Linguistic Musings on the Stigma of Divorce
Testing Substack’s Tolerance for Scholarly Discourse 😬
I was talking with a friend the other day and bitching about how tired I am of reporting my romantic status to everyone from my eye doctor to the person working the desk at the DMV. He said, “I just check ‘single.’” But you’re divorced, I pointed out. He shrugged. “I’m also single. I’m not defining myself by being divorced for the rest of my life” (we’ve both been divorced for nearly 15 years at this point).
He’s right. Why have *I* been checking “divorced” all these years? It’s a strange label to apply to oneself forever, isn’t it? A divorce is a discrete legal action that occurs and concludes during a limited space and time. We don’t do this with anything else. We don’t even do it with gender anymore, which is literally documented on everyone’s birth certificates; we now recognize that something being applied in the past might no longer be accurate or relevant.
When I was a teenager I was certified as a lifeguard, which is also a legal designation, and I don’t go around at 54 years old telling everyone I’m a lifeguard.
I’ve decided I will no longer identify as “divorced” either. I’m a legally-single woman, so I’ll be claiming that status going forward.
All of this has taken me back to an article I wrote nearly a decade ago in which I blend a personal narrative of my own experience at a state-mandated parenting class (horrifying. Darkly comedic at points, but mostly horrifying) with rhetorical analysis techniques.
If you’ve been interested in the applications of rhetorical analysis/critical discourse analysis/feminist-and-embodiment-theories-stuff we do in Burned Haystack, you might enjoy this as well. It was originally published in Peitho: Journal of the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric, but is now thankfully available in the public domain for free. Screenshot of abstract and link to accessible PDF below.
***Looking forward to any discussion that plays out on this one, but asking that anyone who weighs in on the parenting class part reads the entire article first. I’m sorry for being so pedantic, but if we’re going to have a scholarly discussion on this then we need to do it the right way.
https://cfshrc.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Young_Scapegoats-and-Aliens_20.1.pdf
I always say single. It’s none of their business.
This is such a unique opposite perspective to what I feel when I fill these forms. I am 43 and never married. Happy with that decision, I cannot look back and say oh I should’ve married this boyfriend, or maybe that one. They all proved to be man babies who would have been holding me back. I still have relationships from time to time that I greatly enjoy, but again I’m realistic about who is fun to spend a weekend with and who is a quality partner to spend a life with. Despite that, I still feel like when I check that single box right next to my age that whoever is reading, it is going to be judging it and calling me a spinster.