Conscious Un/Coupling
Term 6; Module 2
THESIS: Stories of divorce and marriages in crisis allow us a deeper understanding of character and the ways we realign within ourselves and our relationships over time.
It’s a tale as old as time. Boy meets girl. Boy and girl fall in love. Get married. Spend five to ten years in relative bliss until something inevitably shakes the foundation of the marriage and leads them both down parallel journeys of internal and external reckoning leading to a divorce or the birth of a newer and rawer relationship.
No? Just me?
Stories of romantic relationships and marriage for decades have been largely, well, romantic – if you can overlook the fact that they were all business deals with a side of affection (if you were lucky). Writers like Jane Austen didn’t shy away from strong, independent leading women with the knowledge of these being oft life-saving marriages in terms of reputation and financial status. But she still married them off in a flurry of “bewitched me body and soul” and “if I loved you less…” The rom com was a dominating genre of the early aughts, and now we have shows like Bridgerton, with the express purpose of marrying off a Bridgerton sibling every season.
*A note: for the sake of this module and the texts I have chosen, I am focusing mainly on heterosexual relationships. But rest assured! Queer couples are also getting divorced.*
But more recently, there has been a trend in divorce novels and films. The kind you might expect to have a surge after a century of marriage as a business deal. The kind that often takes place in an affluent neighborhood of Brooklyn with self-aware characters rolling their eyes at their own Carhartt jackets and dropping a child named India or Ronan off at the Montessori that cost them just way too much. They are a dime a dozen these days and I will probably read every one.
