Much to the chagrin of dating app users everywhere, there is no exact science behind meeting someone and falling in love with them. But what about those who have found someone they want to spend the rest of their lives with? Is there a way to know if it will last? Despite the hand-wringing about the falling marriage rate, the divorce rate is falling as well. Are millennials less likely to end their marriages than previous generations? That’s the question that listener Siobhan has on the latest episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s call-in podcast.  Siobhan is very much in love, and as of late, she and her boyfriend are having serious conversations about taking a big step and getting engaged. “I think my partner is the best person in the world,” she said. “There is no better person as far as I’m concerned.” I could feel the love she has for him radiating through the computer screen when I spoke with her.  At the same time, her parents’ divorce and the divorces of people older than her leaves her wondering how such loving relationships can shift. “Purely based on personal experience, so many people of my parents’ generation are divorced,” she said. “Is the millennial generation less likely to get a divorce compared to our parents?” For an answer, I turned to Stephanie Coontz, marriage historian and author of many books, including Marriage, A History. Because Coontz is an expert on marriage, she’s also an expert on divorce.     Coontz and I discussed the way the institution of marriage has changed through the years, if younger people are staying married longer than their older counterparts, and the role marriage does (and doesn’t) play in happiness.  Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity. For more, you can listen to Explain It to Me on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to [email protected] or call 1-800-618-8545. Has the way you think about marriage changed through the years, whether through experiencing it yourself or studying it? Well yes, it’s changed quite a bit. When I was young — raised in the ’50s and early ’60s — I thought marriage was great. I used to practice in high school writing my first name with a boy’s last name.  And then I went away to college and I learned about the history of marriage, and my own mother ended up divorced. So I went through a period of thinking I would never marry,and that marriage was a very oppressive institution, not the protective one that we had been told it was. But when I went back and looked at the way it had actually operated in the past, it began to occur to me that no, marriage is an institution that can work in very different ways. If you go back to where marriage was first invented and why it was first invented, it doesn’t seem as oppressive as it did over the thousands of years of history, of patriarchy, because marriage was essentially invented to get in-laws. And by in-laws, I mean a really much broader sense of connections. Marriage sets up mutual obligations.  Let’s talk about Siobhan’s question: Are millennials less likely to get divorced than previous generations? Oh yeah. Divorce rates have been falling for the past 20, 25 years, so your chance of divorce is lower than your parents. The baby boom generation had the highest divorce rates and those divorce rates have come down quite a bit. What we’ve found is that people’s standards for marriage have risen since the ’80s and the ’90s. We expect more of marriage than we did in the past, and we expect more equality. We come together, we fall in love, and we have to learn to appreciate each other in a totally new way than in the past. A marriage, when it works, is more fulfilling and safer and more inspiring to people than it was for the past.  But when it doesn’t work, it’s less satisfactory precisely because we have higher standards and because we have more alternatives. People today have much higher standards for how economically and emotionally prepared you have to be for marriage. That means you’re less likely to divorce. How do we know that millennials are getting married and divorced less?  The Census Bureau keeps track of the numbers of marriages and divorces each year. Marriage rates have fallen. Now, that can be greatly exaggerated because the age of marriage is rising. The rate of marriage is calculated on the basis of how many women get married every year.  Back in 1960, when the average woman married before she had even turned 21, you would have very high marriage rates. Now that the average age of marriage is up to about 30, the question is how many people will marry as they grow older? This is another huge change that we’ve found.  In the 1950s, if you weren’t married by 25, your chance of ever marrying fell precipitously. But today, people are marrying at older ages than ever before. If you’re not married by 30 or 35 it not only means that you may indeed eventually marry, but it also means that your divorce risk tends to go down.  There are different things that predict a successful marriage. Now women come to marriage with more maturity, and if they face a man who is very oppressive or just too dictatorial, they’re going to leave. On the other hand, if they’ve known this man long enough to know that he is a good choice for marriage, that he is committed to an egalitarian and loving relationship, and they have the resources so that they know that they can support themselves outside marriage — that actually protects the marriage in a way it didn’t in the past.  Do people ask you about divorce a lot?  Yes. I get it, because a lot of people in America think that it’s just a disaster, that people are not getting married or that they’re delaying marriage. So I get asked a lot of questions: “Well, wouldn’t the world be better off if everybody got married? Isn’t getting married the route to happiness and economic success? Isn’t divorce a disaster?” And I can tell you that the answer to all those questions is no. Marriage is not going to make your life perfect or happy or make you economically successful. A lot of these things are predictors; they’re not outcomes. I’m in a good marriage. It is a very big addition to my life, but it’s not going to bring me happiness if I was not already capable of contributing my share of happiness to the relationship. People in unhappy marriages are much less happy than single people. And when we look at divorced people, yes, people who get divorced from a good marriage are unhappy. But people who have been in bad marriages and get divorced are generally at least as happy as they were at the beginning of their marriage and certainly happier than they were by the end. 

