As I’ve noted previously, Robert Stacy McCain* brilliantly describes what he calls “The Writer” in ‘Broken People,’ Cats and Prozac. There are several very common characteristics of “The Writer” which McCain has noted. One of them is their education:
See, this is the thing with young feminist writer types nowadays. They can’t go to Podunk State University. No, they must attend one of those private schools where annual tuition is at or near the median U.S. household income. This is the only way to become that glorious being, The Writer.
Another, even more central characteristic is what The Writer writes about:
Well, you may ask, what does The Writer write about?
Herself, of course! Do these elite colleges offer a major in Solipsism Studies nowadays?
…
To say the very least. Where do they come from, these painfully sensitive writer girls with interior dialogues full of shame and fear?
“Feminine instinct without its proper object or purpose,” my gut tells me, speaking like an old-fashioned psychologist, or perhaps an anthropologist of the evolutionary “brain science” type.
With this in mind, I offer you some excerpts from Laura Lifshitz’s comment in reply to my recent post about her so that we might further test The Other McCain’s prescience:
#3- I went to college for writing. An established institution– Columbia University. I am not be Shakespeare or the other author you mentioned, but I love writing, I write constantly, and try to the best of my ability.
Went to an expensive private university to study writing? Check. The Other McCain has this part dialed in. But did he guess the subject material correctly?
#6 Yup. I make money off writing about divorce, parenthood, sex, marriage, and more.
If that makes me a jerk, well please, I’m waiting for my capital J.
This is a tougher call. The post I linked to and the others of hers I read were very much about her own divorce, her own parenthood, etc. But Lifshitz frames this as writing about the topics in the abstract, not using these topics as an excuse to endlessly write about herself, baring her own pain, etc. However, I am perhaps not the most unbiased observer here, so I suggest instead we take this question to someone who is sympathetic to Lifshitz. William Benton was one of several commenters who came to this blog to defend Lifshitz:
2) Laura is not profiting from her divorce. She supports herself. She is a hard working, creative, witty soul who wishes nothing more than to find the light at the far end of this dark tunnel she has found herself in. She has no delusions that somehow divorce is an inconvenient event that will ultimately be inconsequential, and her daughter will simply get past it. No, she is looking for hope in the future as she deals with the pains she fought to prevent from slamming down on herself and her daughter.
3) Laura writes from her heart. She bares her soul so graphically that I cannot bring myself to read everything that she writes. She reflects upon pain and anguish to control the demons of her past. That is how she copes and how she survives. And it opens her up to critical judgement from those who don’t know or understand the rest of the story.
So far McCain is two for two. This brings up his third prediction, regarding where “The Writer” lives while practicing her trade of writing about herself:
And, probably because as girls dreaming of becoming The Writer, they watched a sitcom or movie about the lives of quirky bachelorettes in Brooklyn, they simply must live there after graduation.
From just a bit of searching it appears that this particular “The Writer” doesn’t actually live in Brooklyn, but does trace her roots to Brooklyn. For this I think it is ony gracious to give McCain partial credit.
But as I mentioned in my previous post, Lifshitz isn’t just another The Writer, she is part of a subset of The Writers who realized that in order to properly navel gaze, they needed to bring more to the table than just ordinary feminist dysfunction. Lifshitz is a cut above ordinary The Writers; she has gone that essential extra mile to become not just any The Writer, but a Professional Divorcée. Divorce papers and devastated young child in hand, she finally has the kind of painful inner dialog her readers crave. As commenter Alexandra Segal explains:
You’re just jealous that she got published in the New York Times and you didn’t. And by the way, how dare you criticize a mother who worries about her child? Don’t even pretend to think that you know what that kind of bond is like.
Let this be a lesson to all would be The Writers. If you want to make it big and put your expensive private school education to use, be sure to leave a trail of wreckage in your wake.
See Also: Harming your kids for attention and profit.
*I understand from Instapundit that The Other McCain has a new book out: Sex Trouble: Essays on Radical Feminism and the War Against Human Nature.
