The Divorce Generation Grows Up

Mic signed the divorce papers several months ago, and his 6-year-old daughter splits her time between her parents. "Obviously when we told her that Mom was moving out, she was not happy with that. But young children adapt more easily," he says. "One day I was taking her and her little friend to school and they were having a discussion in the back seat about divorce and what it meant. It was unbelievable in my mind." Mic didn't bounce back as quickly as his daughter seems to have. Over mojitos one night, he tells me how he's been talking a lot with our friend David Selig's mom, divorcé to divorcée. He says it's tough being back on the market at 44. Mic took up long-distance running to clear his head during the darkest days of the divorce, dropped 20 pounds, and is now more fit than when he and David won citywide honors for doubles tennis at Grant. But it's not hard to see he'd trade the six-pack abs and single life to have a good relationship.

Becoming suddenly single in middle age wasn't part of the plan for my fellow valedictorian Bonnie Pollack. Her childhood was unscarred by divorce—her parents just celebrated their 50th anniversary—and she approached marriage with the same levelheadedness that had made her a star pupil. She met her husband when they were both doctoral students in psychology, but waited to get married until she was 33. "We knew we were very compatible. We shared the same values, we knew each other well, and we communicated very well compared to many couples I have known," she says.

It turns out that students of psychology are as fragile as the rest of us. For more than two years the couple had been trying to adopt a child from Kazakhstan, and finally the moment was about to arrive. That's when Bonnie says her husband told her he couldn't go through with it, and wasn't sure he was in love with her anymore.

The legal part of the breakup was civil: the couple opted for what's called a "collaborative divorce" (a method in which lawyers for each party, often in conjunction with other consultants like financial advisers and psychologists, work as a team with the couple to craft a settlement). The psychological fallout for Bonnie wasn't so manageable. "My best friend, my lover, my companion was gone. The baby was gone. My career was gone, because I had willingly taken myself off the high-powered career track of an organizational psychologist," Bonnie says. "I was 40 and I had no role, I had no place, I had no identity. And it ripped me to the core." Her mother helped pick up the pieces, moving to Oakland, Calif., for a short time to live with Bonnie, while her dad held down the fort in Reno. She nagged Bonnie to take hip-hop dance classes to restore her social life, and her friend Barbara, who had been her maid of honor, nudged her to date again and re-establish her career. It's taken three-and-a-half years, but Bonnie has managed to start over. "I'm a stronger person and I'm certainly a wiser person because of this," she says. "But I'm also a more jaded person, and that's the really ugly side effect."

Another ugly side effect, according to the research, is that divorce can be passed from generation to generation, like some kind of genetic defect, with children of divorce becoming divorcés themselves. Some of my classmates fell into this category. Tonju Francois married when she was 28 and got divorced six years later, in part, she says, because her husband didn't want to have kids (he already had children from a prior marriage). "I loved being married, and it devastated me when it ended," she says. Elyse Oliver got married when she was 25 and divorced four years later. "I guess I just didn't know what to do in a relationship," she says. Now remarried, Elyse says she's determined not to let her 15-year-old daughter act out in the same ways she did: no sex before marriage, and don't even think of living with a boyfriend if you want me to pay for a wedding, she warns.

Other classmates chose to avoid marriage altogether. When she was 26, Deborah Cronin had a daughter, Sharayah, but didn't think marriage with the girl's father was the right thing for her. "I didn't want to get divorced like my parents did," she says. So she left him in Lake Tahoe when her daughter was a year old and moved back to the Valley to be closer to her family. She got a job as a secretary and as a single mom was living a life similar to her mother's. "I began to understand my mom in a way I hadn't before," she says. Smiling at her daughter, who's now 17, Deborah adds, "My mother did a very good job in raising me."