Breaking up may be hard to do, but it’s also an endless source of fascination in American life. Even as the country’s divorce rate declines, the dissolution of marriage has remained a cultural touchpoint. You see it in how strangers online are constantly telling each other to “divorce him, sis!” and in how we love to parse the very specific, leather-clad look of this country’s “most divorced” men. You see it in how separation trends — each with its own new term — persist, from gray divorce to divorcemoons. Maybe we’re so interested in divorce because of its proximity to sex and money. Maybe it’s because we’re just nosy. So while October may be one of the most popular months for weddings, we decided to take a look at its inverse. Most men are walking red flags, according to TikTok. Why more Americans than ever are splitting up in their 50s and beyond. The aggressively, brutally companionless divorced guy aesthetic. Divorced people deserve gifts and parties too. How to take charge of your finances, according to two divorce professionals. Millennials are less likely to get divorced than their parents. Why? Editorial Director: Julia Rubin Reporters: Rebecca Jennings, Allie Volpe, Alex Abad-Santos, Whizy Kim, Nicole Dieker Finley Editors: Meredith Haggerty, Melinda Fakuade, Naureen Khan Art Director: Paige Vickers | Illustrator: Sandi Falconer Managing Editor, Audio & Video: Natalie Jennings Audio: Carla Javier, Sofi Lalonde, Jonquilyn Hill Style & Standards: Elizabeth Crane, Anouck Dussaud, Kim Eggleston, Caity PenzeyMoog, Sarah Schweppe Audience: Gabby Fernandez, Kelsi Trinidad Special thanks: Bill Carey, Lauren Katz, Nathan Hall

Lindsay Donnelly’s TikTok was supposed to be relatable. Last summer, she’d had a squabble with her husband that any partner, family member, or roommate knows all too well: He felt like he was doing all the housework, and she wasn’t doing any of it. So she decided to prove otherwise. For two days, Donnelly did nothing. Then she posted the evidence of what a two-parent, two-kid household looks like when the mother refuses to clean up — laundry unfolded, toys on the floor, dirty dishes on the counter — set to Taylor Swift’s “Karma.” Within a day, her video had a million views, many from women who found it funny or felt seen. “Overwhelmingly, it was a lot of, ‘You go queen!’” Donnelly says. And then there were the others.  Support our journalism today for early access to our digital magazine every month—plus other great member benefits. A year and 20 million views later, nearly all of the most-liked comments on Donnelly’s video are people telling her to divorce her husband. “I’d get divorce papers honestly. That’s unacceptable that he can’t pick up as well,” wrote one. “Don’t let your husband stop you from finding your soulmate, honey,” said another. Many women related to it, but not in the way Donnelly intended: “This same thing happened to me. Filed for divorce yesterday.” “Having people comment on my relationship and say something like ‘get divorced,’ — I felt unhappy about it,” says Donnelly, the founder of the social media management firm Authentic Community Marketing, adding that she’s still happily married. “It can feel disproportionately painful, because even though a hundred people tell you you’re beautiful, you’re gonna hear the one person that tells you you’ve got spinach in your teeth.” Perhaps nobody said it better than Britney Spears, who famously wore a T-shirt emblazoned with the words “DUMP HIM” in 2002 after her breakup with Justin Timberlake. Two decades on, echoes of the sentiment have become the internet’s go-to piece of advice for women in heterosexual relationships. On any TikTok or Instagram Reel posted by a woman that includes a male partner who looks anything less than ecstatic to be there, the comments are typically flooded with some variation of “divorce him” or a string of red flag emojis.  The comments can veer into the extreme: When a woman posted her husband’s lackluster reaction to her new hair, one viewer said her husband reminded her of Chris Watts, the Colorado man who murdered his entire family.  Messy and mean-spirited internet comments sections are nothing new, of course: Joseph Reagle, an associate professor of communications at Northeastern University and author of Reading the : Likers, Haters, and Manipulators at the Bottom of the Web, uses the metaphor of the “rotten barrel.” It refers to the effects an environment can have on people’s behavior, as opposed to the effect a single bad person (the proverbial rotten apple) can have on the bunch. Particularly nasty comment sections, he says, can feel liberating for those participating in them, and the gossipy nature of judging other people’s relationships satisfies an urge to create narratives. “People love a mystery,” says Reagle. “They love making predictions and seeing what might come of them.” This overall ethos of “divorce him” might have more to do with the fraught relations between the sexes at the moment, both online and off. There’s a growing sense that men and women are drifting away from one another, politically and culturally. Women have become more progressive in recent years, and in the wake of Roe v. Wade’s demise, they’ve doubled down on their support of abortion rights; some men (and some women, too), meanwhile, are preaching the return of regressive gender roles amid a backlash to Me Too. “I’ll take the bear” is a sentiment you’re likely to see in the comments of videos on social media, referring to the question of whether a woman would rather be left alone in the woods with a bear or a man. Hence, divorce advice is everywhere. For decades, feminists have extolled the virtues of breaking up while criticizing the systemic control of women through marriage. Now that fewer people are marrying, and those who do are marrying later, there’s less emphasis on monogamous romance in general and a wider acceptance and interest in nonmonogamy, platonic partnerships, and “decentering” men.  Influencers like Florence Given have turned “Dump him!” into Instagram-ready T-shirts and art prints; earlier this year, journalist Lyz Lenz released This American Ex-Wife, which tells the story of her own divorce and the societal history of how marriage benefits men on the backs of women’s unpaid labor.  