Surviving Divorce Quotes

He’d seen combat and had been through two divorces, hadn’t thought of himself as a fearful man. But that was ten minutes ago.

To live factionless Is not just to live in poverty and discomfort; it is to live divorced from society, separated from the most important thing in life: community. My mother once told me that we can’t survive alone,but even if we could, we wouldn’t want to. Without a faction, we have no purpose and no reason to live.

Removing someone out of your life Can hurt like a knife, But sometimes, it may be the only way for you to survive.

A relationship is like a bird: If you set it free, it will thrive. If you put it in a cage, it will struggle to survive.

A divorce is like an amputation, you survive but there's less of you.

I have found the best way to deal with a toxic person is to not respond in any other way than monotone voice and a businesslike manner.

What cracks had he left in their hearts? Did they love less now and settle for less in return, as they held onto parts of themselves they did not want to give and lose again? Or - and he wished this - did they love more fully because they had survived pain, so no longer feared it?

Dear ignorance, I’m disowning you. Dear knowledge, I’m wooing you. Dear understanding, I’m seeking you. Dear wisdom, I’m wedding you. Dear fear, I’m divorcing you. Dear courage, I’m courting you. Dear hope, I’m pursuing you. Dear love, I’m marrying you. Dear past, I survived you. Dear present, I’m ready for you. Dear future, I’m longing for you. Dear destiny, I’m coming for you.

If you're as detached as that, why does the obsolete institution of marriage survive with you?" Oh, it still has its uses. One couldn't be divorced without it.

Let go of all your hurts and be healed.

You can't compare men or women with mental disorders to the normal expectations of men and women in without mental orders. Your dealing with symptoms and until you understand that you will always try to find sane explanations among insane behaviors. You will always have unreachable standards and disappointments. If you want to survive in a marriage to someone that has a disorder you have to judge their actions from a place of realistic expectations in regards to that person's upbringing and diagnosis.

I thought the world had actually ended. I thought nothing good could ever happen again. I thought anything might happen if I wasn't vigilant. I didn't eat. I didn't go out. I didn't want to see anyone. But I survived, Paul. Much to my own surprise, I got through it. And life...well, gradually became livable again.

We all face difficult times. It is only the grace of God that gives strength to endure.

When people think of food stamps they don't envision someone like me, someone plain faced and white, someone like the girl they'd known in highschool, someone who'd been quiet but nice, someone like a neighbor, someone like them. Maybe that made them too nervous about their own situation. Maybe they saw in me the chance of their own fragile circumstances, that with one lost job, one divorce, they'd be in the same place as me.

You are the gatekeeper to your life and your home. You get to decide who or what comes in and what needs to stay out. If it doesn't contribute to the peaceful home you are now trying to have, then it should stay out.

The sorrow for the dead is the only sorrow from which we refuse to be divorced. Every other wound we seek to heal - every other affliction to forget; but this wound we consider it a duty to keep open - this affliction we cherish and brood over in solitude. Where is the mother who would willingly forget the infant that perished like a blossom from her arms, though every recollection is a pang? Where is the child that would willingly forget the most tender of parents, though to remember be but to lament? Who, even in the hour of agony, would forget the friend over whom he mourns? Who, even when the tomb is closing upon the remains of her he most loved, when he feels his heart, as it were, crushed in the closing of its portal, would accept of consolation that must be bought by forgetfulness? No, the love which survives the tomb is one of the noblest attributes of the soul. If it has its woes, it has likewise its delights; and when the overwhelming burst of grief is calmed into the gentle tear of recollection, when the sudden anguish and the convulsive agony over the present ruins of all that we most loved are softened away in pensive meditation on all that it was in the days of its loveliness - who would root out such a sorrow from the heart? Though it may sometimes throw a passing cloud over the bright hour of gaiety, or spread a deeper sadness over the hour of gloom, yet who would exchange it even for the song of pleasure, or the burst of revelry? No, there is a voice from the tomb sweeter than song. There is a remembrance of the dead to which we turn even from the charms of the living. Oh, the grave! The grave! It buries every error - covers every defect - extinguishes every resentment! From its peaceful bosom spring none but fond regrets and tender recollections.

What happens to us are tiny matters compared to us response to any situation.

I became a student of my own depressed experience, trying to unthread its causes. What was the root of all this despair? Was it psychological? (Was it Mom and Dad's fault?( Was it just temporal, a 'bad time' in my life? (When the divorce ends will the depression end with it?) Was it genetic? (Melancholy, called by many names, has run through my family for generations, along with its sad bride, Alcoholism.) Was it cultural? (Is this just the fallout of postfeminist American career girl trying to find balance in an increasingly stressful alienting urban world?) Was it astrological? (Am I so sad because I'm a thin-skinned Cancer whose major signs are all ruled by unstable Gemini?) Was it artistic? (Don't creative people always suffer from depression because we're so supersensitive and special?) Was it evolutionary? (Do I carry in me the residual panic that comes after millennia of my species' attempting to survive a brutal world?) Was it karmic? (Are all these spasms of grief just the consequences of bad behavior in previous lifetimes, the last obstacles before liberation?) Was it hormonal? Dietary? Philosophical? Seasonal? Environmental? Was I tapping into a universal yearning for God? Did I have a chemical imbalance? Or did I just need to get laid?

Does it count as staying if leaving is always on the mind? How much lying does a marriage need to survive?

With perseverance and endurance you can survive any storm.

In any situation, listen and follow the first instinct, the sacred inner voice.

Even the Thanksgiving when her parents had just divorced, Hoosier Pie made the cut. ...They also, incidentally, made a pumpkin pie, but it fell on the floor, a classic example of survival of the fittest

Indeed, it is the nature of intelligent life to climb mountains, to strive to stand on ever higher ground to gaze farther into the distance. It is a drive completely divorced from the demands of survival.

This is the violence that captures our fear and attention, even though only 20 percent of all homicides are committed by strangers. The other 80 percent are committed by people we know, so I’ll focus on those we hire, those we work with, those we fire, those we date, those we marry, those we divorce.

The end of my marriage meant the end of fighting for something I believed in: my commitment to God to stay faithfully married until death, no matter the circumstances.

Angelo and I had the nastiest “deaf fights” where instead of speaking, we mouthed the words—“Fuck you” or “I want a divorce”—because we didn’t want the baby to be any more upset than she already was.

