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“No one talks about how your childhood affects your relationships. Fear of abandonment and overthinking about people leaving you all the time sucks,” says the caption of a TikTok with 3.4 million views, in which a girl films herself crying.
I watch another: “I don’t have parents, I have a mom and dad who don’t love each other, it hurts,” says the text on screen as a young woman sobs. “I will never know what it will be like to have parents that love each other and it gives me so much pain and jealousy. Why . . .why, Mom and Dad, can’t you just love each other?”
It’s 2025, and I’m scrolling through the hashtags #divorce and #divorcedparents, where girls describe the pain of living without their mother or father, of feeling split in two, of never having seen what a healthy relationship looks like. One thing I notice, again and again, is how often they say that nobody talks about this, nobody understands.
By Bari Weiss“No one talks about how your childhood affects your relationships. Fear of abandonment and overthinking about people leaving you all the time sucks,” says the caption of a TikTok with 3.4 million views, in which a girl films herself crying.
I watch another: “I don’t have parents, I have a mom and dad who don’t love each other, it hurts,” says the text on screen as a young woman sobs. “I will never know what it will be like to have parents that love each other and it gives me so much pain and jealousy. Why . . .why, Mom and Dad, can’t you just love each other?”
It’s 2025, and I’m scrolling through the hashtags #divorce and #divorcedparents, where girls describe the pain of living without their mother or father, of feeling split in two, of never having seen what a healthy relationship looks like. One thing I notice, again and again, is how often they say that nobody talks about this, nobody understands.