The blanket advice for women to ditch men entirely has not been without its own criticism. “‘Dump Him’ Feminism Isn’t Revolutionary. It’s Callous,” wrote the leftist journalist Ash Sarkar in 2022. “The recognition that the weight of emotional baggage is unevenly distributed has, amongst some contemporary feminists, morphed into the idea that any sense of obligation is itself the enemy,” she wrote.  Yet it’s caused some women to turn to social media to see whether they should, in fact, dump him. Over the past year, trends that supposedly determine whether your relationship is solid or not have proliferated on TikTok and Reels. One of the most popular is the “orange peel test,” wherein you hand your partner an orange and ask them to peel it for you. If they do so without question, they’re a keeper. If they ask something to the effect of, “Why can’t you peel it yourself?” — run.  There are dozens more, including the “bird test” (point out something tiny, like a bird, and see if they respond enthusiastically), the “Beckham test” (start dancing to a song and see if they join you), and “name a woman,” in which you ask them to name a woman and hope they say you.  As psychologist and author Alexandra Solomon told my coworker Alex Abad-Santos about the orange peel “theory,” “An entire intimate relationship can’t be boiled down to what a partner does or doesn’t do with an orange,” adding that, “The worry that I have is that I prefer us to talk directly to our partners about our needs rather than setting up a test. And certainly, rather than setting up a test that goes public, because I think the risk here is humiliation.” Humiliation is what awaits many who post videos about their relationships, often coming in ways they never could have possibly expected. Any evidence of bad relationship behavior — even by normal, non-famous people — can lead to a manhunt online. In June, a woman took multiple videos of a man wearing a wedding ring and allegedly flirting and making out with the woman sitting next to him on a plane. She then posted them, writing, “Do your thing TikTok.” In a day, commenters had found the man and his family, posting photos from their social media profiles and praising the original poster for being a “girl’s girl” by apparently rescuing the woman from her cheating husband.  Not everyone was impressed: TikToker Tamika Turner made a video saying, “Your addiction to surveillance and attention is betraying the fact that although you’re the exact demographic to call yourself ‘girl’s girls,’ your only allegiance is to your own entertainment,” pointing out the enormous personal ramifications a video like this could have on someone who never asked for the public’s attention.  The hunger for clear-cut pronouncements on other people’s marriages and relationships is so insatiable that Dustin Poynter earns his living by making them. Also known as “the red flag guy,” Poynter has spent the last year reposting videos of couples in relationships on TikTok and Instagram and splices them with videos of himself holding (or sometimes running with) a giant red or green flag. A green flag communicates that the partners are behaving well, like surprising their significant other with a gift, while a red flag portends doom (like, say, when a partner acts like a maniac during a gender reveal). The Arkansas-based 32-year-old has more than 4 million followers and earns a lucrative income through regular brand deals (he declined to disclose exactly how much, but says, “It’s changed my life, and I’m able to support my whole family”).  With Poynter having sifted through many, many TikTok videos posted by couples hoping to go viral, I wondered about the vast majority of instances where people’s behaviors can’t be boiled down to a single color. What of the “beige flags,” as they’re called online, the kinds that don’t really fit into the categories of “good” or “bad”? “I think red flags are not permanent,” Poynter says. “It requires the person to acknowledge it and want to change, but I do believe that people can change. I’m not out here trying to break anybody up.”  Boyfriend won’t cut up your fruit? Break up! Husband says you don’t do enough housework? Divorce him, sis!  Poynter stresses that he’s not an expert; he’s just a normal guy running with a flag through a public park who stumbled upon a bizarre niche that allows him to live the life he’s always dreamed. But his — which is to say, the entire internet’s — brand of advice-giving and morality policing is remarkably black-and-white. This, obviously, is the reason why TikTok trends and phenomena like Reddit’s “Am I the Asshole?” forum are so popular. They allow us to fit complex situations into neat and comfortable boxes. Boyfriend won’t cut up your fruit? Break up! Husband says you don’t do enough housework? Divorce him, sis!  Taken together, the comments feel almost like the next wave of girlboss or Lean In feminism, where instead of acting more like men in professional settings, women are viewing men as a hopeless cause, treating them the way patriarchy has treated women for eternity. While the practice of “decentering” men from one’s life can be hugely positive for many women, the idea that all men are trash is loaded with essentialist rhetoric that harms people of all genders. Similarly, the idea that all heterosexual marriages are (or should be) irrevocably doomed is, as the Atlantic’s Lily Meyer pointed out, a failure of imagination, a failure to imagine a better world in which two people who ostensibly love each other can create an equal and mutually positive relationship.  Expecting nuance from a TikTok comment (character limit: 150) is a futile exercise. Perhaps the world would be a simpler place if the future could be determined by a test that goes viral on social media — if you could truly determine whether you should marry a man by bringing him an orange and waiting, hopefully, for him to peel it. Marriage doesn’t work like that, though. Because if it did, nobody would ever have to get divorced in the first place.

