Yesterday’s post about Kristi, shared how Kristi came to set up her website, Divorce to Happiness and became a divorce coach. In addition to helping people find a new life after divorce, Kristi has another mission and I’ll leave it up to her to explain it:
We have to teach our kids a different way of life so they don’t make the same mistakes we did. I really want parents, especially parents who are divorced, to understand that we have to teach our children the kind of partners to look for, to have a real, long-term marriage. That talk is a relationship talk and it needs to be done, just like a sex talk.
Did anyone ever talk to you when you were growing up about your parents? About the kind of relationship it took to make it for 50 years?
Nobody ever talked to me about that. That wasn’t something anyone wanted to talk about. The first time I talked to my kids about it, they were like,
“Mom, we’re not talking to you about that.”
And I said,
“Well, yes you are because I refuse to let you end up in the same boat your mom and dad are in. So we’re going to talk about this and you’re going to understand a few things. We’re not going to send you off into the big, wide world with no clue how to pick somebody to marry.”
If I’d had some coaching and some guidance as a teenager, there is no way in the world I would have picked the man I picked. We were as opposite as water and oil. They say opposites attract and I think that is very true because it’s the intrigue of figuring out someone who you have no clue how they are. I understand that. But for a long term marriage, that is a really bad choice. By the time you figure out that person has nothing in common with you, it’s five years down the road, you’re married, you don’t do anything together and you have no similar interests except for the three kids you have.
Today’s divorce rate is because we made bad choices in the beginning and we have to teach our children to make good choices. The “hook-ups” of today are not good choices – a hook-up has no strings attached. They don’t have to date, they don’t communicate. They’re not learning anything about a partner. It doesn’t teach them anything about somebody who would be good for them, somebody who will be there when they’re sick, who they can go hang out with on a rainy day, somebody who will help them cook a supper.
I think it needs to be a program in school or a 12-step program for parents to work through with their kids.
I just want the kids to not go through what we went through. I’m blessed that my kids are not completely traumatized by this. Their grades are still good, they’ve managed to survive in a little, bitty town that talked about them constantly and I know I’m blessed. Not every divorce family gets that blessing.
The Divorce Coach Says
I think Kristi is absolutely right – about half of all marriages in the U.S. end in divorce and reducing the divorce rate is the right goal. In my opinion, making divorce harder to get is not the answer but educating our children on how to choose a lifelong partner is.
Many churches do offer ( some require) a pre-marriage counseling program and while I am in favor of this, I don’t think it’s ideal because you’re participating in this, as a couple with a marriage already planned – hardly with an open mind. I like Kristi’s idea of a program in high school because it would give our children a foundation, a decision-making formula for their relationships.
Maybe there’s something be said for arranged marriages – using the collective wisdom of the people who love you the most, to make a lifelong match ? We’ve moved away from that and frown on it, and we’ve swung the other direction leaving it entirely up to the individual (or at least that was how it was for me). Maybe there is a happy medium?
One resource I’ve come across, is The Hard Questions – 100 Essential Questions to Ask Before You Say ‘I Do’, by Susan Piver (Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 2000). She wrote this based on her own divorce and subsequent second marriage. I’m going to try and get my 17 YO to read it.
This is the last post in Kristi’s series. I want to thank Kristi for sharing her story and for her work to make divorce easier. You can follow Kristi on Twitter at @DivorcetoHappy, on Facebook and at her Divorce to Happiness website and blog.
Photo credit: //www.flickr.com/photos/belisacupcakes/ / CC BY-NC 2.0