There are two basic coping mechanisms. One consists of dreading the chaos, fighting it and abusing oneself after losing, building a structured life of work/marriage/gym/reunions/children/depression/affair/divorce/alcoholism/recovery/heart attack, in which every decision is a reaction against the fear of the worst (make children to avoid being forgotten, fuck someone at the reunion in case the opportunity never comes again, and the Holy Grail of paradoxes: marry to combat loneliness, then plunge into that constant marital desire to be alone). This is the life that cannot be won, but it does offer the comforts of battle—the human heart is content when distracted by war. “The second mechanism is an across-the-board acceptance of the absurd all around us. Everything that exists, from consciousness to the digestive workings of the human body to sound waves and bladeless fans, is magnificently unlikely. It seems so much likelier that things would not exist at all and yet the world shows up to class every morning as the cosmos takes attendance. Why combat the unlikeliness? This is the way to survive in this world, to wake up in the morning and receive a cancer diagnosis, discover that a man has murdered forty children, discover that the milk has gone sour, and exclaim, 'How unlikely! Yet here we are,' and have a laugh, and swim in the chaos, swim without fear, swim without expectation but always with an appreciation of every whim, the beauty of screwball twists and jerks that pump blood through our emaciated veins.

He spent two decades wandering the wilderness, overmedicated, set upon by the tax man, divorce lawyers, everything but a rain of toads. There were more fights and pills and liquor and car crashes and women and discharge of firearms—accidental and on purpose—than a mortal man could be expected to survive, but he played.

Scientific advancement carries risk,” Kohler argued. “It always has. Space programs, genetic research, medicine—they all make mistakes. Science needs to survive its own blunders, at any cost. For everyone’s sake.” Vittoria was amazed at Kohler’s ability to weigh moral issues with scientific detachment. His intellect seemed to be the product of an icy divorce from his inner spirit. “You think CERN is so critical to the earth’s future that we should be immune from moral responsibility?

To realize the value of 1 week, ask an editor of a weekly newspaper. To realize the value of 10 years, ask a newly divorced couple. To realize the value of 4 years, ask a graduate. To realize the value of 1 year, ask a student who has failed their final exam. To realize the value of 9 months, ask a mother who has given birth to a stillborn. To realize the value of 1 mont, ask a mother who has given birth prematurely. To realize the value of 1 minute, ask a person who missed the train, bus or plane. To realize the value of 1 second, ask a person who has survived an accident. To realize the value of freedom ask a person who's in prison. To realize the value of success, ask a person who has failed. To realize the value of a friend, relative, family member or partner, LOSE ONE." Time waits for no-one, treasure every split-second.

Every sacred marriage will survive all times with great love and patient commitment.

Divorce is a death. It is the death of a relationship. It is the death of your dreams. You have to start all over.

Isolating yourself from those you love will only cause unnecessary breakdowns in your relationships, perhaps even to the point of divorce.

I survived a divorce, no children and come to Paris three days per week. My cat ran away on a love adventure; don't know when he will be back.

A divorce is like an amputation, you survive but there’s less of you.

Recently, evolutionary psychologist have turned their sights on love and divorce. It didn´t take long to notice that when people fall in love, there´s period of up to three years during which the zeal and infatuation ride at a peak. The internal signals in the body and breain are literally a love drug. And then it beginds to decline. From this perspective, we are preprogramed to lose interest in a sexual partner after the time required to raise a child has passed – which is, on average, about 4 years. In psychologist Helen Fisher´s view, the internally generated love drug love drug is simply an efficient mechanism to get men and women to stick together long enough to increase the survival likehood of their young.

It is better to conquer yourself than to win a thousand battles. Then the victory is yours. It cannot be taken from you, not by angels or by demons, heaven or hell. —Siddhartha Buddha,

I took on my depression like it was the fight of my life, wich of course, it was. I became a student of my own depressed experience, trying to unthread its causes. What was the root of all this dispair? Was it psychological? (Mom and Dad's fault?) Was it just temporal, a "bad time" in my life? (When the divorce ends, will the depression end with it?) Was it genetic? (Melancholy, called by many names, has run through my family for generations, along with its sad bride, Alcholisme.) Was it cultural? (Is this just the fallout of a postfeminist American career girl trying to find balance in an increasingly stressful and alienating urban world?) Was it astrological? (Am I so sad because I'm a thin-skinned cancer whose major signs are all ruled by unstable Gemini?) Was it artistic? (Don't creative people always suffer from depression because we're so supersensitive and special?) Was it evolutionary? (Do I carry in me the residual panic that come after millennia of my species' attempting to survive a brutal world?) Was it Karmic? (Are all these spasms of grief just the consequences of bad behavior in previous lifetimes, the last obstacles before liberation?) Was it hormonal? Dietary? Philosophical? Seasonal? Environmental? Did I have a chemical imbalance? Or did I just need to get laid?

But there shouldn’t be a clash between “God’s Truth” and “more loving.” In the Bible, Truth and Love are two sides of the same coin. You can’t have one without the other. God’s Truth is all about God’s Love for us and the Love we ought to have for one another. We are being untrue to that Truth if we treat people unlovingly. And we are missing out on the full extent of that Love if we try to divorce it from Ultimate Truth. We Christians must work to repair this schism in the church. If the church is to survive much longer in our culture, it must teach and model the Christianity of Jesus—a faith that combines Truth and Love in the person of Jesus Christ, revealed to us in the Bible and lived out in the everyday lives of his followers. That is what we say we believe. It’s time we start acting like it.

Indeed, it is the nature of intelligent life to climb mountains. They all want to stand on ever higher ground to gaze ever farther into the distance. It is a drive completely divorced from the demands of survival.

Oh, there had been divorced Presidents, even, late in the twentieth century, one who had survived a White House divorce to the extent of being re-elected. Of course old Gus Time hadn't made any mistake in the marital department. Sixty years of wedded bliss. The grin came and went. Old fox! They said when he was in his early twenties and so new in Washington he still smacked of the boondocks, he had cast his eyes around all the Washington wives: he picked Senator Black's wife Olive for her beauty, her brains, her organizational genius and her relish of public life, then simply stole her from the Senator. It worked, though she was thirteen years older than he. She was the greatest First Lady the country had ever known. But behind the scenes - Oh man, what a tartar! Not that he had ever heard old Gus complain. The public lion was perfectly content to be a private mouse. Gus do this, Gus don't do that - and he was so lost when she died that he abandoned Washington the moment her funeral was over, went to live in his home state of Iowa and died himself not two months later.