In this world, there are divorced men (fact) and men who are the most divorced (derogatory).  Men who marry will be divorced or they won’t. Men can also divorce and remarry, or divorce and remarry and divorce again, over and over, as many times as their hearts desire. According to the Census Bureau, roughly 33 percent of straight men who have ever been married have also been divorced, and the older a man gets, the more likely it is he will have been divorced at some point.  Support our journalism today for early access to our digital magazine every month—plus other great member benefits. But that’s not what people mean when they call a man the most divorced. In describing men this way, wordsmiths have crafted a critical spectrum to reflect their dismay, concern, disgust, chagrin, and often sexual aversion at a specific hypermasculinity shared by high-profile divorced guys. Journalist and critic Hunter Harris has a recurring bit about “the most divorced” men, naming Kanye West, Elon Musk, Ben Affleck, Joe Jonas, and Jeff Bezos as examples. It’s a distinction that’s not about the number of times a man’s marriages have dissolved but rather the severity of his resulting aura and how he presents himself.  An example: Musk is divorced, but he is the most divorced when he’s posting a picture of guns, cans of caffeine-free Diet Coke, and a small reprint of George Washington crossing the Delaware River on his nightstand.  While behavior varies, the aesthetic of the most divorced man remains remarkably consistent, and that is tight, sometimes shiny, clothes and a starter pack of flashy accessories.   The derision this look receives raises an important question: If the most divorced man is to be avoided, then why do certain men, especially famous ones, continue to dress so divorced? Why is the most divorced guy aesthetic so popular, even when the most divorced guy persona is not?  To be clear, it’s not that all divorced men wear a certain set of clothes; it’s that some newly single straight guys dress and accessorize in a way that eroticizes a violently loveless persona. Usually it involves leather, a lot of black, and a snug fit. Just as important are the add-ons: aviators, a bracelet or other jewelry like an expensive watch, cigars and a fancy lighter, and less appreciated trimmings like guns and cryptocurrency. It’s as though these men may be asked to shoot something and then light it on fire, all in a designer T-shirt.   “It’s about the kind of middle-aged guy that’s hitting the club in a certain kind of jacket, in a certain kind of shirt and certain kind of jeans and shoes, and he just kind of looks like a guy who’s trying to appeal to a 22-year-old,” said Derek Guy. Guy, the founder of Die, Workwear!, has also become a celebrity on X for his expertise in menswear. “And it’s not just like, going to Target, for example. They’re going to a little bit more of an upscale store, but at the same time, they’re probably buying into trends that are 10 to 20 years old, and they haven’t kept up with how trends and things have moved.”  Ben Affleck debuts faux-hawk haircut as managers reportedly work on divorce https://t.co/6xjgKYKVt3 pic.twitter.com/vXvTgWxb82 Guy explained that these fits are even more glaring now that actual young people are wearing oversized or baggier clothing. But his example isn’t that far off from divorced dudes from previous generations trying to look younger — nor is it that far off from what’d we previously label as midlife-crisis chic (leather jackets, hair dye and/or a toupee, a convertible).  All these strong aesthetic choices mean that the most divorced men don’t actually have to be divorced at all. What’s key here is a mood, a feeling, a state of existence that most of us want no part of. Being able to clock it from a distance — from a phone screen, preferably — becomes a shared relief. The beauty of the most divorced guy archetype is that he is rarely, if ever, in the same room as us but, at the same time, is ubiquitous, like a boogeyman who loves Las Vegas nightlife.  While we’re likely pulling these ideas from what we see in the media of very rich and powerful celebrities like Musk, Bezos, and Affleck, who have access to stylists and social media managers — Guy encourages us to think about the way we project meaning onto fashion, and onto the men, famous or regular, wearing these clothes. On one level, a man dressing in uber-divorced men’s garb may be clinging to an expression of masculinity. But the people making this judgment have also created a narrative in their heads about what kind of person he is.  Guy worries that as this spreads to regular guys who want to experiment in their fashion, divorced or not, it ends up having a chilling effect. “I’m careful with the term”— divorced guy — “because I always want to make it easier for guys to get into what I consider a hobby,” Guy said. “And using the term can make guys worried [about fashion] and just puts another obstacle, another fear, on the road to them finding something that I think can be very fulfilling.”  The delineation is in the intent and awareness. As Guy points out, some guys buy a Rolex because they want you to think certain things about them, their power, their wealth, their manhood; other guys just really like watches.   With this in mind, it seems that what unifies the divorced guy style is that they wear their masculinity as a shield. They want you to think they’re too manly to be contained, which they illustrate with choices everyone knows no woman had a hand in. What they might not have done, however, is reconcile the husband they used to be with the man they’re becoming now. Few people knowingly pick out a visually unpleasant outfit because they think it’s horrible. Deliberately doing that would be clown behavior. There’s some disconnect there, a gulf between what one person thinks looks good and what marks them to others as an insidious archetype. That disconnect might be reflecting something deeper. “There’s one thing that I am really aware of is that there are so many resources out there for divorced women and women going through divorce. And I don’t think there’s the same kind of support for men,” said Alexandra Solomon, a psychologist specializing in relationships. She explained that because of this support, women have a better understanding of what life post-divorce looks like, whereas men — billionaires and non-billionaires alike — don’t have that same kind of clarity and backing.  “There really is a dearth of community support and conversation about how to help men transition out of marriage in a way that honors the profound shift in identity that occurs when you come out of a divorce.”   But how does that loss and confusion turn into purchasing a horrific shirt? Does a lack of resources compel a man to post pictures of beers and guns for clout? Are men just aesthetically violent sleeper agents waiting for activation, and is that trigger divorce?  There are myriad steps between a split and buying an outfit to reflect said split. Solomon explained that what lives between — or, crucially, fails to — is a psychological term called “self-concept clarity.” Essentially, this is how human beings frame our own identity and how well we think we know ourselves. She said studies have shown that when people go through emotional breakups, their sense of self shatters.  “We don’t need to laugh at them and we don’t need to pity them,” Solomon said of men who make bold fashion choices following a breakup. “But we could be curious about what it is they’re displaying. Reclamation? Transition? A new identity? We’re all generally clunky about all those things.”  Ego death coupled with a lack of emotional support may be why certain men seek out the divorced guy aesthetic. Hypermasculine clothes and other external markers help them self-identify or graft an idea of what they perceive being a single man to be onto who they already are. Divorced guy aesthetic is, often, an impression of a single man — a caricature of another caricature, but absent irony or self-awareness. And maybe it’s all in an attempt to show the world they’re doing okay.  It’s the sexual implication of these signifiers that can be unnerving to others. There’s a sense that they belong to an aggressively on-the-prowl bachelor. It is true that people should dress in ways they find empowering, and a leather cuff is not in and of itself an unwanted sexual overture. But it’s hard to ignore the carnal hope that seems implicit to its wearer. Because the most divorced guy vibe is so adjacent to to tenets of toxic masculinity — aggression, violence, sexism, compulsory heterosexuality — the yuck it elicits feels similar too. There’s something desperately insecure about holding on to outdated masculine norms. Expressing our ick reflects our own changing ideas about how men should act and present themselves.  “We always should investigate our ew. Our ew says as much about us, just as much as it says about the other person,” Solomon said. “Our ews are always worthy of our investigation.” That knee-jerk, shudder reaction is a problem when divorced guys seemingly need all the empathy they can get. Community, especially among men who have regained their self-conception after a split and those still in process, might well be the answer. After all, being divorced isn’t the worst thing — unless it’s from reality. 

