This article draws on interviews discussing relationships with 25 heterosexual women
aged 20–87 from a variety of relationship status groups. Divorce was
portrayed as a negative consequence of flawed individual skills and investments,
reinforcing the marriage ideal and obscuring any advantages of this transition for
the increasing numbers facing single-again life. Those interviewees who had been
divorced did not endorse these attributions and negotiated their social lives around
feedback from others employing these interpretations. The ways in which discourses
of divorce reinforce dominant marital models of heterosexual relationships are
examined alongside the implications of this for the growing population of
single-again women.
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