StarTrekker wrote:
Growing up a "child of divorce" as they call it, definitely impacted me. It made me resentful of the institution of marriage, and skeptical that love could ever work out on a permanent basis. I now live with the cynical belief that there's no such thing as "true love" and that everyone will leave you eventually.
I used to feel that way too, but have managed to get away from it. I think meeting my now-husband's family helped. His parents got married when they were twenty, and thirty years later they are still together and still happy. Same with my best friend's parents. They are still together, twenty-three years later, and still happy. I try to look at it more realistically now, though. Sometimes forever isn't forever, and sometimes it is. Just because a marriage ends in divorce does not mean the preceding years and the marriage as a whole were failures. As long as you have a lot of good memories and lessons learned, it was not a failure.
My dad has been with the same woman since my parents split thirteen years ago and she's great, though my mom has been through many men, with three main ones (two of whom she had chosen to live with). One of them was an abusive, manipulative sociopath whose behaviour has scarred my younger sister forever, another an insecure, racist old man, and the last one a recovering heroin addict. She's finally back to living by herself, hopefully rethinking her taste in men. I love my mom, but after the divorce (that she wanted), she developed just awful taste in men.