It was sometime last year that it started to feel like Big Conversations about marriage and divorce were *everywhere.*
David Brooks was lecturing young people to “obsess less about your career and to think a lot more about marriage” because marriage rates have been falling. Emily Gould was contemplating leaving her husband and then not over on The Cut. High-profile writers like Lyz Lenz, Leslie Jamison and Maggie Smith were all releasing memoir (or memoir-adjacent) books about their respective divorces. And then… there were the trad wives. The trad wives, who it felt like were following us around TikTok and Instagram, homesteading and baking in dresses and posting about the failures of feminism.
Even on reality television, it feels like there’s been a distinct uptick in storylines involving the dissolution of longterm relationships. On Bravo we’ve been watching a spate of splits and their aftermaths unfold: Ariana and Sandoval, Tom and Katie (VPR), Jax and Brittany, Michelle and Jesse…
