Splitting Up: Divorce, Culture and the Search for a Real Life

Q. What does everyone want from a marriage?

A. For someone else to be the wife!

Exploring the many cultural assumptions exposed by divorce - sex, money, dating, love, home, and health - Splitting Up is both a guide to the new social landscape and a serious search for personal meaning in an age of rapidly shifting cultural values. According to social theorist and lawyer Larry G. Frolick, divorce is neither a legal nor a therapeutic problem - it is a serious cultural issue. No one can perform the old social roles anymore.

Drawing on his most interesting cases from twenty years practicing law, and from studies in culture, the author shows how the seventy-per-cent divorce rate is the flip side of mall marriage - that is, a relationship based on consumption, rather than on saving - and how divorce is part of our common destiny, a painful world many of us will one day encounter.

This fascinating book takes the reader on an unsettling trip into the strange world of divorce, revealing the new social order and the roles we must play in it to survive - Working-Warrior Mom, Treat Daddy, and the Lost Child - as our society evolves into the next millenium.

Splitting Up is a hip handbook for divorce in the twenty-first century, a guide to survival and renewal. The many topics include:

• The Worst Divorce Story Ever Told
• Sex Realities: Sex Talk & Real Sex
• Divorce Statistics & the Myth of Undifference
• Depression: Can a Million Therapists Be Wrong?
• My Ex-Spouse was an Alien!
• McParenting in an Age of Wire Monkeys: Children Need One Thing
• The Lawyers Other Lawyers Use
• Your Money & Your Sanity & How to Keep Both
• and much, much more!

Larry G. Frolick graduated from the University of Toronto with degrees in both law and anthropology. He practiced family law for twenty years, during a time when the divorce rate skyrocketed in North America. His previous work about children has won international awards. Openly critical of our legal and medical systems, which he feels have failed the people, Frolick insists we need a radical personal approach to divorce today. He has two children, and lives in Toronto’s Beaches district, in a ＂library with a bed.＂