The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce

If you’re wondering what has drawn me to purchasing this book despite my age, it’s because of my curiosity about my parent’s separation. I am just very lucky enough to have grandparents who stayed in love with each other after how many decades. My parents might not be a good role model on my future marriage but I am fortunate enough to have wonderful grandparents to look up to who stayed together until the end. Looking at their successful marriage is better than focusing on the damaged relationship that my parents had, but my parents’ separation wasn’t all bad. I got to learn stuffs in advance and appreciated it over time.

I recommend this book to people who’s undergoing a rocky marriage, to those children of separated parents like me and to those people who are in a relationship with a person from a broken family.Even mentors and life coaches will benefit in this book. You will see a lot of different kinds of marriage in this book, different family setups and surprising child behaviors towards separating parents. Philippines doesn’t have a divorce law, only annulment and legal separation, so I replaced the word divorce with separated instead. This book talks about the laws and obligations that families who divorced are encountering and the impact of the rules to a child’s life from childhood to adolescent and finally the effect of their parent’s separation in their adult life.

The only advice that I can share to those people who are children of separated parents, you are not your parents. You will not have a similar faith with them because you have control over your future marriage. No matter how painful the past is, there will always be hope for comfort in the future. Don’t make unhappiness be part of your daily life forever.

I wish there was a law that obligates couples to stay together in one room, sharing only one bed, one plate, one chair, one table, one mug and one pair of spoon and fork for one month until they make their final decision if they are going to stay in the marriage or finalize the separation. Maybe in this way the probability of broken marriage will lessen, because the couples will gain something from the shared experience and understanding on the situation that they’ve gone through.

Before I forget, I got this book for only Php20.00 on a super book sale that was held at SM Manila. I can no longer remember the date though. So forgive me for that…

Curious about the content of the book? Below are several paragraphs from random pages of the book that I found very interesting to share:

“Divorce makes you grow up very fast. I resented this when I was young, but as I grew older, I realize it could be a good thing. Some kids were so angry at their parent’s divorce, all they could do was get into drugs and an unhappy lifestyle. Even now I know people who have not recovered. But I have. And I’ll tell you why. Somewhere in my twenties I stopped wanting a lost childhood. I think that’s the secret. I began to realize that it’s now, not then, that matters. And I realized that I’m me, not them. I can do what I want, not what they did. I learned to take responsibility for myself and my life.”

“Do we fit? Are we good together? Is what we have in common good enough to stay together for one night, one year, a life time? For building family?”

“By relying to his rights, he lost her. What a pity. How foolish we are to think that we can legislate or direct the human heart.”

“I was lost for so long and I could easily have just stayed high and self-destruct. There must have been something I got from my parents. I guess they loved me even though they didn’t show it. I always thought they were both selfish. But things are better now and that’s what’s important. I have a better family now than I had as a kid. I guess there’s no way not to have something left over from what’s happened to you.”

“You have to expect to take the bad things with the good,” she said, “to make the most of what life gives you and to make your own happiness.”

“All divorces are bad for kids,” he told me. “They make kids do things that they normally wouldn’t do.”

“A few days later we had a long and very useful talk in which I made it clear that she is first a wife and only second a daughter. She belongs with me just like I belong with her. Whatever care was needed we would provide each other. ”

“The secret of a good marriage is to arrive at a good enough fit so that each person feels that the relationship is uniquely satisfying, sometimes uniquely annoying, but probably irreplaceable.”

“You spend a fortune on the wedding and then when you’re broke, you divorce.”

“What’s done to children, they will do to society.” -Karl A. Menninger