There are few life events where a person might feel as loved and supported as they do during their wedding. A bride or groom and their new spouse are fêted with a full calendar of celebrations, from engagement parties to destination bachelor and bachelorette trips, bridal showers, rehearsal dinners, and of course, the Big Day itself. They’re showered with gifts — money toward a honeymoon, a good knife set, a hand drill for DIY home projects — to set them up for a successful start to blissful matrimony.  What if we did the same for people going through a divorce? Support our journalism today for early access to our digital magazine every month—plus other great member benefits. Increasingly, some are doing exactly that: They’re throwing divorce parties, signing up for divorce registries and asking loved ones to pitch in, and even going on “divorcemoons.” These trends bookend the growing list of traditions surrounding matrimony, filling in the gaps at the other end of the journey and bringing a little bit of the $70 billion wedding industry to the modern divorce. After all, a divorce is arguably a time when someone needs more assistance and well wishes than ever. Some 40 percent of first marriages end in divorce, with the rate shooting up even higher for second and third marriages. “Yet we still don’t talk about divorce in a very realistic way,” says Olivia Dreizen Howell, who started the Fresh Starts Registry in 2021 with her sister Genevieve Dreizen. The company provides pre-made divorce registries and a host of other services helpful for when you’re ending your marriage. The divorce bundles contain many of the same quotidian household objects you’d find on a wedding registry, except this time they’re intended to help you turn over a new leaf after you’ve split up the furniture, the houseplants, maybe even half the household stock of toilet paper. Howell got divorced in April 2019. “Half my things were gone … and everything else that was left were very emotionally charged items,” she says. “The sheets that we slept on together, the dishes we got from our wedding registry — we donated a lot of those items, and then my house was really empty.” In June 2021, Dreizen ended her engagement, and later that year Fresh Starts was born. Dreizen didn’t take any furniture when she moved out, only clothes and heirlooms. Friends asked what they could do to help as she sat in a mostly empty apartment. After going through their own breakups, they officially launched Fresh Starts in 2021 to host a cornucopia of pre-made divorce registry bundles that are organized by budget, the room you want to furnish, and even decor style. The cheapest, at $99, includes the basics like a set of sheets, towels, some cutlery, and a toothbrush holder — the things you might need for your very first night in a new place — while the most expensive basics bundle contains about $500 worth of stuff. In the kitchen-specific bundle there’s an easy jar opener (a must-have when you don’t have another adult to help loosen lids), and a single-serve coffee maker.  “It’s kind of the things that you touch every day, so your sheets, towels, utensils, cups, plates, dishes,” says Howell. For a bundle to furnish a child’s room, Howell made sure all the furniture could be assembled solo by one adult. “I just thought that was such an incredibly thoughtful thing from a single mom to other single moms,” says her sister.  For Scarlett Longstreet, a 36-year-old writer and influencer who posts content about divorce on social media, the concept of a divorce registry was foreign at first, and yet it made practical sense. “It’s so sweet that we’re showered with gifts when we’re getting married, but I didn’t have three little girls to take care of when I was getting married,” she tells Vox. She chose not to take much from the home she’d shared with her ex-husband. “I really did want a fresh start,” she says. Using the bundles on Fresh Start, in all she put about $1,500 worth of household products on her registry to start anew.  For comparison, the average value of a wedding registry last year was about $4,853, according to The Knot. There’s nowhere near the same pageantry and well-wishes showered on people exiting a marriage, even though they’re arguably more financially strapped than a pair of people joining households. Even if you’re scrimping, furnishing a one-bedroom apartment on your own is likely to cost several thousand dollars at least, not including rent, security deposits, and any other lease signing fees. “I think the biggest hurdle is to say, ‘I’m going to do this registry,’” Longstreet says. “I would encourage people to do it, because that’s a way that your loved ones can show up for you.” Fresh Starts’s primary revenue stream comes from offering vetted experts who can walk people through their entire process — divorce lawyers, coaches, therapists, even hair stylists. Experts pay $55 per month to be listed on Fresh Starts, and the site currently has around 120 professionals it connects with interested clients. What people often find surprisingly hard about divorce is taking care of the minutiae of life that add to the creaking emotional weight on their shoulders: how to find a rental, how to separate a bank account from an ex-spouse’s, how to refinance a mortgage on your own, or how to ensure your child can stay in the same school district. Fresh Starts’s coterie of experts, Howell says, can help. Beyond the practicality of a registry when you’re newly single, there’s a growing group of people who choose to celebrate divorce with a splashy party. The end of a long legal process can be something to cheer — no one who’s seen the paparazzi photos of Nicole Kidman after her divorce was finalized could disagree. Marina Hoffmann, a 49-year-old publicist, threw her divorce party at the same venue where she got married 15 years earlier. She used the same event planner, the same cake designer, and invited (using proper paper invites) many of the same people who had attended her wedding. There was a taco station, a 10-piece band, and flowers adorning the event space. She wore a pink dress. Calling it a “next chapter” party, Hoffmann spent between $25,000 to $30,000 on the blowout divorce bash. “I had 100 people, and it was an amazing party,” says Hoffmann.  