Who Comes First in Your Marriage: Your Spouse or Your Children?

What was "The Divorce Generation"?

Every generation has its life-defining moment. For the Greatest Generation it was D-Day; for baby boomers, Kennedy's assassination or Nixon's resignation. In a 2011 Wall Street Journal essay adapted from her memoir In Spite of Everything, writer Susan Gregory Thomas proposed the defining question for Generation X: "When did your parents get divorced?"

Thomas's generation — born roughly 1965 to 1980 — grew up during the peak divorce years in America. Her own father left when she was twelve. The children of those splits, she argued, became adults with a fierce, almost sacred vow: never let it happen to our own families.

Who comes first: the spouse or the children?

Here is where the essay turned uncomfortable. Determined to give their children the stable childhoods they never had, many Gen-X parents poured everything into the kids — the perfect nest, the remodeled home, the constant attention — and let the marriage run on fumes. The children became the project; the spouse became the coworker.

Thomas's own story was the cautionary tale. She did everything right, she wrote — the happiest nest possible, teamwork, devotion to the kids — "and yet divorce came. In spite of everything."

The point is not that loving your children is wrong. It is that a marriage is not a self-sustaining machine. When two people agree, silently, that the kids come first and the relationship can wait, they sometimes discover — years later, when the nest empties — that there is no relationship left to return to. The divorce generation's children, trying so hard not to repeat their parents' mistakes, risked making a new one: starving the marriage in order to save the family.

The essay's question still lands, for Indian families as much as American ones: who comes first in your marriage? If the honest answer has been "the children" for a decade, it might be worth asking what the marriage is living on.