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Dalrock, you might want to comment on this article: http://howlround.com/parenting-and-playwriting-the-boyfriend-plot
A Girl Scout troop leader found the little girls “wise beyond their years.” Yet when she tried to teach storytelling skills to them, she was disappointed that all but one of the girls told stories about boyfriends. An excerpt:
“The girls were terrific. Silly and shy, coy and rambunctious, attention-seeking, wise beyond their years, strikingly immature, they strutted about the room like little heroines in a post-modern novella written by Louisa May Alcott, edited by Ntozake Shange, with contributions from Beyoncé—the Destiny’s Child years. Their monologues, however, were a disappointment. Not because they were poorly written or lacking in style or stingy with words, but because only one girl wrote a monologue that wasn’t about getting a boyfriend, keeping a boyfriend, or losing a boyfriend.
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“…hey strutted about the room like little heroines in a post-modern novella written by Louisa May Alcott, edited by Ntozake Shange, with contributions from Beyoncé—the Destiny’s Child years. Their monologues, however, were a disappointment. Not because they were poorly written or lacking in style or stingy with words, but because only one girl wrote a monologue that wasn’t about getting a boyfriend, keeping a boyfriend, or losing a boyfriend.”
The blindness HAS to be willful, right?
Maybe the “destroy my family and write about the pain” has an analogue in the old saw about “authentic” blues….you couldn’t sing authentically about the blues unless you’d hit ‘rock bottom’….ie BB King or whoever.
‘You’re just jealous that she got published in the New York Times and you didn’t. And by the way, how dare you criticize a mother who worries about her child? Don’t even pretend to think that you know what that kind of bond is like.’
It’s all about feelings and assumptions from their heart. You’re just jealous a woman succeeded, don’t criticize a mother about her child, men have no clue what a mother-child bond is like.
Personally I would love to see an article in the NYT about a SAHM and her life (I’ve read several blogs from them…it’s crazy but they love it). From that I got what it’s like about mothers and children. And many of them talk about their love for their husbands as far as what they give to the family. I think many of us have a skewed viewing of the world because the media decides that discontent and destruction are considered ‘successful writing’.
No offense to Ms. Lifshitz, but I’ve also been published in the New York Times and it’s pretty meh once the afterglow dies down. It’d be weird if someone were actually envious (jealous is the wrong word).
Follow up (lest someone think I’m a thesaurus nazi):
Envy: the desire to possess something that belongs to another
Jealousy: the fear of being displaced
So, this is why a spouse is jealous of sexual attention paid to their husband/wife, because they fear being displaced. However, this is different from desiring another’s spouse, which would be envy.
I like the way her defender talks about her divorce as if she were an unsuspecting victim of it. She just “found herself” in this dark tunnel of pain which came “slamming down” on her out of nowhere. She was just running through a meadow one day and fell in a divorce hole.
Now, I don’t know her story, and it’s possible that her husband surprised her with divorce papers, completely against her knowledge and wishes. That happens, though it’s incredibly rare. But if a man in that position were to talk about it entirely in the passive tense, people (probably including the man himself) would say things like, “Well, there are two sides to every story, no one’s perfect, it takes two, he could have done more to make it work, etc.” Only a woman (or her white knight) can talk about her divorce as if it was a force of nature against which she was entirely a powerless victim.
I (and I guess I have this in common with Shakespeare) is that I never attended a course of creative writing but I understand that one of the first pieces of advice at such a course is to write about what one knows (presumably meaning that fiction is better the closer it is to fact). Such advice is thus taken to heart by so many of the Mommy-bloggers including our own personal favourite at this blog, Jenny Erikson. Sadly, ex-husbands and children is the only subject that so many women seem to know for that is the subject on which they write.
I was once romantically linked to one of your fellow countrywomen who attended a creative-writing course, but she did not write about divorce, she wrote about me. My less than impressed comment to her was that it was terrible porn, to which she (somewhat hurt, I suppose) replied that it was not porn but how she felt about me. What can one say to that?
