Divorce by murder: How Jennifer Dulos' death shook a generation that has already been freaked out by mom and dad

When I was a child, the scene in which I was most feared had my parents, who entered my bedroom – their hands – to say that we had to have a “serious” conversation. I already knew that the sentences that this lecture presented would include: “We still love each other, but not in this way”, “Sometimes adults fall out of love”, “it's not your fault.”

At the age of 12, life had already taught me the lingo of modern divorce. Although my parents stayed together, so many parents of my friends separated in the early 1980s. I thought it was just a matter of time. Whenever my mother and father argued, my heart would beat and an inner voice said: “Here we go! Get ready for the overnight stays in a rented apartment, unpleasant introductions to a new friend or mom's new friend.”

Between 1970 and 1980 the divorce rate rose by more than 100%. “This meant that less than 20% of the couples married in 1950 were divorced, but about 50% of the couples married in 1970” Brad Wilcox Once explained in National affairs. “And about half of the children who were born by married parents in the 1970s took part in their parents, compared to about 11% of the people born in the 1950s.”

Kennedy murder was the decisive childhood event for the boomers. It created its sense of the world and how it works. JFK consciousness theories remain in news because the boomers are still trying to understand their childhood. For gen X'ers ​​who grew up during the “sexual revolution” and the resulting domestic wrecks, the divorce was our Kennedy attack. It has shaped a sensitivity marked by cynicism. In the middle school we already knew that most relationships would come to a bad end, that “richer and poorer” and until “death was part of us”; This love came like milk with an expiry date.

Although we agreed on little other things, many of those who got older after Watergate and before cable television agreed: We would not do our children what had been for us. By being married, even if it was difficult, we would increase a generation that could grow up without worrying that they were only a serious conversation from domestic upheavals. This is what you see in the decline in divorce rates. According to Divorce.com, “the divorce rate of the gene X 18 divorces per 1,000 people, which means that this generation and the millennials are at the end of the divorce rate.”

Together with the risk of smoking, this is one of the few lessons that we actually seemed to learn. For this reason, I found the tragedy of Jennifer Dulos, about which I reported for my new book. Murder in the doll house, So confusing: One morning in May 2019, Dulos left her five children at the new Canaan Country School in Connecticut in the middle of a controversial divorce, then went home and then disappeared. Your body was never found. Although Jennifer and her husband Fotis Dulos were born as the heart of the early Gen X in 1968 and 1967, they have apparently never learned to really fear the divorce court. In my opinion, this case ended, which ended in the disappearance and death of both parents – fotis took life instead of appearing for a deposit – and a large part of the nation, among other things, about the risk of divorce.

Jennifer and Fotis represented the American elite. She grew up richly, the daughter of a banker and the niece of designer Liz Claiborne. As a graduate of Saint Ann in Brooklyn, where the high school study fees are now more than 60,000 US dollars a year, she hit a pretty Greek National name for Brown, where she met the man she would marry. The couple had access to every variety of experts and specialists, which means that it not only the dangers of divorce – for the children, the psyche – but the legal system that turns every interaction into a cudgel. She married late and wore her wish to have children and have them quickly. As a brilliant young playwright in 2006, who followed dreams in New York and La, she was tied to an inattentive husband of five years until 2016 and lost in a suburb of Hartford in a suburb of the Herrhaus near Hartford. Then came the other woman, the paramour, who means public shame and heartache in the age of social media. Until June 19, 2017, when Jennifer put her children in the car and leaving her husband and home in Farmington, Connecticut, for New Canaan, she had decided that the only possible escape led through what members of our generation know as a wild melting pot: divorce.