“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.