I find it suspicious as hell that a woman making a living off of sharing copious personal details is not sharing the details of her divorce. If her husband did indeed leaver her, I have a very hard time believing she would not have shared that, as it would have catapulted her into esteem by way of victimhood.
Ah yes, most women are credential fetishists. It isn’t enough to let their work speak for itself. She must remind you that she spent a small nation’s GDP to read books she could check out of the local library, and write papers for an audience of two(her and the professor) instead of one(herself). When I hear a blogger went to Columbia, I’m not impressed. In fact, I’m left to wonder where she went wrong. Someone spending that much to become a writer lowers my opinion of them. Much like a painter, you can hone your writing in college, but the innate talent must be there. A sub-par writer that goes to Columbia will leave as a sub-par writer with 6 figures less in the bank(or 6 figures in debt).
Jack Kerouac went to Columbia as well, but he dropped out. Faulkner went to college for 3 semesters. Mark Twain dropped out at 12. To a credential fetishist, our mommy blogger is obviously a much better writer than these 3 idiots.
“this dark tunnel she has found herself in”
How did that happen? Who knows? Can’t assign blame here. Maybe it was “the patriarchy”.
So, let me get this straight.
She’s a college educated woman who is proudly independent, except she forces her ex-husband to fork over money she’s entitled to receive (according to her lawyer and judge who held her husband down and went through his pockets), even though she can work to support herself?
Tell me again how she fiercely resisted the lure of self-centeredness offered through divorce and the cash-and-prizes her lawyer whispered into her ear.
No offense to Ms. Lifshitz, but I’ve also been published in the New York Times and it’s pretty meh once the afterglow dies down.
You’re a writer. She (and others) are The Writer.
You and others are routinely published in periodicals, trade magazines, etc. It’s a normal part of the job. I am responsible for news releases and articles as a secondary part of my main duty.
But we’re not living the pure life of The Writer. You see, The Writer will not sully her hands with activities other than Writing.
She will not compromise that, even if it spends every last dime in her ex-husband’s bank account.
Can one be taught to write? Can one be taught to write music? I mean over and above the nuts and bolts of harmony, counterpoint and orchestration. Clearly, shadowing a composer for a few years is a formative and life-changing experience (don’t just take my word for it, Haydn J. says exactly the same thing about his time with Niccolo Porpora) but it won’t of itself make you creative. That has to be there first as anyone who listens to the Missa Brevis for Chorus Two Violin (parts) and Continuo that Haydn wrote when still a chorister at St Stephens and just seventeen years of age – his first piece – can easily hear). Does the same apply to writers?
In his book on musical composition Reginald Smith-Brindle (1917–2003) himself both a pupil of Dallapiccola and Pizzetti reflects somewhat ruefully that his most played piece of music – something for guitar – was written before his studies in Italy. Perhaps all that Serialism killed off his own voice.
Boulez turns ninety on Wednesday …explosante/fixe….
“Can one be taught to write?”
Yes and no as you stated above. One can be taught technicalities, but innate talent is needed. And I’d say a voracious appetite for books. A lot of writers get into writing because they read books and think they can do better. Some do.
Timber St. James
To be clear, she wasn’t published in the New York Times, she was published in Motherlode the NYT mommy blog. It is an achievement in the land of mommybloggers, and certainly a feather in her cap. But it is nothing compared to Susan Gregory Thomas writing about hurting her children via divorce in both the WSJ and the NYT proper. If you really want to get attention for having harmed your children, Gregory Thomas should be your guide as Lifshitz is but a poor imitator.
Someone bragged that Lifshitz was “published,” and it was just a blog?
[PRNT SCRN]…[right click, paste]…[print]…frame for posterity!
I have another example of a “writer” with an MTA. Her name is Maggie Tokuda-Hall.
http://www.ravishly.com/contributors/5722
She now has a children’s picture book out; and her two articles listed are why her abortion was the right decision and when she dated a married couple.
