We want the best for our parents, so when Reddit user Secretechillboy noticed that his recently divorced mom had started to smile less and less, he invited her to a gala as his plus-one.
The plan was simple: dress up, leave all the worries at home, and enjoy the night. At first, everything was going pretty well, but then our guy saw that an infamous womanizer had taken an interest in his parent.
He understood that his mom’s a grown-up who is fully capable of making her own decisions. But on the other hand, he despised the slimy playboy.
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You can’t teach your parents how to live
Image credits: Andrej Lišakov (not the actual photo)
So when this guy saw an infamous Casanova flirting with his mom, he didn’t know what to do
Image credits: Kateryna Hliznitsova (not the actual photo)
Your parents’ divorce hits you even if you are no longer a child
While academics have widely analyzed how young children are affected by divorce, the impact on adult children was long neglected, likely because they were assumed to handle it better. However, in the late 1980s, emerging research found that, just like kids, grown-ups reacted to parental divorce with anger, shock, and lingering sadness.
“Many times I’ve heard adult children say, ‘it felt like the rock that was my family […] my support network system that I grew up with […] was sucked into an earthquake fault'”, says Carol Hughes, a marriage and family therapist based in southern California and the co-author of Home Will Never Be the Same Again: A Guide for Adult Children of Grey Divorce. “All of a sudden, their parents are divorcing, and they feel like the bottom has fallen out of their lives.”
Reflecting on the past with their family, adult children may wonder: “Was it all smoke and mirrors? Were they ever really happy?”, Hughes says. Some of her clients have ended relationships and engagements because of their parents’ divorce, or questioned their identity and self-esteem, she adds. So it very well might be that our Redditor’s confusion and inability to react to the man hitting on his mom is somehow connected to the unresolved emotions following his parents’ divorce.
It’s understandable that the woman feels uneasy talking to men
Divorce recovery specialist Kat Forsythe, MSW, says that dating after a long-term marriage is enormously scary.
The best way to reenter the scene, according to her, is in baby steps—going online, meeting for a coffee, that sort of thing.
Perhaps our Redditor’s mom hadn’t started yet, so even though she enjoyed the interaction, it was still a bit uncomfortable.
“Nervous? Of course we are! It’s the unknown,” Forsythe explains.
“Grey divorce has challenges that our younger counterparts don’t have. We have a lifetime of habits and rituals to honor. We have grown children and grandchildren in the mix. Our bodies have drooped. Some of us haven’t [been intimate] in years. Our energy has dropped. Our time-line is shorter.”
But even with all the sensitivities, it feels like the son should find an empathetic and non-confrontational way to simply inform his mom about her new admirer.
As his story went viral, the son clarified a few details
Image source: secretechillboy
He then shared more information in the comments
People have had a lot of different reactions to his situation