Savanna Pruitt, a 26-year-old in digital marketing, was getting a divorce right as her best friend was about to get married. The two enjoyed a joint bachelorette-and-divorce beach weekend. Pruitt and her best friend both wrote their Venmo accounts on the back window of the car they drove, following a bachelorette party trend where people display Venmos so passersby can buy the bride a drink. “We both got probably $10 a piece,” she recalls. Her friend had a “white sash that said ‘Bride to be,’ and then I had a black one that said, ‘I do, I did, I’m done.’” In all, the weekend cost Pruitt and her friend about $500. Christine Gallagher, a former divorce party planner and author of The Divorce Party Handbook, says there are a lot more people in the business of divorce party planning today than when she first started. “A lot more party companies are branching out and offering this, which is great,” she says. Throughout her career, Gallagher estimates having planned somewhere around 450 divorce parties. Certain themes were especially popular, like divorce parties based on the cutthroat reality show Survivor. “You survived a shipwreck marriage,” Gallagher explains. Sometimes the events weren’t joyful, but more somber observances — like a ring burial ceremony, complete with ring caskets — but it was crucial for a lot of people to have some tangible ritual to mark the end of one part of their lives so that they could usher in the next. “Most of our big events in life, we have some sort of public ritual or ceremony,” she tells Vox. “It’s a way to bring your friends around you to help you make a transition, and that’s primitive.” The only bad divorce party she recalls is one that was planned as a surprise.  Everyone Vox spoke to had experienced some degree of negativity because they talked publicly about their separation — to be anything but downtrodden and ashamed about divorce was seen as tacky, or even ungrateful, to the people who had spent time and money on the wedding. “I get a lot of people who say, ‘Oh this is just distasteful. You shouldn’t even talk about it — you’re airing your dirty laundry,’” says Longstreet. Gallagher remembers seeing online comments calling divorce parties “the kind of thing that’s ruining our country.”  “I think it’s healthy to work stuff out and not sit around suffering,” Gallagher says. “My grandparents were horribly unhappy, but they were Catholic and couldn’t divorce.”  Because of the stigma, there’s a great deal of self-consciousness around asking people for support as a person going through a divorce. Most people don’t bat an eye at a few splurge options listed on a couple’s wedding registry — but Longstreet recalls feeling sensitive to what people might say if she didn’t list only the most essential, budget-friendly items on her registry. “It was like, ‘I can’t really ask for that, right?’ I tried to really focus mostly on stuff for my girls rather than me,” she says. There was no Vitamix blender, no Balmuda toaster oven, and definitely no 157-piece Le Creuset cookware set. For Longstreet, a divorce registry was a way for her to say out loud that she was getting a divorce. “It’s okay for me to be public about this,” she says.  For now, the Divorce Industrial Complex remains limited in scope. But divorcées are learning from the wedding: It’s okay to find some joy (or relief) in the act, and it’s okay to expect your loved ones to be there for you. The end of a marriage doesn’t mean it was a failure. As the poet Jack Gilbert put it: “Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.”

Welcome to Money Talks, a series in which we interview people about their relationship with money, their relationship with each other, and how those relationships inform one another. Jackie Pilossoph is 59 and lives in the suburbs of Chicago. Her business, Divorced Girl Smiling, is a media company that connects people facing divorce with trusted, vetted divorce professionals. Michèle Heffron is 63 and lives in the suburbs of Seattle. She is a certified relationship and divorce coach, who provides practical and emotional support to clients as they navigate the legal process and enter their post-divorce life. The following conversation has been lightly condensed and edited. Jackie Pilossoph: I got divorced in 2008. I was 41 years old with two toddlers. I had no family living in my town, and I didn’t know one divorced person. The internet was not what it is today, and I did not have a good experience. I felt alone and isolated. I didn’t have a divorce team of professionals to help me. It wasn’t really a thing yet! Divorce coaches didn’t even exist. That was a really, really hard time for me. Support our journalism today for early access to our digital magazine every month—plus other great member benefits. I didn’t want other women to have to go through what I did. They should have a community of support. So I started blogging. I started my blog in 2014 and it caught on very quickly. People could relate. Then, after a few years, I thought “I’m not a divorce coach, I’m not an attorney, I’m not a mediator, I’m a journalist who loves to write. I need to partner with divorce professionals who can help these women in other ways.”  So I started curating the best of the best. There’s not a person on Divorced Girl Smiling whom I wouldn’t do business with myself. They’re all vetted, not only by me but also by my advisory board. Michèle Heffron: I’ve been through two divorces. My second one was 15 years ago. I had a career, and then I decided to become a stay-at-home mom. Getting back into the workforce after that was absolutely terrifying and very challenging. It was my second abusive marriage, from a verbal, emotional, and financial standpoint. I didn’t have a credit card. I moved out of our house. I didn’t think I had any rights as a stay-at-home mom who hadn’t contributed financially to the household. I had a daughter in college and a son going into middle school and I was scared. I felt alone. I had family and friends around, but I don’t think anybody understands what you’re going through at that point in time.  One of the mistakes I made was using my attorney as my therapist. It was very expensive therapy, and it didn’t really help me. It’s not that they don’t care, but it isn’t their deal, and they charge you by the minute! Jackie: I did the same thing. I would call my divorce attorney and cry. My attorney was filling shoes that he wasn’t qualified to fill, and charging me for it.  