Wow.
She now has a children’s picture book out; and her two articles listed are why her abortion was the right decision and when she dated a married couple.
Laughable and pathetic.
In the main post, the link for Laura Lifshitz’s comment is not quite correct. It should be
https://dalrock.wordpress.com/2015/03/18/laura-lifshitz-hits-the-bigtime/#comment-172224
[D: Thank you. Fixed.]
Spot on again Dalrock, as usual.
Yeah, Dalrock. How would you know ANYTHING about the sacred bond between parent and child?
Just kidding. BTW, if I had known that Lifshitz was still un-famous enough to google her own name, I wouldn’t have been so brutal in the comments section of your post about her. But then again, she chose to be in the public eye when she wrote those intimate details about herself in those articles. And she is horrible for trying to brand herself as Hero Mom after the things chose to do to her family. She needs God, and considering what she wrote about in her article about being a slut at 14, she probably needs therapy also. She doesn’t need to be patting herself on the back for her retarded behavior and sending the message to impressionable women that what she did is okay.
Being a complete fanboy here, but I love how Dalrock quietly gave them enough rope to hang themselves with by not responding and letting them spew their dysfunction. WINNAR!
Red Pill Latecomer says:
March 23, 2015 at 11:23 am
“Dalrock, you might want to comment on this article: http://howlround.com/parenting-and-playwriting-the-boyfriend-plot
A Girl Scout troop leader found the little girls “wise beyond their years.” Yet when she tried to teach storytelling skills to them, she was disappointed that all but one of the girls told stories about boyfriends.”
Since the Girl Scouts went feminist/pro-abortion/careerist over family/took God out of their oath, discerning Christian parents of daughters instead head over to the Heritage Girls for what the Girl Scouts used to be (but are no longer). It’s founded by disgusted longtime Girl Scout adult leaders. It’s where my two daughters will be headed in a couple of years.
http://www.ahgonline.org/
You’re just jealous that she got published in the New York Times and you didn’t
Only leftists are clueless and talentless enough not to realize that publication of one’s work in a rag like the NYT is an embarrassment rather than an accomplishment to be proud of. If I as a professional writer were to realize that such an event was the best I could ever expect for my work, I’d seriously consider never writing anything else again.
And by the way, how dare you criticize a mother who worries about her child? Don’t even pretend to think that you know what that kind of bond is like.
Why not? Mizz Dipshitz herself is merely pretending to know what a mother-child bond is like, so what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander…
Ok so I have a serious question. I just recently read https://dalrock.wordpress.com/2012/11/21/harming-your-kids-for-attention-and-profit/ after seeing it linked in the posts about Laura Lifshitz.
I then went on to read about Susan Gregory Thomas, including her WSJ article.
Susan Gregory Thomas very clearly stated in her WSJ article that her husband left her.
This is not a sarcastic question, as I assume you have a well-thought out and hopefully elucidating reply:
How is her divorce her fault if her husband left her?
Now I wouldn’t want to equate things written for blog comment sections with carefully crafted articles or papers, but if I were to go to Columbia for writing and come out still writing sentences as awkward and clunky as the above, I’d want my money back. You don’t have to hold a seance and contact the ghosts of Strunk and White to get an idea how much they would hate that last sentence for #6.
@myrealitie
But she doesn’t say that. She tells us that she bitched him to the point where he couldn’t take it anymore. Once he had enough and said she wanted out, she left it at that. She wrote:
Hilariously, her very next words are:
She checked out on her husband, refused to do something as simple as the dishes, and didn’t sleep in the same bed with him for two years straight. Then she follows up with “Is there anything I could have done differently?” He didn’t walk out on her, he gave in and gave her what she was passive aggressively demanding. Should he have done that? No, as I explained here. If he had been the one exploiting the pain of his children for attention and profit, my post would have been about him, not her.
