Bye Bye, Love
Divorce is sad. But some folks are finding humor--and profit--in it
When Angie Schmidt's seven-year marriage ended, there wasn't much to laugh about. But what she craved was a little levity. "There was nothing out there that really made people laugh at themselves and laugh at breakups," she says. "I thought, Wouldn't it be great to create a business that does this?" Last September she started an online store dedicated to lightening the mood--smashingkatie.com, named after "the other woman." By the holidays, the site was flooded with orders.
The annual number of divorces has dropped nearly a third since the early 1980s, to 16.4 for every 1,000 married women age 15 and over, but 40% to 50% of first marriages still break up. In the spirit of American ingenuity that can find a way to make a buck out of even the worst situations, a cottage industry has sprung up to help people cope with and often celebrate this passage from one part of their lives to the next. "Once divorce gets so common, the human approach is to treat it like another aspect of life," says sociologist David Popenoe, co-director of the National Marriage Project at Rutgers.
Business for products aimed at the newly divorced, from greeting cards and post-breakup getaway packages to custom-made cakes and joke gifts like wedding-ring coffins, is booming. New Orleans resident Reneé Savant bought a hearse, thinking she would rent it out for over-the-hill-birthday celebrations. But since she began her service last October, the hottest demand has come from clients who want to ride around as they and friends celebrate the death of their marriages. "I would never in a million years have thought the fad would be divorce parties," says Savant.
No party is really complete without a cake, and increasingly, bakers are being asked to come up with fanciful designs that give new meaning to the pun "just desserts." Joan Spitler, co-owner of Cake Divas in Los Angeles, says she was used to baking cakes for "people's second, third and even fourth weddings" but has recently been getting orders for confections to mark the end of marriages as well. The designs feature scenarios like a bride kicking her former groom down the tiers of the cake. At Sprinkles Custom Cakes in Winter Park, Fla., Larry Bach has been getting requests for his upside-down wedding cake with the bride or groom's legs sticking out at the bottom as if the cake had crashed down on the figure à la the Wicked Witch of the East.
Like Schmidt, many of the divorce entrepreneurs are people who have gone through the experience themselves. After Scott Schmeizer, an executive with a housewares firm based on Long Island, N.Y., got divorced in 2004, he worked with a designer to manufacture a knife rack that looks like a human figure. He called it the Ex. "It was cathartic," he says. Others apparently think so too; it now comes in six different colors, retails for $120 and is one of the firm's top sellers. Schmidt's online breakup boutique sells mugs that say things like BOO FRICKIN' HOO and books like How to Tell If Your Boyfriend Is the Antichrist. "Why take life so seriously?" she asks.
Most separation-inspired items--the Ex, ex-wife toilet paper, ex-boyfriend voodoo dolls--may be intentionally designed to evoke laughter from the otherwise painful situation of a breakup. "They're filling a need," says Princeton anthropologist John Borneman. But he and other experts worry that the surge of products is symptomatic of an increasingly fickle investment in marriage. "A classic case where market intervention is sapping the moral fiber of a society," Popenoe says.
Marriage experts say it's too soon to know how these new rites will affect future relationships. "We'll have to wait and see whether such things help you find a new mate sooner, and once you do, if you're going to stay with that person as you didn't in the first round," Popenoe says.
Throwing a divorce party turned out to be just the right thing for Lesley Rogers, whose five-year marriage ended in 2006. Rogers, a communications director in Seattle, met her current boyfriend that night when another friend brought him to the celebration.
(Bye Bye, Love. By: Sharples, Tiffany, Time, 0040781X, 2/11/2008, Vol. 171, Issue 6)
-This website provides divorce information to many families experiencing hard times. It covers topics such as child custody, visitation, child support, alimony, and property division.
-This website provides help for specifically women. It helps talk women through the hurt of divorce and the process of rebuilding their lives.
"When two people decide to get a divorce, it isn't a sign that they "don't understand" one another, but a sign that they have begun to at last." - Helen Rowland
Families
Across 2. Consensual unit based on intimacy, economic cooperation, and multual goals. 7. Those never married, widowed, or divorced. 8. The legal ending of marriage. 9. Whole network of parents, children, and other relatives who form a family unit. 10. Married adults with stepchildren, cohabiting stepparents, and stepparents who don't reside together. Down 1. Married couple resides together with their children. 3. Child abuse involving sexual relations between persons who are closely related. 4. Primary group of people who form a cooperative economic unit to care for offspring and each other and who are committed to maintaining the group over time. 5. Pracitce of men and women having multiple marriage partners. 6. The practice of sexually exclusive marriage with one spouse at a time.
I chose this chapter of the book because the concept of a family is something that most everyone is blessed enough to experience. Families are mostly thought of as a great support system of people who love you and who are always there for you. However, within all things that are good, there are things that are bad as well. Such as mentioned in this chapter: divorce, abuse, and the issue of just not getting along. I chose to focus on the common experience of divorce because I have seen many people who have experienced this and who have had great problems with this issue.
The first article that I chose for this post talked a lot about one women's specific experience with divorce and how she had to go about the process of rebuilding her life. I found it entertaining and enlightening. Next, the picture I chose for this chapter was actually a graph representing the divorce rates over a 50 year period. The graph showed how rates of divorce have gone up greatly. My video I included was from the Mormon Church. It had a church member talking about divorce and their ideas of divorce within their church. I grew up surrounded my mormons which is why I found this video interesting. My two websites were very similar. The first one was a divorce support website that was a resource of helping people get through the hard times of divorce and the different things that come along with a divorce that need to be addressed. The second website was the same kind of website but aimed directly at women. I found it interesting to see the differences between a women related website and a website aimed for both genders. Lastly, my quote was included to help people see that divorce isn't always a bad thing. It does cause a lot of people hurt and hatred towards others but at the same time it can greatly release stress in some people and in some marriages. It was really interesting to research different aspects of a divorce to see what was all included in this different concept.
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