While there is a place for divorce attorneys — you need one to get divorced, in most cases — they are such a small percentage of what you need. They are only doing 25 percent of the work you need to do to get divorced. You need a therapist, and you also need a divorce coach.  Michèle: I facilitate emotional clarity and stability. I also encourage personal accountability, because no matter what anyone says, even if the other party is 97 percent responsible for the damage that has been done, everyone owns some part of the downfall of a relationship. I really help prevent costly decision-making based on values rather than resentment, which I think is a really important thing. Sometimes people will go to great expense to make a point, even though it gets them nowhere. Jackie: One of your first calls [when you’re considering divorce] should be to a mortgage lender, to see if you can afford to stay in your home. Your divorce attorney can’t help you with that.  The business of divorce is changing. You need a team of people to get divorced, and that can include a divorce coach, therapist, mortgage lender, real estate agent — and all of these people have divorce credentials. People think that it means you’re going to spend a lot of money, but I think you’re going to spend less because you’re not calling an attorney who charges by the hour. Michèle: When we were going through our divorces, there weren’t all of these certifications. “Having a team” meant stacking up lawyers. There’s more of a collaborative philosophy [these days], with coaches and attorneys working together — and that doesn’t mean your divorce is going to be any more amicable, but it’s a different approach.  Jackie: What I see a lot [in my work] is that women, especially, do not take charge of the finances in a marriage. When a marriage ends, they’re financially in the dark. They don’t look at the statements, they don’t know how much money they have, and the mistake is not empowering yourself right at the beginning, either when you think you’re going to get divorced or when you think something’s wrong.  Maybe your ex is going to start hiding money, maybe you’re not going to get such a great deal. Go to a financial adviser who specializes in divorce and start the conversation.  I tell women all the time, if you feel intimidated by numbers and you’re nervous and you feel mad at yourself — first of all, don’t be mad at yourself. It’s never too late to get empowered about finances. You’ll feel so much better when you have the numbers in front of you. You’ll know what’s going on financially so you can make good decisions in your divorce.  Michèle: It’s important to get all of the information without making any assumptions based on what your spouse is telling you — or what happened to your sister or to your friend down the street, because your situation is never going to be the same as somebody else’s. Get all of the documents together, including your tax returns and your bank statements and all of that, so when you go to a financial adviser they’ll have all of this stuff on the table.  Jackie also mentioned going to a certified divorce real estate broker or mortgage broker, because if you do own a home there are a lot of things that could happen to it that you’re not aware of. It’s not a given that anybody’s going to get the house or not get the house. So many people think they absolutely must have their house, and sometimes that’s just not feasible. I see it more and more frequently with women — they’ve gotten the house and then they’re hit with a big tax bill that they didn’t expect, and then they’re getting extra jobs so they can pay off the taxes. For me, my husband owned the house before we got married, and it was a relief for me not to get the house because even if I’d fought for it, I couldn’t have afforded it. But I didn’t stand up for what I should have gotten out of that house. There was a lot of information that I wasn’t aware of, and I was so afraid of tipping over the apple cart with my ex that I didn’t go after what I could get.  You need to surround yourself with people you can trust, so you can get the information and make the decision instead of just getting it over with so you’ll be done with it.  Jackie: My kids were three and five when I got divorced, and college was never discussed. Huge mistake. You don’t want to have to keep going back to court. If you have a good lawyer, your lawyer will bring up everything — and even if it changes, at least you have something. Everything continually changes. People get remarried, someone might lose their job, you can always modify — but if you don’t even discuss it, you’re going to be in court every five years as these children grow up. I was constantly in court with post-litigation. Michèle: It’s also about not putting the kids in the middle. I don’t care how mature you think your child is, they’re a kid. You have to think about how they’re absorbing the information they’re gathering.  In my case, I had a 20-year-old and a 10-year-old. The 20-year-old could hear a lot of different things, but your 10-year-old doesn’t really need to hear that stuff. Jackie: Also, when you talk negatively about your ex in front of their kids, it really hurts them. I did that, and I’m ashamed of it, but we’re also human. You have to give yourself a break and really try not to do it as much as possible. Michèle: It’s so easy to do. Jackie: Which is why you have a divorce coach and a therapist to talk to! Michèle: You have to think about so many different things with kids. What if they’re really good at sports or ballet? What if they want piano lessons? What happens when they start driving? You need a living document that can be modified that spells out the financial responsibilities for each parent — and if you have a spouse that doesn’t do their share, which happens a lot, at least you have the document so you can go back to it.  Jackie: When kids turn 18 and there’s no more child support but you still might have to deal with expenses like college, you have to hope that the parents are in a place where they can deal amicably with each other and come to agreements themselves. That’s really what they teach you in mediation. They teach you how to co-parent for the rest of your life. Michèle: As long as the parents are on the same page. Jackie: But some people get on the same page after mediation!  Michèle: That’s the most important part.