What could she have done differently? She could have been a pleasant wife. Barring that, she could have said “I’m not done, I want to be your wife” when he said he was done. But she didn’t want that, as she proved by both her silence and her actions.
Dalrock,
I think they are afraid of you. I think that your words are so truthfully blunt, that you terrify feminists. You really don’t give them any space, any platform from which they can logically argue you (because you are red pill and they are blue pill) which is by design, I know. But you say things in such a “matter-of-fact” kind of emotionlessness way (no profanity, no pointless arguments, nothing but being entirely matter of fact) and your message is getting across far and wide (I have seen many youtubes with hits in the hundreds of thousands where people quote you and compliment you) that you genuinely scare feminists. They are afraid of you sir. They are afraid of you because what you say, changes minds.
[D: Thank you.]
You are most welcome sir. You have “helped” me.
Dalrock,
For this I think it is ony gracious to give McCain partial credit.
should probably have “only”. Feel free to delete this comment whether you fix this or not.
Logic is not something I have found a lot of when talking about sensitive issues, especially with women.
Correct Brad. That is why I do not want women anywhere near the voting booth making decisions on government that will affect all our lives.
@myrealitie
In a review of Thomas’s book, it was noted:
“Cue, for Thomas, the smoking, drinking, drugs, sexual misadventure, and, by her senior year, the psych ward, where she was diagnosed with “deep terror.”
So she started out seriously psychotic, likely with borderline personality disorder; which she then hung on an unsuspecting “nice guy”:
Of her marriage to a kind, “stable” man with whom she had “an absence of heat,” Thomas asks herself, “Did I end up strong-arming Cal into becoming a sexless caregiver? I foam with remorse and self-loathing at the thought.”
Note her comment “absence of heat”, not an alpha badboy was her husband; just another example of female hypergamy where AF/BB is the coin of the realm and Thomas, by her own admissio, started out crazy. Not a greta way to carry on a marriage.
@Dalrock, @Olay These are good points, thank you.
Olay – Oh, I don’t know. I think even women who marry an “alpha” can end up feeling heatless and bored if they expect all of their life’s jollies to come from him. More and more I think that the fun in life comes from feeling proud of yourself, not because other people reflect to you that you’re great but because you’ve earned your own self respect. This is kind of tangential and is not intended to negate your or Dalrock’s points about her being at least partially culpable in her marriage’s demise.
And I feel I should also add that feeling proud of yourself doesn’t necessarily mean going out in the world and conquering; it’s not incompatible with traditional gender roles.
I also find the part about resenting her husband not finding time to read her book as contemptible. My husband is a research mathematician. We are very close, but I have never once read anything he has ever published (as it is completely inaccessible to me).
It amazes me that any man would date or marry a female Writer. It seems that in doing so, he puts every detail of his own life, and that of the children he and Writer Woman will have, up for grabs as essay/blog fodder for Mom. Imagine being the child of such a woman! The intimate details of how you wet your diaper at age one; how you threw Cheerios across the kitchen at age three; the temper tantrum you had when you couldn’t stay up to watch television at age six. Your struggles with bullies as a high school freshman. The time you failed algebra. All saved for posterity in national newspapers and magazines!
(I’m borrowing that last example from a writer for the Atlantic, who, in a hilariously un-self-aware moment, complained in print that said son “tuned her out”. It’s like the Meme Generator writes itself: HUMILIATES TEENAGE SON IN NATIONAL PUBLICATION … … WONDERS WHY HE “TUNES HER OUT”.)
What are these mothers thinking? I would stop worrying if many of them were writing under pseudonyms so that their husbands and children would be spared the embarrassment of all these details of their personal lives being published like this. Are they?
@Dalrock
In re: your March 23rd post of 9:17, you should expand that into a separate post. Too many people think that the person who files for divorce is 100% responsible for the end of the marriage while the other party bears no responsibility at all. Yet this woman’s story is a classic tale of the “abandoned spouse” having manipulated the other spouse into filing after YEARS of her own completely unreasonable behavior. (When the house is a mess, you start with washing the dishes. If you haven’t washed the dishes for over a year, you have ceased doing any housework at all.)
