[throwarerain]

Also, while I'm certainly jealous of people raised in ~~married~~ divorced households, I don't blame them in the slightest for not having much of a sense of how the other half lives. The only way to know is to live through it, and I wouldn't wish that on anyone.

As someone who spent their childhood wishing their parents would get a divorce already, I felt like I was in an upside down world reading your comment.

- I have never in my life gone to my parents for emotional support. They would come to me to tell me how horrible the other parent or my siblings were. And I was constantly tending to my siblings after they had been upset by my parents. Plus the normal things I heard them argue about, mostly my father stressed about losing his job and my mother spending too much money.

- I was constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop via 1) one of them directly blows up at me 2) blow up at each other and then take it out on me 3) blow up at my siblings, who would then take it out on me.

- We didn't take holidays, but even them driving together to the dentist was extremely stressful as they were guaranteed to start fighting over nothing (see above point).

- There were no logistical nightmares because we all lived in the same house. No argument there.

- I assumed they stayed together not because they cared about us, but for the same reason they treated us like burdens to kick when they were down: their culture taught them that a certain hierarchy and structure in life was more important than stupid American values like happiness, especially the happiness of children. Also my mother couldn't financially support herself without my father's income.

And, yes, there was almost no physical aspect to this unhappiness for me. My older sibling, who did suffer physical abuse, said that, both growing up and to this day, they preferred it to all the emotional injuries.

Much as you may idealise married households, perhaps I'm idealising divorced ones. If my parents had divorced, maybe I would have written your comment.

[skissane]

I remember reading a paper which argued that the impact of divorce on children is determined by pre-divorce family functioning level. Children in low-functioning families often experience parental divorce as a relief, it removes them from conflict/violence/abuse/harm, and it can have a positive impact on their lives; by contrast, in high-functioning families, the parents do a good job of hiding their marital issues from their children, and the children often experience divorce as an unexpected, even traumatic, event, which disrupts the stability of their world, and can produce lasting (even lifelong) psychological harm. I think using that model is a good way of integrating the kinds of contrary experiences expressed in this thread.

If divorce laws were written to put the welfare of children first, they’d make divorce easy for the first kind of family and difficult for the second. However, I don’t think children’s welfare is really a priority for most contemporary divorce laws.

[bbgtpm]

My heart breaks for you and your siblings, I'm so terribly sorry. I wonder if a better delineation might be "broken" households (divorced or not) versus functional/happy ones.

One thing I didn't mention is that as kids growing up in broken households, we often have no frame of reference so our lives feel "normal", and it's only later in life that we piece together the damage our narcissistic parents have wrought. It sounds like this may not have been the case for you and your siblings though - extremely curious as to how you see it and how your perspective has changed over time (if at all).