Alcenith Crawford (a divorced ophthalmologist): "We women doctors have un-happy marriages because in our minds we are the superstars of our families. Having survived the hardship of medical school we expect to reap our rewards at home. We had to assert ourselves against all odds and when we finally graduate there are few shrinking violets amongst us. It takes a special man to be able to cope. Men like to feel important and be the undisputed head of the family. A man does not enjoy waiting for his wife while she performs life-saving operations. He expects her and their children to revolve around his needs, not the other way. But we have become accustomed to giving orders in hospitals and having them obeyed. Once home, it's difficult to adjust. Moreover, we often earn more than our husbands. It takes a generous and exceptional man to forgive all that.

The entire page of data had been innocuous, except for the inversion—the Rebirth Principle, Eli had called it, a re-creation of self. It wasn’t necessarily positive, or even voluntary, but always marked, and Flinch ticked off that box with a bold red check. In the wake of his trauma, everything about his life had changed. Not subtle changes, either, but full flips. He went from being married with three kids to being divorced, unemployed, and under a restraining order. His survival—or revival, rather—should have been cause for celebration, for joy. Instead, everything and everyone had fled.

it is the nature of intelligent life to climb mountains. They all want to stand on ever higher ground to gaze ever farther into the distance. It is a drive completely divorced from the demands of survival. Had you, for example, been only concerned with staying alive, you would have fled from this mountain as fast and far as you could. Instead, you chose to come and climb it. The reason evolution bestows all intelligent life with a desire to climb higher is far more profound than more base needs, even though we still do not understand its real purpose. Mountains are universal and we are all standing at the feet of mountains.

Suicide among gay teens is one of the highest suicide rates of any group. People don’t commit suicide for other “sins.” No one kills themselves so they can continue getting baseless divorces, or to gossip or steal. People commit suicide when a fundamental part of who they are is being destroyed, and it is better to not be alive than to be a hollow shell.

Divorce is always experienced as a failure. It threatens a person’s self-image of being good, being loved, being valued.” But, he adds, it is out of failure that a person often finds the inner strength to grow and attain major achievements in life. “A lot of people make a big contribution to society out of their own suffering,” he says. “A crisis forces change.

Romantic literature often presents the individual as somebody caught in a struggle against the state and the market. Nothing could be further from the truth. The state and the market are the mother and father of the individual, and the individual can survive only thanks to them. The market provides us with work, insurance and a pension. If we want to study a profession, the government’s schools are there to teach us. If we want to open a business, the bank loans us money. If we want to build a house, a construction company builds it and the bank gives us a mortgage, in some cases subsidised or insured by the state. If violence flares up, the police protect us. If we are sick for a few days, our health insurance takes care of us. If we are debilitated for months, social security steps in. If we need around-the-clock assistance, we can go to the market and hire a nurse – usually some stranger from the other side of the world who takes care of us with the kind of devotion that we no longer expect from our own children. If we have the means, we can spend our golden years at a senior citizens’ home. The tax authorities treat us as individuals, and do not expect us to pay the neighbours’ taxes. The courts, too, see us as individuals, and never punish us for the crimes of our cousins. Not only adult men, but also women and children, are recognised as individuals. Throughout most of history, women were often seen as the property of family or community. Modern states, on the other hand, see women as individuals, enjoying economic and legal rights independently of their family and community. They may hold their own bank accounts, decide whom to marry, and even choose to divorce or live on their own. But the liberation of the individual comes at a cost. Many of us now bewail the loss of strong families and communities and feel alienated and threatened by the power the impersonal state and market wield over our lives. States and markets composed of alienated individuals can intervene in the lives of their members much more easily than states and markets composed of strong families and communities. When neighbours in a high-rise apartment building cannot even agree on how much to pay their janitor, how can we expect them to resist the state? The deal between states, markets and individuals is an uneasy one. The state and the market disagree about their mutual rights and obligations, and individuals complain that both demand too much and provide too little. In many cases individuals are exploited by markets, and states employ their armies, police forces and bureaucracies to persecute individuals instead of defending them. Yet it is amazing that this deal works at all – however imperfectly. For it breaches countless generations of human social arrangements. Millions of years of evolution have designed us to live and think as community members. Within a mere two centuries we have become alienated individuals. Nothing testifies better to the awesome power of culture.

With our faith in our community of two or more, we can go anywhere.When the three roots of faith, practice, and community support have fed us deeply, then we will be solid both alone and in our relationships. We will not just survive; we will flourish. Often in our daily lives, we are just focused on survival. But fidelity is not a question of survival. It is one of vitality.

Scientology doesn’t exactly put a premium on the sanctity of marriage. Or on relationships between parents and children, for that matter. The church demands that rather than placing value in your own future or your future as a married couple, or a family, you place value and focus only back to Scientology. Divorce is rampant among church and Sea Org members, as is the dissolution of families.

So this summer, this first summer when he was allowed to have “visitation rights” with his father, with the divorce only one month old, Brian was heading north. His father was a mechanical engineer who had designed or invented a new drill bit for oil drilling, a self-cleaning, self-sharpening bit. He was working in the oil fields of Canada, up on the tree line where the tundra started and the forests ended. Brian was riding up from New York with some drilling equipment—it was lashed down in the rear of the plane next to a fabric bag the pilot had called a survival pack, which had emergency supplies in case they had to make an emergency landing—that had to be specially made in the city, riding in the bushplane with the pilot named Jim or Jake or something who had turned out to be an all right guy, letting him fly and all.

If you’re the person who had to file for divorce, don’t accept the Bad Guy status your kids and your cheating ex may try to inflict on you. Chumps are often people pleasers who don’t want to let anyone down (despite being grievously let down themselves). Please don’t assume responsibility for your partner’s cheating. Divorce is a consequence. You break the rules, you pay the consequences. Even a fourth-grader understands that. Although it’s terrifically sad that they ever have to.

One of the few stable statistics in our fast-changing world is our rate of divorce, which has hovered between 40 and 50 percent for the last thirty years. Any two people who marry face a grim 50 to 60 percent chance of survival. And if that weren’t sobering enough, one needs to ask further: Of those who remain together, how many do so happily, as opposed to those who stay for external reasons, like their children, finances, religion, or fatigue? Conservatively, we can estimate that at least one out of three, perhaps one out of two, of those couples left standing do not relish their lives together.