It is probably true that women are much more responsible for the high divorce rate than men are, but in real life, you simply can’t make any assumptions based on the mere fact that one spouse was the plaintiff and the other was the defendant.
The credentialism Dalrock, McCain and others have noted is even more insane than you’d imagine. Circa 1994, yeah, your only chance of getting ahead in traditional media was through the name writer’s school or the name journalism school. And you would have needed Ivy-esque creds to get your start at a 15k circulation daily in Western Kentucky.
Then came 1995, AOL, Yahoo!, NetScape, MSN, Slate, list goes on and on. Any number of “writers” made the jump from blogs to paid writing for media companies. The most successful of them, Randall Munroe of XKCD fame (you can call him an artist, but… anyone could draw like that), went to something called Christopher Newport University and studied physics.
Mr. Munroe has single-handedly turned around the fortunes of Houghton-Mifflin Harcourt with his publication of the bestselling “What If?” based on a series of blog posts he’s done, in addition to his comic, for the past couple years.
There are tons of other examples, primarily male, folks from UCLA, or Kent State, or dropouts, who achieved actual results as writers. The level of investment in credentials may be on the rise for women like Ms. Lifshitz. The value of said credentials declines daily.
(the most successful of them, Randall Munroe of XKCD fame (you can call him an artist, but… anyone could draw like that)
Munroe is actually a pretty good artist; he just intentionally doesn’t try. It’s become a schtick. This, for example, is extremely well drawn: https://xkcd.com/1021/
And this: https://xkcd.com/1024/
re: And this: https://xkcd.com/1024/
You’re right. Maybe not the best example, but he’s the first that came to mind as HMH has been in and out of bankruptcy for years owing to things like leveraged buyouts. The company was mostly Amazon’s unofficial print arm (wink, wink), but they are now making actual money for the first time in decades thanks almost solely to him.
That would go both ways Laura. I suspect a man is less likely to push the woman to file. I have heard stories of such, but they seem like the exception rather than the rule as they don’t follow likely male behavior.
A common claim among at least some women is that the man “made her file,” but I have yet to see strong evidence of that. LL in the other thread seems to blame her husband quite a bit, as one example, though she was clearly the one who withdrew from being a wife.
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There are clearly things she could have done…like tried.
But read what she wrote. She didn’t. Not once. No counseling, no attempt to better things, when she KNEW neither of them were happy. Husband says he wants to file, she gives up. The end.
Saying that she “wonders what she could have done differently” is laughable. How about ANYTHING?
She had the idea in her head early she was going to be an independent woman. She did what an independent woman would do…not make any effort to stay with a husband.
@BradA
I ended up filing because my husband told me he was going to take the children out of the country to location with no extradition treaty and that I would never see them again. I thought that I could get a restraining order and possibly have the children’s passports cancelled (this was prior to attending law school) but the first words out of my attorney’s mouth were that as long as the marriage was intact, either spouse had the right to take the children anywhere without the permission of the other. To get a restraining order, I had to file.
I don’t doubt that women are more likely to be the instigators of divorce, but in any particular case, you can’t be certain. Even if you think that you know a couple quite well, you can be very surprised at what they were dealing with once they separate. Being on the verge of bankruptcy for years on end, sexual orientation issues, substance abuse problems, etc.
If there are two or more children under the age of seven or eight, and the wife works outside the home full time, the marriage is very likely to be fragile, IMO.
Laura,
What nationality was your ex?
Is marrying a foreign national man dread game participation on the part of women?
Question about the Venn diagram. What does one do if one pretended to commit for life, wants to be a writer, but fails to lack talent (i. e. does have it)?
I’m thinking the feminist education will see to it that talent is lacking.
