I've always struggled with the concept of coming from a "broken home." Broken. There had been times when I felt fractured and my scattered limbs had been picked up by parents unable to reassemble me in my original composition. Something felt incomplete, abrupt to my parent's divorce, but there was also the unspoken normalcy that existed in its wake. I felt much more comfortable in a home that was separated, "broken." I had been told by therapists that divorce negatively impacts all children. It had been insinuated that my home was not stable and even my parents themselves feared that this would impact the way I loved. Not until this past year had I been able to assess what damage had been done to my soul. It wasn't my childhood. I was wrapped full of love and I had space to be mischievous. The only damage done was as a result of my assumption that I was prone to fractures, already set up to fail in love because of the home that I was born into.

Who teaches you how to love? When allowing my trembling mouth to shiver out words so warm that I don't leave any for myself because I don't know any other way to show this partner that they matter. How do you teach yourself all over again how to love? I know that in order for me to feel safe, I would let any love escape from me. I couldn't let anyone know because that would mean that I'd have to tell the vampire standing at my door to come in, knowing that they could also destroy me. This fear of destruction is what stemmed from these poisonous concepts like the "broken home. I thought that I'd to be unhappy, unsuccessful, wallowing in confusion and emptiness because I was born from something that was broken. How can someone who is not whole, be enough for another person?

While watching Sex and the City, Carrie Bradshaw said words that described the entirety of how I saw relationships.

I realized that relationships had a caste system of their own. There’s the person who says, “I love you.” And there’s the person who never responds.

I fell on the spectrum of the latter. The person who never responds. For me, the lack of response was a way of protecting myself. Learning how to love in reality wasn't the problem, it was learning how to express it. Fear of anything breaking is terrifying.

The fear of falling in love is the fear of falling out of it. I knew how to love, I knew that I'd seen love fade, but I didn't know how to restructure my concept of what marriage in relation to love could look like. The degradation of a relationship is shown in gritty detail when you are the child who is on the outside looking in. Seeing exactly how and what comes of a separation could make anyone wary of falling in love, because there is always pain at the end of a relationship. There is no such thing as an amicable separation, at least one person is always hurt, there is no complete agreement on emotions, no two people will ever be in exactly the same place. How can the world that has been shaped by perspectives from childhood trepidation, rooted in fears, with no experience of relationships of their own for context be even remotely healthy?

Love doesn't need to be seen through a heteronormative lens, options are not offered to children of divorce for what relationships can look like besides being rooted in monogamous ideals. Families do not need to live together to be seen as functional or to still be considered families. Parents can have multiple partners and still love each other and their children. Rid the rhetoric of the "broken home", destroy the need to retain stigma to divorced families, separation doesn't have to be traumatic and isn't always. The reinforcement of children being broken or unwhole is damaging. Divorce doesn't make a child incapable of love, it can help the child see how love can morph and change. Love doesn't need to be 'till death do us part, but teaching children of divorce that love can be created and also lost and how falling out of love doesn't mean you'll never find it is the first step to healing pain and erase the stigma of being a child of divorce.

We, children of divorce, don't need to have it figured out. But we do need to talk about what love means to us and how that has been shaped by our circumstance of being born into a family that separated. Expanding our concepts on what family needs to look like can help us expand our ways of thinking about how we've been conditioned to think about marriage in a way that is one-dimensional and ineffective.