The 'instructions' received by our military and political leaders for contriving atomic, bacterial, and chemical means of total human extermination have the same psychological status as the messages recorded by the Xosa girl: they are self-induced hallucinations that wantonly defy all the historic precepts of human experience. The fact that these dreams have been put forward under the pseudo-rational garb of advanced theoretic science and justified as a measure for national 'survival' does not disguise their bottomless malignity and irrationality, with its complete divorce from even an animal's instinct for self-preservation. But unlike the pitiable mistake of the Xosa, the colossal kind of error, or 'accident,' that the Pentagon and the Kremlin have already neatly set the fuse for, would be beyond redemption.

Yes, I am imperfect and vulnerable and sometimes afraid, but that doesn’t change the truth that I am also brave and worthy of love and belonging. This definition is based on these fundamental ideals: Love and belonging are irreducible needs of all men, women, and children. We’re hardwired for connection—it’s what gives purpose and meaning to our lives. The absence of love, belonging, and connection always leads to suffering. If you roughly divide the men and women I’ve interviewed into two groups—those who feel a deep sense of love and belonging, and those who struggle for it—there’s only one variable that separates the groups: Those who feel lovable, who love, and who experience belonging simply believe they are worthy of love and belonging. They don’t have better or easier lives, they don’t have fewer struggles with addiction or depression, and they haven’t survived fewer traumas or bankruptcies or divorces, but in the midst of all of these struggles, they have developed practices that enable them to hold on to the belief that they are worthy of love, belonging, and even joy. A strong belief in our worthiness doesn’t just happen—it’s cultivated when we understand the guideposts as choices and daily practices. The main concern of Wholehearted men and women is living a life defined by courage, compassion, and connection. The Wholehearted identify vulnerability as the catalyst for courage, compassion, and connection. In fact, the willingness to be vulnerable emerged as the single clearest value shared by all of the women and men whom I would describe as Wholehearted. They attribute everything—from their professional success to their marriages to their proudest parenting moments—to their ability to be vulnerable.

We can also increase the perceived long term value by the way we describe our emails. Nowadays many businesses mention a newsletter on their website, but the phrase ‘newsletter’ doesn’t have any implied value in it. In fact the word ‘news’ is probably something you don’t want to hear from a potential supplier. Who cares whether Mary in accounts has had a birthday? What you would like to get is useful, valuable information. So instead of calling it an email newsletter, I call mine ‘client winning tips via email’. Or you could call it a ‘divorce survival bulletin’. Or ‘the cash flow accelerator emails’ or ‘tax cutting tips’. Each of these names implies some kind of value or outcome your potential subscribers will get from your emails. To come up with a good name, go back to your customer insight map for your ideal clients and look at the big problems, challenges, goals and aspirations your clients have. If you can name your emails to relate to those big goals and problems then they’re likely to see they’ll get value by subscribing to them.

It’s a fallacy that this generation does not know how to love as its predecessor did. Truth of the matter is, modern love is a constantly moving target. In fact, it’s moving at the fastest pace than our predecessors ever had to deal with. It’s flying at the speed of a fighter jet. To keep up with it you have to constantly be evolving, and that means being constantly in touch with your own sensuality. Our ultimate survival lies in our sensuality. Period.

I know that my buddy Jorgeson was a real American hero. I wish that he had lived to be something else, if not a painter of pictures then even some kind of fuckup with a factory job and four divorces, bankruptcy petitions, in and out of jail. I wish he had been that. I wish he had been anything rather than a real American hero.

I don't know why divorce happens, but it does. Embracing it means stepping into the unknown future with a known God and trusting that He will be with you the entire way.

To live factionless is not just to live in poverty and discomfort; it is to live divorced from society, separated from the most important thing in life: community. My mother told me once that we can’t survive alone, but even if we could, we wouldn’t want to. Without a faction, we have no purpose and no reason to live.

His book For Whom the Bell Tolls was an instant success in the summer of 1940, and afforded him the means to live in style at his villa outside of Havana with his new wife Mary Welsh, whom he married in 1946. It was during this period that he started getting headaches and gaining weight, frequently becoming depressed. Being able to shake off his problems, he wrote a series of books on the Land, Air and Sea, and later wrote The Old Man and the Sea for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in May 1954. Hemingway on a trip to Africa where he barely survived two successive airplane crashes. Returning to Cuba, Ernest worked reshaping the recovered work and wrote his memoir, A Moveable Feast. He also finished True at First Light and The Garden of Eden. Being security conscious, he stored his works in a safe deposit box at a bank in Havana. His home Finca Vigía had become a hub for friends and even visiting tourists. It was reliably disclosed to me that he frequently enjoyed swinger’s parties and orgies at his Cuban home. In Spain after divorcing Frank Sinatra Hemingway introduced Ava Gardner to many of the bullfighters he knew and in a free for all, she seduced many of hotter ones. After Ava Gardner’s affair with the famous Spanish bullfighter Luis Miguel Dominguín crashed, she came to Cuba and stayed at Finca Vigía, where she had what was termed to be a poignant relationship with Ernest. Ava Gardner swam nude in the pool, located down the slope from the Hemingway house, after which he told his staff that the water was not to be emptied. An intimate friendship grew between Hemingway’s forth and second wife, Mary and Pauline. Pauline often came to Finca Vigia, in the early 1950s, and likewise Mary made the crossing of the Florida Straits, back to Key West several times. The ex-wife and the current wife enjoyed gossiping about their prior husbands and lovers and had choice words regarding Ernest. In 1959, Hemingway was in Cuba during the revolution, and was delighted that Batista, who owned the nearby property, that later became the location of the dismal Pan Americana Housing Development, was overthrown. He shared the love of fishing with Fidel Castro and remained on good terms with him. Reading the tea leaves, he decided to leave Cuba after hearing that Fidel wanted to nationalize the properties owned by Americans and other foreign nationals. In the summer of 1960, while working on a manuscript for Life magazine, Hemingway developed dementia becoming disorganized and confused. His eyesight had been failing and he became despondent and depressed. On July 25, 1960, he and his wife Mary left Cuba for the last time. He never retrieved his books or the manuscripts that he left in the bank vault. Following the Bay of Pigs Invasion, the Cuban government took ownership of his home and the works he left behind, including an estimated 5,000 books from his personal library. After years of neglect, his home, which was designed by the Spanish architect Miguel Pascual y Baguer in 1886, has now been largely restored as the Hemingway Museum. The museum, overlooking San Francisco de Paula, as well as the Straits of Florida in the distance, houses much of his work as well as his boat housed near his pool.