Laura,
No, it’s a serious question, and here’s why. I have never remotely approached the position where I needed to make that kind of threat to my wife… fortunately… but as a born-in-America citizen of the US, but one who did indeed live in a foreign country that didn’t have an extradition treaty with the US (Sudan, if it matters) — I would have NO IDEA how to go about getting a resident visa in that country–or any other non-treaty country for that matter–apart from my employer sending me there. Hence the question: how credible was this threat?
Is marrying an ISIS fighter the real life equivalent of marrying a fantasy vampire lord? Is donning a burqa the equivalent of crossing over? Who could be a darker triad sort than someone who is willing to saw peoples heads off with a hunting knife while speaking calmly into a camera?
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If your Lifshutz, what’s your butthole do?
Womenz lololozzzllozlzzz: They just can’t accept responsibility. They can’t.
Laura,
My mother would have said my father made her file, when the truth was that they were both quite flawed people at the time and he could not make up for what her own father did not provide. He was not a great father at the time, though miles better than most I suspect.
You would be a special snowflake if his threat was credible, though I would also wonder about many other things going on in the background that played into that situation. I doubt your husband did that to get you to file however. He might have, but it was more likely a “heated word” thrown out in an argument.
Most men who would do it would likely just do that, not proclaim it ahead of time.
@KP and BradA:
My ex only had U.S. citizenship at the time of our divorce, however he later acquired Italian citizenship through Wife #2, and may have obtained citizenship or residency rights in the Philippines courtesy of Wife #3. Throughout out decade-plus marriage, he had talked non-stop about moving out of the country, and he was conversationally fluent or better in several languages.
He was also engaged in illegal activity that might have required him to make a run for it at some point. He told me very plainly that he had sought out legal advice as to where he could move with the children without risk of later extradition. After I filed for divorce, he admitted that his attorney was annoyed with him for having triggered the filing with his threats, as his attorney wanted to have the chance to negotiate a comprehensive divorce settlement with me before I hired an attorney.
I considered his threats to “disappear” with the kids to be very credible at the time, because I knew that he had a bank account in Switzerland, no conscience, excellent legal representation, and an unfulfilled dream of living overseas combined with potential legal problems from which he would have liked to escape. He didn’t give a damn about his parents or siblings, and had no genuine friendships, so being unable to return to the USA would not have been as much of an issue for him as it would have been for the vast majority of men. Apparently a study was done one time of people who kidnapped their children during a divorce — the people who did it turned out to be extremely selfish and immature, which isn’t much of a surprise.
Our separation/divorce began in the late 80s, and I don’t know if there are more or fewer choices these days for an overseas hideout. My guess would be that there are fewer. Children only go missing in a tiny percentage of divorces, but that is cold comfort for the people to whom it DOES happen.
My ex’s parents later helped him set up a new business for himself overseas, and I’m sure they would have helped him do so at the time of the divorce if he had told them that he was “desperate.” Having access to money without needing to work can make taking the children overseas much more of a viable proposition. But I don’t think that my ex would have EVER considered moving to a place like Sudan.
Someone should do a study on women who deny father’s access to their own children after a divorce. Sounds a lot like kidnapping to me. I wouldn’t blame a guy for taking his own kids and disappearing to stop that from happening.
Here’s a real gem with all the requisite qualifications:
– Writer
– Exclusive private university
– English / Journalism degree
– Lives in NYC
– Writer
– Uses that insufferably presumptious “us” and “we” voice, as though everyone shares her perspective
– Single
– Self-absorbed
I’m sure there’s a cat somewhere, too – if not now, in her not-too-distant future.
http://elitedaily.com/dating/why-women-want-players/1086019/
Cliff Notes Version: It’s not your fault – it’s nature’s – and the cad’s. Ride the carousel because that’s the only way to find Mr. Right, so don’t get too down on yourself. And remember: You deserve nothing less than Mr. Amazing.
It’s like these universities have some kind of injection molding machine to turn out female writers so indistinguishable from the stereotype.
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