cptsdcarlosdevil:

this is my opinion on divorce:

paternal granddad went off to world war II and came back with PTSD. at the time working-class Irish Catholics with PTSD didn’t get therapy, they got drunk. he became a mean and nasty guy who made himself and everyone around him miserable. I have literally never heard my dad say a nice word about him. he beat his wife and kids and drank up his paychecks while his kids’ shoes had holes in them. being a good Catholic, my grandmother stayed with him until she died in her fifties, gratefully.

maternal granddad married a really vapid woman and didn’t realize she was really vapid until he’d had three kids with her. they fought a lot until they (fairly amicably) divorced. it was hard on the kids at the time– particularly since they were the only kids with divorced parents they knew– but eventually they realized that it was better to have their parents vaguely able to tolerate each other instead of screaming all the time.

my parents promised each other when they got married that if they fought all the time they would get a divorce. 

they have been happily married for twenty-six years.

yeah, “our grandparents unto the nth great achingly suffered to build civilization and the boomers sure did have a good time slurping it down in one generation” is becoming something of a new consensus