It is. It’s a psychological phenomenon common in governments, business organizations, and political parties; a culture of conformity that discourages independent thinking and disagreement. Anyone who challenges the consensus of the greater body, regardless of how valid that challenge might be, is considered disloyal. This produces deviant outcomes. People thinking they are always right, everyone else is wrong, and their logic is unassailable, no matter how divorced from reality it might be.

Matthew said, “Torrance is claiming his wife obtained an ex parte divorce that is not a binding one. According to him, they were still married at the time of her death. Under Florida law, and as a surviving spouse, he now intends to elect a statutory share of her estate. At least, that’s what Mrs. Donovan told me.” “You understand I can neither affirm nor deny that.” “Of course. You’re aware, though, that in Florida, the statutory share is thirty percent of the fair market value of the net estate.” “Yes, I’m aware of that,” D’Allessandro said. “The major part of Willa Torrance’s

With no step-by-step guidance or role models, I had stumbled and fallen and picked myself up. I had survived. I had thrived. All along, I had moved one day at a time, one considered step followed by another, one morning followed by another night. Each day had been an improvement from the day before.

Human males, too, form alliances for gaining resources such as large game, political power within the group, ways to defend against the aggression of other coalitions of men, and sexual access to women.7 The survival and reproductive benefits derived from these coalitional activities constituted tremendous selection pressure over human evolutionary history for men to form alliances with other men. Since ancestral women did not hunt large game, declare war on other tribes, or attempt to forcibly capture men from neighboring bands, they did not experience equivalent selection pressure to form coalitions. Although women do form coalitions with other women for the care of the young and for protection from sexually aggressive men, these are weakened whenever a woman leaves her kin group to live with her husband and his clan. The combination of strong coalitions among men and somewhat weaker coalitions among women, according to Barbara Smuts, may have contributed historically to men’s dominance over women.9 My view is that women’s preferences for a successful, ambitious, and resource-capable mate coevolved with men’s competitive mating strategies, which include risk taking, status striving, derogation of competitors, coalition formation, and an array of individual efforts aimed at surpassing other men on the dimensions that women desire. The intertwining of these coevolved mechanisms in men and women created the conditions for men to dominate in the domain of resources. The origins of men’s control over resources is not simply an incidental historical footnote of passing curiosity. Rather, it has a profound bearing on the present, because it reveals some of the primary causes of men’s continuing control of resources. Women today continue to want men who have resources, and they continue to reject men who lack resources. These preferences are expressed repeatedly in dozens of studies conducted on tens of thousands of individuals in scores of countries worldwide. They are expressed countless times in everyday life. In any given year, the men whom women marry earn more than men of the same age whom women do not marry. Even professionally successful women who do not really need resources from a man are reluctant to settle for a mate who is less successful than they are. Women who earn more than their husbands seek divorce more often, although this trend appears to be changing, at least within America. Men continue to compete with other men to acquire the status and resources that make them desirable to women. The forces that originally caused the resource inequality between the genders—women’s mate preferences and men’s competitive strategies—are the same forces that contribute to maintaining resource inequality today. Feminists’ and evolutionists’ conclusions converge in their implication that men’s efforts to control female sexuality lie at the core of their efforts to control women. Our evolved sexual strategies account for why this occurs, and why control of women’s sexuality is a central preoccupation of men. Over the course of human evolutionary history, men who failed to control women’s sexuality—for example, by failing to attract a mate, failing to prevent cuckoldry, or failing to retain a mate—experienced lower reproductive success than men who succeeded in controlling women’s sexuality. We come from a long and unbroken line of ancestral fathers who succeeded in obtaining mates, preventing their infidelity, and providing enough benefits to keep them from leaving. We also come from a long line of ancestral mothers who granted sexual access to men who provided beneficial resources.

If you feel like this divorce was forced on you, that you didn’t want it, that there is something to miss—get over that. You can’t be with your cheater because you aren’t a good match. You don’t share the same ideas about love, family, and relationships. To be with that person would be squelching a fundamental part of yourself—the person who demands reciprocity, honesty, and fidelity in marriage. In a way, it’s nothing personal. You are just two people who have nothing in common except shared history.

Separated or divorced.

came back to New York. I came back to my old job, I came back to face what made me run. I’m here; I’m different, but I’m here. And I’m here to tell you what I learned: fuck love, fuck marriage, fuck divorce, fuck walls, fuck anything that takes our ability to survive and to survive well.

intelligent tended to pursue the most-highly specialized occupations and also landed them in careers that divorced them from personal responsibility for their physical welfare. In other words, very few of the college educated had any idea how to grow their own food, start a fire, or shoot a gun. The less education a person had, the more likely they were to understand the fundamental skills of survival.

As there can be no causeless wealth, so there can be no causeless love or any sort of causeless emotion. An emotion is a response to a fact of reality, an estimate dictated by your standards. To love is to value. The man who tells you that it is possible to value without values, to love those whom you appraise as worthless, is the man who tells you that it is possible to grow rich by consuming without producing and that paper money is as valuable as gold. “Observe that he does not expect you to feel a causeless fear. When his kind get into power, they are expert at contriving means of terror, at giving you ample cause to feel the fear by which they desire to rule you. But when it comes to love, the highest of emotions, you permit them to shriek at you accusingly that you are a moral delinquent if you’re incapable of feeling causeless love. When a man feels fear without reason, you call him to the attention of a psychiatrist; you are not so careful to protect the meaning, the nature and the dignity of love. “Love is the expression of one’s values, the greatest reward you can earn for the moral qualities you have achieved in your character and person, the emotional price paid by one man for the joy he receives from the virtues of another. Your morality demands that you divorce your love from values and hand it down to any vagrant; not as response to his worth, but as response to his need, not as reward, but as alms, not as a payment for virtues, but as a blank check on vices. Your morality tells you that the purpose of love is to set you free of the bonds of morality, that love is superior to moral judgment; that true love transcends, forgives and survives every manner of evil in its object, and the greater the love the greater the depravity it permits to the loved. To love a man for his virtues is paltry and human, it tells you; to love him for his flaws is divine. To love those who are worthy of it is self-interest; to love the unworthy is sacrifice. You owe your love to those who don’t deserve it, and the less they deserve it, the more love you owe them—the more loathsome the object, the nobler your love—the more unfastidious your love, the greater the virtue—and if you can bring your soul to the state of a dump heap that welcomes anything on equal terms, if you can cease to value moral values, you have achieved the state of moral perfection.

a friend told me that surviving divorce isn’t about getting what you want, because you won’t. It’s about making the best life you can, with what you get.

