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Let’s talk about the words we use, because they are doing real damage. Failed marriage. Broken home. Broken family. Torn apart. These are the phrases that attach themselves to divorce like a second verdict — one that follows people long after the legal proceedings are over, seeping into the way they talk about their own lives, the way they explain their families to strangers, the way they lie awake at three in the morning and wonder what it says about them that their marriage

Imagine booking a flight to a country you've never visited. You don't speak the language. You've never read anything about the local customs. You have no itinerary, no map, no sense of the terrain. You just show up at the airport and hope for the best. No one does that. Even the most spontaneous traveler does some preparation — a few searches, a downloaded map, a rough sense of where they're going and what to expect when they arrive. Because going somewhere unfamiliar without

Interviewing adult children who experienced their parents' divorce in childhood is instructive. What If We Just Asked the Kids? We spend a lot of time theorizing about what children of divorce need, what they feel, what they will carry with them into adulthood. Researchers debate it. Therapists write about it. Parents agonize over it in the quiet hours when the house is still. But what if we simply asked them? That's exactly what sociologist and family therapist Constance Ahr

Financial awareness in marriage is a non-negotiable. There is a version of this conversation that only gets had in a divorce attorney's office, and it breaks my heart every time. A spouse — often a woman, though not always — sits across from me and says some version of the same thing: "I don't really know what we have. He handles all of that." Sometimes it's said with a shrug. Sometimes with shame. And sometimes, after years of financial invisibility, it's said with a dawning