Top 10 Reasons People Get Divorced
As I write this, a story is unfolding. After twelve years together, including two years in the capacity of husband and wife, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie – collectively and internationally known as Brangelina – are getting divorced. The details are still vague, mostly consisting of sound bites from Pitt (‘I’m very saddened by this, but what matters most now is the wellbeing of the kids’), or from Jolie’s attorney (‘The decision was made for the health of the family’). Yet the scarcity of information is doing nothing to detract from the story’s popularity: it is, at present, the most read story on the BBC News website.
Amidst an escalating international crisis in Syria, violent anti-police protests in North Carolina and emerging details about a famine in Yemen, we might ask why, exactly, Brangelina’s divorce constitutes news. The answer, I’d suggest, must lie in its symbolism. As far as celebrity royalty goes, the bella coppia have come as close to fantasy perfection as possible – demonstrating considerable financial largesse, genuine humanitarian concern, and, recently, stoic resilience in the face of life-threatening illness. In a more relatable sphere, however, their significance could be said to have been as ambassadors for a notably contemporary incarnation of marriage: this will be Jolie’s third divorce, Pitt’s second.
This, in itself, is instructive. A large part of this story’s popularity comes down to its contemporary relevance: divorce rates stand at around 40-50% of first marriages and 60% of second. Divorce amongst the over 50s –termed ‘gray divorce’ – is on the increase, constituting around one-quarter of all divorces in the US. Some call this a crisis; others call it adaptability. Here, it’s called a trend, or cultural phenomenon, and here on Listland we’ve compiled 10 reasons to help both explain and contextualize it.
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