Our anger is the energy that gives us strength. The Incredible Hulk becomes the huge, powerful hulk when he needs the energy and power to take care of others. Our sadness is an energy we discharge in order to heal. As we discharge the energy over the losses relating to our basic needs, we can integrate the shock of those losses and adapt to reality. Sadness is painful. We try to avoid it. Discharging sadness releases the energy involved in our emotional pain. To hold it in is to freeze the pain within us. The therapeutic slogan is that grieving is the “healing feeling.” Fear releases an energy that warns us of danger to our basic needs. Fear is an energy leading to our discernment and wisdom. Guilt is our morality shame and guards our conscience. It tells us we have transgressed our values. It moves us to take action and change. Shame warns us not to try to be more or less than human. Shame signals our essential limitations. Shame limits our desire for pleasure and our interest and curiosity. We could not really be free without our shame. There is an anonymous saying, “Of all the masks of freedom, discipline (limits) is the hardest to understand.” We cannot be truly free without having limits. Joy is the exhilarating energy that emerges when all our needs are being met. We want to sing, run and jump with joy. The energy of joy signals that all is well. Dissmell is the affect that monitors our drive for hunger. It was primarily developed as a survival mechanism. As we’ve become more complex, its use has extended interpersonally. Prejudice and rage against strangers (the ones who are not like us) have terrible consequences. Dissmell is a major sexuality factor. Disgust follows the same pattern as dissmell. Originally a hunger drive auxiliary, it has been extended to interpersonal relations. Divorces are often dominated by disgust. Victims of abuse carry various degrees of anger and disgust. Rapists who kill operate on disgust, anger and sex fused together.

She picked up her glove and hit his cheek with it, but so lightly he did not even blink. “I despise you,” she said. “Quite,” said Mr. Mackenzie. Jean Rhys, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie

Divorce often forces people to grow up. You get over your divorce by confronting the kind of relationship there was in the marriage. You realize there aren’t any victims. You recognize your own complicity in the breakup. Then you learn how to carry on a relationship that works. You can’t do this intellectually; you learn through experience.

The buzzword is companionate marriage, a relationship between two equals based on love and shared interests. Coupling is all about the quality of the relationship; its purpose is centered on mutual satisfaction, individual development (of children as well as spouses), and the joint pursuit of happiness.

Divorce is always experienced as a failure. It threatens a person’s self-image of being good, being loved, being valued.

A question that sometimes drives me hazy: Am I or the others crazy?” —

You have invested a lot of time, love and emotion into it, so it should take just as much consideration, if not more, to walk away from it. The main thing holding people back from accepting that a relationship is over once they have parted is if they have rushed to end it.

The most recent statistics reveal three women a day lose their lives at the hands of their intimate partners. Aasiya

To friends and family: Look beyond a bruise for signs of domestic abuse of a loved one. We

The best way out is always through. —Robert Frost,

Dissmell is the affect that monitors our drive for hunger. It was primarily developed as a survival mechanism. As we’ve become more complex, its use has extended interpersonally. Prejudice and rage against strangers (the ones who are not like us) have terrible consequences. Dissmell is a major sexuality factor. Disgust follows the same pattern as dissmell. Originally a hunger drive auxiliary, it has been extended to interpersonal relations. Divorces are often dominated by disgust. Victims of abuse carry various degrees of anger and disgust. Rapists who kill operate on disgust, anger and sex fused together.

She just kept seeing the hopeless look in Baird’s eyes as he’d held her tight one last time. He hadn’t even said anything but then, he didn’t need to. She could see what was going on—he was dying inside from losing her. That was the real reason the Kindred didn’t do divorce, she finally understood. Because they couldn’t survive without their mates. She supposed it was a good thing she and Baird hadn’t actually bonded before she’d had to leave or he wouldn’t stand a chance.

But because divorce was so unheard of in middle-class Indian society, people looked at divorcées with a sort of incredulous shock and wonder, as if they were somehow criminals. They were ostracized from everyday life because of an invisible scarlet D hovering over them. Meanwhile, Second Wave feminism in the United States was changing attitudes about how women were treated in the workplace and in society, and how unmarried women were perceived in particular. Women were challenging age-old notions of their place in the world. Western media was full of unafraid, smart American women who published magazines, were marching in DC, and were generally making a lot of noise. No such phenomenon had reached our Indian shores. I’m sure my mother had read about the ERA movement, Roe v. Wade, and bra burnings. She, too, wanted the freedom to earn a living in a country where she wouldn’t be a pariah because of her marital status. We could have a fighting chance at surviving independently in the United States, versus being dependent on her father or a future husband in India. Conservative as he was, my grandfather K. C. Krishnamurti, or “Tha-Tha,” as I called him in Tamil, had encouraged her to leave my father after he witnessed how she had been treated. He respected women and loved his daughter and it must have broken his heart to see the situation she had married into. He, too, wanted us to have a second chance at happiness. America, devoid of an obvious caste system and outright misogyny, seemed to value hard work and the use of one’s mind; even a woman could succeed there. My grandfather was a closet feminist.

Kemmer is not always played by pairs. Pairing seems to be the commonest custom, but in the kemmerhouses of towns and cities, groups may form and intercourse take place promiscuously among the males and females of the group. The furthest extreme from this practice is the custom of vowing kemmering (Karh. oskyommer), which is to all intents and purposes monogamous marriage. It has no legal status, but socially and ethically is an ancient and vigorous institution. The whole structure of the Karhidish Clan-Hearths and Domains is indubitably based upon the institution of monogamous marriage. I am not sure of divorce rules in general; here in Osnoriner there is divorce, but no remarriage after either divorce or the partner’s death: one can only vow kemmering once. Descent of course is reckoned, all over Gethen, from the mother, the “parent in the flesh” (Karh. amha). Incest is permitted, with various restrictions, between siblings, even the full siblings of a vowed-kemmering pair. Siblings are not however allowed to vow kemmering, nor keep kemmering after the birth of a child to one of the pair. Incest between generations is strictly forbidden (In Karhide/Orgoreyn; but is said to be permitted among the tribesmen of Perunter, the Antarctic Continent. This may be slander.). What else have I learned for certain? That seems to sum it up. There is one feature of this anomalous arrangement that might have adaptive value. Since coitus takes place only during the period of fertility, the chance of conception is high, as with all mammals that have an estrous cycle. In harsh conditions where infant mortality is great, a race survival value may be indicated. At present neither infant mortality nor the birthrate runs high in the civilized areas of Gethen. Tinibossol estimates a population of not over 100 million on the Three Continents, and considers it to have been stable for at least a millennium. Ritual and ethical absention and the use of contraceptive drugs seem to have played the major part in maintaining this stability. There are aspects of ambisexuality that we have only glimpsed or guessed at, and which we may never grasp entirely. The kemmer phenomenon fascinates all of us Investigators, of course. It fascinates us, but it rules the Gethenians, dominates them. The structure of their societies, the management of their industry, agriculture, commerce, the size of their settlements, the subjects of their stories, everything is shaped to fit the somer-kemmer cycle. Everybody has his holiday once a month; no one, whatever his position, is obliged or forced to work when in kemmer. No one is barred from the kemmerhouse, however poor or strange. Everything gives way before the recurring torment and festivity of passion. This is easy for us to understand. What is very hard for us to understand is that, four-fifths of the time, these people are not sexually motivated at all. Room is made for sex, plenty of room; but a room, as it were, apart. The society of Gethen, in its daily functioning and in its continuity, is without sex. Consider:

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here! —2 Corinthians 5:17 (NIV) It’s amazing what a few gallons of butter-yellow paint can do for your soul. As I stepped out of a difficult year that included financial hardship and a painful divorce, I wanted my home to reflect not only my survival, but also my hope and renewed joy. I got rid of every painting and hung up blank white canvases waiting for colors and inspiration. Old photos were taken down and new ones were framed. My dingy linoleum floors were covered by bright laminate wood, and the dining room chairs were newly dressed in dark, childproof upholstery. As my home was undergoing its slow rebirth, I asked advice from carpenters who had come to my church on a missions trip from North Carolina. “I’m thinking of building a loft bed for my boys,” I said. I wanted them to have space for all their toys. “Is it safe to use my old bed frame to build it?” “Why don’t you wait till we get back to New York City next month?” they responded. I waited and painted my sons’ walls the color of sunny skies, and when the team finally returned they had a surprise waiting for me: the loft bed! I was overwhelmed by their generosity and love. As they installed the bed, I could feel God’s hand in it. He’d done so much to transform me on the inside and now He was helping me transform everything else. Lord, thank You for the gift of renewal. —Karen Valentin Digging Deeper: Rom 12:2; 1 Pt 1:13

If you roughly divide the men and women I’ve interviewed into two groups—those who feel a deep sense of love and belonging, and those who struggle for it—there’s only one variable that separates the groups: Those who feel lovable, who love, and who experience belonging simply believe they are worthy of love and belonging. They don’t have better or easier lives, they don’t have fewer struggles with addiction or depression, and they haven’t survived fewer traumas or bankruptcies or divorces, but in the midst of all of these struggles, they have developed practices that enable them to hold on to the belief that they are worthy of love, belonging, and even joy.

Familiarity, not survival, is the strongest drive in human beings.

It was about what had survived the divorce. Our family had imploded, but my mom and I having brownie parties still felt like some descendant of that, some tiny fragment that had survived the crash. Connecting me to the family we used to be.

I’m fully aware that Sasha emerges from these descriptions as sympathetic, whereas I come off as a moralizing prig. I was a moralizing prig, and not just toward my cousin. My father, who treated Sasha as a daughter and whom I saw as her enabler; my mother, whose romantic adventures since my parents’ divorce I found sickening; my younger brothers, Ames and Alfred, both of whom I’d deemed “lost” before they turned twenty-five—no one escaped the roving, lacerating beam of my judgment. I can access that beam even now, decades later: a font of outraged impatience with other people’s flaws. How had the human species managed to survive for millennia

Remember: a 50/50 chance of survival is better than no chance at all. Use your 50% to teach them what abuse is, boundaries, and self-love.

July 18 Velcro Relationships All minds are joined. — A Course In Miracles While Carla was teaching a seminar, a woman told her, “I feel that my marriage is over. My husband and I have been together for a long time, and we have grown in different directions. I want to leave, but I cannot because I know it would crush him.” A month later at another workshop, a man confessed, “My marriage is empty, but I’m staying with my wife because I know she would never survive a divorce.” Then Carla discovered that he was the husband of the woman who spoke at the first seminar. Relationships are based on matching energy. Like strips of Velcro fasteners, partners contain hooking energies that conform by agreement. Often couples have similar or polarized underlying feelings that go unspoken. When you speak your truth, you invite your partner to do the same, and together you bring the

I'll take my hands off you, the waters will calm down. Let go of the blur. Let those waters remain still. More than just drifting with the current, I need to keep my head on the surface. I don't want to drown. Let me survive. Let me breathe.

The only time we’re allowed to open this box before our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary is if it’s an emergency.’ ‘What kind of emergency? Like…death?’ He shakes his head. ‘No a relationship emergency. Like…divorce.’ ‘Divorce?’ I hate that word. ‘Seriously?’ ‘I don’t see us needing to open his box for any other reason than to celebrate our longevity, Quinn. But, if one of us ever decides we want a divorce - if we’ve reached the point where we think that’s the only answer - we have to promise not to go through with it until we open this box and read these letters. Maybe reminding each other of how we felt when we closed the box will help change our minds if we ever need to open it early.’ ‘So this box isn’t just a keepsake. It’s also a marriage survival kit?’ Graham shrugs. ‘You could say that. But we have nothing to worry about. I’m confident we won’t need to open this box for another twenty-five years.

Over the next weeks and months, my daughters had to learn to live without their father, and me without my husband. In addition to the overwhelming, everyday tasks like buying groceries, making meals, and getting the girls to their activities, I suddenly had to navigate the legal system and file for divorce. I had to figure out the nearly impossible feat of owning a small business and solo parenting two active, preteen girls. I learned the hard way that you have to remove the leaves from the gutter if you don’t want your basement to flood. I had to muster the courage to pull the hair out of the shower drain. I had to somehow find the time and energy to decontaminate the entire house when the dreaded scourge that is lice made its unwanted appearance. And I had to do it all with the added anger, sadness, and sheer frustration that these were all things John used to take care of. As tempting as it was to collapse, I had two girls who needed me now more than ever. I needed my business to survive. I had a mountain of legal bills—tens of thousands of dollars and increasing daily. As a business owner, if I didn’t work, I didn’t get paid. Stepping away to take care of my mental and emotional state was a luxury I couldn’t afford. I had to balance what was best for my business in the long term with what the girls and I needed in the short term. I had to get through each day and keep moving forward. This meant I toggled back and forth between dealing with this trauma and running a business. I lived in a constant state of holding it all together, while simultaneously watching it all fall apart.

that estranged angrily demanding beast …. The problem was that without my food allotment the question of survival appeared to be purely academic. (1997a: 32) In an insightful interpretation of that scene, Summers-Bremmer emphasizes the inseparability of “the instinct that connects food with survival and the excessive, enigmatic elements to do with meaning”—namely “the way hunger can never be divorced from hope […]

But humans aren’t meant to survive divorced from the help and hope and love of others, and neither are the drones. We must reject calls for self-sufficiency, self-care, and self-actualization. We help the drones, but we have to help each other too.