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Former president Donald Trump’s new anti-immigration line sounds like a very old one: that immigrants are biologically worse than native-born Americans. In the latest episode of conservative pundit Hugh Hewitt’s podcast, Trump argued that the impulse to murder is determined by one’s genetics — and that immigrants today have “bad genes.” The comments seem to represent Trump’s authentic beliefs. Going back at least to his 1987 book The Art of the Deal, where he said that dealmaking ability is determined “in the genes,” Trump has credited his own success to good genes and blamed poor peoples’ failures on bad ones.  But this is possibly the first time — and at least the highest-profile moment — where he has explicitly linked his faith in genetics to his obsession with migrant criminality. While Trump has long (and falsely) maintained that immigrants are responsible for the lion’s share of American crime, he has never explained exactly what it is about the current wave of migrants that makes them so much more likely to commit violent acts. Now we know the answer: that, per Trump, “[being] a murderer — I believe this — it’s in their genes.”  Trump’s comments fit neatly into a broader conservative intellectual universe, unintentionally combining two disparate ideas on the right into a disturbing synthesis. Right-wing intellectuals have long been fascinated by genetic determinism — a belief that people’s lot in life, including their propensity to commit crime, is set at birth. Separately, some Trump-era conservatives have declared war on the Reaganite vision of America as a nation defined by its founding ideals rather than the ethno-cultural identity of its people. Trump’s musings about genes tie these notions into a coherent whole. Immigration is an existential threat to America, per Trump, because it brings in people who are genetically incapable of assimilating into the American body politic. America is a nation determined by its people — specifically, people who have “good genes.” It doesn’t take a historian to see the disturbing parallels at work here. American conservatism, as I’ve argued previously, sees an insistence on the idea of a fixed human nature as one of its defining traits. For some conservatives, this manifests as a notion that inequalities are natural: that the very best rise to the top due to their innate gifts, while the poor remain so due to their own failings. This is the central theme of The Bell Curve, the infamous 1994 book on the role of intelligence in America’s social structure. Though best remembered for its infamous claim that racial inequalities likely reflect the superior intelligence of whites relative to Blacks, the book’s main focus is using research to naturalize America’s class structure.  The Bell Curve treats intelligence as a heritable, largely genetic trait. Modern societies, the book writes, are extremely good at identifying and elevating their most genetically gifted children, producing a “cognitive elite” at the top of the social structure and an unintelligent underclass at the bottom. The underclass’ problems are primarily caused by the stupidity of its denizens — including, the book claims, poor communities’ high crime rates.  “Many people tend to think of criminals as coming from the wrong side of the tracks. They are correct, insofar as that is where people of low cognitive ability disproportionately live,” authors Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein wrote. Like many of The Bell Curve’s arguments, linking criminality to genetics has remained a popular move among right-wing intellectuals even as the modern evidence base tells a more complicated story. After Trump’s Hugh Hewitt interview, prominent right-wing commentator Richard Hanania insisted that “he’s right that crime is largely genetic.” Interestingly, Hanania dissented from Trump’s application of this idea to immigrants. Correctly pointing out that immigrants are no more prone to crime than native-born Americans, Hanania concluded that immigrants as a group don’t have the “bad genes” that incline certain people toward criminality. “Trump is lying on crime, even when he tells the truth about genetics,” Hanania concludes. But in this, he is in the right-wing minority: most share Trump’s view of immigrants as an especially criminal and essentially alien group. Indeed, this has led the modern right to take a very different view of America as a country than they have in the past — one that ties in uncomfortably well with Trump’s comments on genes and crime. In one of his earliest political speeches, Ronald Reagan insisted that “America is less of a place than an idea.” The American idea, per Reagan, is that “deep within the heart of each one of us is something so God-like and precious that no individual or group has a right to impose his or its will upon the people.” Reagan is expressing the traditional conservative movement view of American national identity: that it is defined by our shared commitment to the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. This kind of nationalism, which scholars term “creedal” or “civic” nationalism,” gives rise to a deep belief that anyone can be an American provided they are properly socialized into American ideals. As president, Reagan offered amnesty to millions of undocumented migrants and explicitly welcomed people crossing the Southern border. “Rather than making them or talking about putting up a fence, why don’t we work out some recognition of our mutual problems, make it possible for them to come here legally with a work permit,” as he put it in a 1980 presidential debate. Today, of course, putting up a fence is Republican orthodoxy. Gone too is Reagan’s creedal nationalism and its welcoming, idealistic spirit. Instead, the modern right is increasingly enamored by a darker vision of American nationalism: one in which the country’s identity is defined less by its founding ideals than by blood and soil. Americanness is not set by commitment to principles of liberty and equality, but rather by one’s historical and familial connections to the country. It is a more classically European way of seeing national identity, and one that’s echoed at the highest levels of the current Republican Party. “America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation,” Vice Presidential nominee JD Vance said during his speech at the Republican National Convention.  While allowing that “it is part of that tradition, of course, that we welcome newcomers,” Vance argued that this tradition also requires strict criteria for the number and kind of newcomers who should be permitted. Immigrants may only be allowed “on our terms,” or else America will lose the sense of nationhood that he believes underpins the country’s greatness. “People will not fight for abstractions, but they will fight for their home. And if this movement of ours is going to succeed, and if this country is going to thrive, our leaders have to remember that America is a nation, and its citizens deserve leaders who put its interests first,” Vance said. Trump made a similar, if more pointed, argument in a September campaign speech in Pennsylvania. “It takes centuries to build the unique character of each state,” the former president said. “But reckless migration policy can change it very quickly and destroy everything in its way.” In his recent comments about immigrants and crime, Trump shows how this new nationalism fits together with the longstanding conservative preoccupation with genetics. It is not just that America is a country for a specific kind of people; it’s that the people we’re letting in are biologically incapable of becoming peaceful Americans. Creedal nationalism’s faith in assimilation is not merely misplaced, but a delusional denial of genetic reality. The only responsible conservatism, on this account, is one that understands the United States as an almost physical entity: one whose survival depends on keeping its gene pool full of desirables. We’ve seen versions of this nationalism before. It does not tend to end well. This story was adapted from the On the Right newsletter. New editions drop every Wednesday. Sign up here.