Divorces and Quick Remarriages

[bcrowessteffi]

So, okay, I was thinking

Comments

[pigeonrat]

I don't really think we're supposed to think of all those things happening within a year. I'd be curious to see where they fall within the timeline someone worked out recently of how long the timeline within the books actually is if you consider each new school year, summer vacation, Christmas, etc. as happening in its own year and not just the same year repeating over and over. It DOES seem like Dawn's mom started dating Richard awfully fast, though, but I guess they have the excuse of being old friends.

[editornia]

Here's EditorNia's BSC Timeline, Take 2. It's slightly more acurate than my previous timeline. :)

[schexyschteve]

I think it's odd that there was so much divorce considering Stoneybrook is supposed to be a small town, and it was in the mid-80s when the books were first written. I never considered divorce as common back then.

[urbunnie]

Really? I grew up in a smallish town and had many friends from divorced families... and the divorces happened in the mid-80s. :)

[anneliese]

me too... well, the 1980s part, not the small town part. But I never thought that small towns (and Stoneybrook is actually more of a suburb than a small town) were associated with lower divorce rates, anyway.

[urbunnie]

I always considered divorce to be more picking up speed in the 80s and way more common and less frowned upon than in previous decades. But maybe I'm wrong and that's just my perception because that's when I was a child and my friends' parents were getting divorced.

[bibberly]

It seemed to me when I was a kid that there were SO many books about learning to deal with a new stepparent. I mean, I guess this is a hard thing for kids to deal with, so it makes sense that there would be kids wanting some reassurance that everything was going to be okay, but it featured into the plots of a lot of books. It felt like the message was that if your parents divorced, they would be finding new partners and creating new families fairly quickly.
By contrast, when my parents split up when I was almost 13, the last thing either one wanted was to get caught in another marriage! It's 16 years later, and my mom would still find the idea of doing that ridiculous.
As for the small town / divorce connection, my experience in a small town was that many parents moved there after going through a divorce. This would also seem the case in Stoneybrook.

[cattiva7784]

I think it really bothered me that Dawn's dad was able to meet Carol, break up with her, get back together, marry her and then have a baby! It would be one thing if time stood still but it seemed as if some things were just so wacky time-wise that it could really hurt you brain if you thought to hard about it.

[miss_myu]

I never really thought about the remarriage thing until today, but it does seem odd that so many of them remarried relatively soon after their divorces (even when one doesn't consider the time warp). My BSC super reasoning power(tm) says that the divorcees could have been separated for years before the divorces were finalised, but I can't be bothered to elaborate on that.