Nevertheless, the issue of Catholic marriage deserves some additional theoretical and historical consideration to prevent ambiguity. Naturally in our case it is not the arguments of “free thinkers” that turn us against this kind of marriage. Earlier I mentioned the contamination between the sacred and the profane. It is worth recalling that marriage as a rite and sacrament involving indissolubility took shape late in the history of the Church, and not before the twelfth century. The obligatory nature of the religious rite for every union that wished to be considered more than mere concubinage was later still, declared at the Council of Trent (1563). For our purposes, this does not affect the concept of indissoluble marriage in itself, but its place, significance, and conditions have to be clarified. The consequence here, as in other cases regarding the sacraments, is that the Catholic Church finds itself facing a singular paradox: proposals intending to make the profane sacred have practically ended up making the sacred profane. The true, traditional significance of the marriage rite is outlined by Saint Paul, when he uses not the term “sacrament” but rather “mystery” to indicate it (“it is a great mystery,” taken verbatim—Ephesians 5:31-32). One can indeed allow a higher idea of marriage as a sacred and indissoluble union not in words, but in fact. A union of this type, however, is conceivable only in exceptional cases in which that absolute, almost heroic dedication of two people in life and beyond life is present in principle. This was known in more than one traditional civilization, with examples of wives who even found it natural not to outlive the death of their husbands. In speaking of making the sacred profane, I alluded to the fact that the concept of an indissoluble sacramental union, “written in the heavens” (as opposed to one on the naturalistic plane that is generically sentimental, and even at base merely social), has been applied to, or rather imposed on, every couple who must join themselves in church rather than in civil marriage, only to conform to their social environment. It is pretended that on this exterior and prosaic plane, on this plane of the Nietzschean “human, all too human,” the attributes of truly sacred marriage, of marriage as a “mystery,” can and must be valid. When divorce is not permitted in a society like the present, one can expect this hypocritical regime and the rise of grave personal and social problems. On the other hand, it should be noted that in Catholicism itself the theoretical absoluteness of the marriage rite bears a significant limitation. It is enough to remember that if the Church insists on the indissolubility of the marriage bond in space, denying divorce, it has ceased to observe it in time. The Church that does not allow one to divorce and remarry does permit widows and widowers to remarry, which amounts to a breach of faithfulness, and is at best conceivable within an openly materialistic premise; in other words, only if it is thought that when one who was indissolubly united by the supernatural power of the rite has died, he or she has ceased to exist. This inconsistency shows that Catholic religious law, far from truly having transcendent spiritual values in view, has made the sacrament into a simple, social convenience, an ingredient of the profane life, reducing it to a mere formality, or rather degrading it.

Thus, as I have said, in innumerable cases today’s family owes its existence merely to a force of inertia, conventions, practical convenience, and weakness of character in a regime of mediocrity and compromises. Nor can one expect external measures to bring about a change. I must repeat that familial unity could only remain firm when determined by a suprapersonal way of thinking, so as to leave mere individual matters on a secondary level. Then the marriage could even lack "happiness," the "needs of the soul" could be unsatisfied, and yet the unity would persist. In the individualistic climate of present society no higher reason demands that familial unity should persist even when the man or the woman "does not agree," and sentiment or sex leads them to new choices. Therefore, the increase of so-called failed marriages and related divorces and separations is natural in contemporary society. It is also absurd to think of any efficacy in restraining measures, since the basis of the whole is by now a change of an existential order. After this evaluation, it would almost be superfluous to specify what can be the behavior of the differentiated man today. In principle, he cannot value marriage, family, or procreation as I have just described them. All that can only be alien to him; he can recognize nothing significant to merit his attention. (Later I will return to the problem of the sexes in itself, not from the social perspective.) The contaminations in marriage between sacred and profane and its bourgeois conformism are evident to him, even in the case of religious, indissoluble, Catholic marriage. This indissolubility that is supposed to safeguard the family in the Catholic area is by now little more than a facade. In fact, the indissoluble unions are often profoundly corrupted and loosened, and in that area petty morality is not concerned in the least that the marriage is actually indissoluble; it is important only to act as if it were such. That men and women, once duly married, do more or less whatever they want, that they feign, betray, or simply put up with each other, that they remain together for simple convenience, reducing the family to what I have already described, is of little importance there. Morality is saved: One can believe that the family remains the fundamental unit of society so long as one condemns divorce and accepts that social sanction or authorization—as if it had any right—for any sexually based cohabitation that corresponds to marriage. What is more, even if we are not speaking of the "indissoluble" Catholic rite of marriage, but of a society that permits divorce, the hypocrisy persists: one worships at the altar of social conformism even when men and women separate and remarry repeatedly for the most frivolous and ridiculous motives, as typically happens in the United States, so that marriage ends up being little more than a puritanical veneer for a regime of high prostitution or legalized free love.

MLMs tend to be value-agnostic in this way, using any opportunity to spin someone's sob story to their advantage, even if the MLM's culture is directly related to dopamine hits and addictive behavior. I've heard keynote speeches from women who had lost children or spouses, dealt with cancer, gone through painful divorces, become paralyzed, or survived domestic-abuse situations, all spun in a way that would lead you to believe the MLM unlocked their ability to process this trauma. Indoctrination through other women's pain. And now, I am the new inspirational tale. I actually feel honored.

Glennon, you’ve been flying and living long enough to know that while turbulence feels scary, it won’t take the plane down. Turbulence isn’t deadly, and neither is divorce. We survive these things. The kids don’t know this yet, so they are afraid. They are going to keep looking at your face for information. Your job right now is to smile at them, stay calm, and keep serving the freaking peanuts.” This is what I told myself every single day during the divorce, and a million times since: Keep serving the freaking peanuts, Glennon.