Almost immediately after the divorce culture set in, we discovered something quite different. Entire generations have been harmed.

The True Face of “Happy Divorce”

 is Quite Ugly

by Austin Ruse

Afeature film now in theaters tells the story of children devastated by divorce and the story of middle-aged adolescents living almost exclusively for themselves.

The Way Way Back is the story of teen-age Duncan, who spends part of a summer at a beach house with his mother Pam, her boyfriend Trent and her boyfriend’s snotty and obviously wounded teenage daughter.

Duncan is morose, deeply depressed by the situation he finds himself in. Trent bullies him. He demands that Duncan rate himself between one and ten. Humiliated, Duncan finally mumbles “six.” “No, you’re a three,” says Trent. And that’s the remarkable opening scene as they drive to the beach.

The woman at the beach house next door is also divorced and most of the time drunk. Her hyper-sexualized daughter is also morose. Another couple enters the scene, long time friends; they all seem to have been going to this beach resort in Massachusetts their whole lives.

Though the divorced Pam has been dating the also divorced Trent for a year there is not much of a connection between them and she certainly does NOT connect with his longtime friends, she seems an utter outsider.

There’s lots of drinking and some pot smoking and silly cavorting on the beach. All the adults act like adolescents while the real adolescents are disgusted. They are disgusted not simply in the way adolescents might always be disgusted. They have a reason for their disgust, which is the way the adults are.

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Read more: www.crisismagazine.com

One of the best books on this topic remains Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce (Crown, 2005) by Elizabeth Marquardt, which reported “the first national study in the United States of grown children of divorce.”

Between Two Worlds: 

The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce 

Elizabeth Marquardt