—my dad or my mother's new husband? Would it be an insult to my dad if I wrote down my stepfather's name?"

Shame and isolation. Those were familiar feelings to many of our friends. When Josh Gruenberg's parents separated for a time in 1977 and his mother left the house, he didn't tell anyone—not even his best friend, whose parents were divorced themselves. "I tried to keep it a secret from him because I was so embarrassed," says Josh, whose father was an English teacher at Grant and divorced his mother several years later. "It had to do with this idea that we were the perfect family, and I didn't want that to fall apart."