No judgment here please, but for some reason, the other Saturday evening (partner at work and children in bed) I found myself watching the new series of Love is Blind on Netflix. I will be honest, I was sceptical at first.
One episode in and I was hooked. The series describes itself as a social experiment, where single men and women get engaged without meeting in person, essentially by dating each other in pods through which they talk to each other but cannot see each other. If, after a few dates, they feel they have ‘fallen in love’, they can propose.
Now on the face of it, this sounds bonkers, but I have since come to learn that couples from the first series are still happily married.
It wasn’t actually the swiftness to falling in love that shocked me. Many of us will be familiar with the different attachment theories, such as the way we become attached to people as a result of how we become attached to our primary caregiver during infancy, which can in turn impact the way we become attached to a romantic partner, with those with an anxious attachment style feeling more pressure to settle than those securely attached. No, it was the frequency and extent to which the contestants discussed how their own parents’ divorce/separation had shaped and/or scarred them, leading to some very strong views on marriage and what it should look like. For example, one participant described one of her fondest memories as being all together as a family at Christmas and how sad she was when her parents divorced that this could no longer happen and all she wanted for her own family was to recreate those memories with her own children and husband. Another didn’t speak to her mother for years after her parents’ divorce.
Now this got me thinking, is some of this sadness and animosity that these adult children now feel due to the way their parents divorced. Was it litigious, was it angry, was it unkind.
It doesn’t have to be like that. At CW, we offer the ‘one couple, one lawyer’ way to divorce. The aim is to reduce that animosity and have an amicable, respectful divorce. I’m no psychologist, but surely this is only going to assist children to develop healthy relationships in adulthood, and help to reshape the way divorce is viewed for the better. It doesn’t always have to be unpleasant. Helping to keep your divorces out of court