Divorce expo a counterpoint to wedding industry

Author Stephanie Dol­goff presents a lec­ture titled “My For­merly Hot Life” at the Start Over Smart Divorce Expo in March in New York. (Asso­ci­ated Press | Charles Sykes)

LEANNE ITALIE

Asso­ci­ated Press

NEW YORK — Liz Slay­back can trace her deci­sion to pur­sue a divorce to a pre­cise, painful moment.

“I knew my mar­riage was over and the divorce pro­ceed­ings were about to begin when I came home and I found my hus­band in bed with my two best friends,” said the 33-year-old den­tal hygien­ist from Staten Island.

How do we know that? Because Slay­back declared it so in a video record­ing booth set up by Huff­in­g­ton Post dur­ing a rare, two-day event — an “expo” for peo­ple just start­ing divorce pro­ceed­ings, in the mid­dle or look­ing to rise from the ashes in the aftermath.

Slay­back, pos­i­tively bub­bly after a fancy but free hair­cut, was among about 300 peo­ple to attend “Start Over Smart” last week­end, most of whom were women. A smat­ter­ing of ven­dors set up booths offer­ing every­thing from a divorce plan­ning binder to advice on long-term insur­ance, with sem­i­nars on such top­ics as “Sen­su­al­ity Secrets” and “My For­merly Hot Life.”

Unlike mega-expos put on by the multimillion-dollar wed­ding indus­try, this was a not-so-jubilant affair — save an evening mixer — at an ele­gant, inti­mate venue.

The divorce coun­ter­point to wed­ding mar­ket­places was the idea of a mother-daughter team from West­port, Conn. The younger, Nicole Baras Feuer, is a divorce medi­a­tor and divorced mother. Her mom, Francine Baras, is a fam­ily ther­a­pist. They got the idea from a sim­i­lar divorce expo in Paris, which they attended in late 2010.

“Amer­i­cans need a place to come and meet pro­fes­sion­als face-to-face and not get every­thing from a book or a web­site, to bring every­thing live and let peo­ple have all the accu­rate infor­ma­tion under one roof instead of piece­meal­ing it,” Baras Feuer said.

Her mother added: “There is no com­ing together of peo­ple going through divorce as there are at a wed­ding expo, where you get your dress, you get your veil, you get an event plan­ner, you pick out your invi­ta­tions. Wed­dings are a known quan­tity. Get­ting divorced is an unknown quantity.”

So where does divorce stand, anyway?

Deci­pher­ing divorce sta­tis­tics to arrive at an over­all rate feels a lot like break­ing the Da Vinci Code when all fac­tors are con­sid­ered, but this much we can say: Mar­riages are at an all-time low, due in part to younger peo­ple delay­ing their nup­tials, and divorce is high among baby boomers when com­pared to other age groups.

Accord­ing to a Cen­sus Bureau analy­sis based on a 2009 sam­ple of 3 mil­lion house­holds, 19.1 wed­dings were per­formed per 1,000 men and 17.6 per 1,000 women across the U.S. that year, while divorces became final for 9.2 of every 1,000 men and 9.7 of every 1,000 women. That means that roughly, for every two peo­ple get­ting mar­ried, one gets divorced.

South­ern and West­ern states ranked among the high­est for wed­ding bells, but many in those regions also have higher rates of divorce than the North­east, among other areas.

Roughly 1.1 mil­lion chil­dren, or 1.5 per­cent of all chil­dren, lived in 2009 in the home of a par­ent who divorced in the pre­vi­ous year.

Yet it might as well be 1950 all over again when it comes to the iso­la­tion and stigma of divorce.

“The cul­ture hasn’t allowed divorce to be some­thing that we know is real and does hap­pen,” Baras said. “We sort of say it hap­pens, but in your own house and not the cul­ture itself.”

The divorce of Hiromi Schaub, 32, was final on March 27, but the Queens accoun­tant hadn’t told her co-workers or any friends back home in Japan that she’s no longer with her hus­band, an Amer­i­can lawyer she said racked up thou­sands of dol­lars in debt in her name.

“I don’t have fam­ily here in Amer­ica. I’m all alone. It is very hard,” she said. “I wanted to come here and see other peo­ple, what they are doing and how they are get­ting through. I never thought I would get a divorce. I thought I was happy.”

Schaub was among about 20 in the audi­ence to lis­ten to Stephanie Dol­goff share her own divorce expe­ri­ence and describe a book she wrote, “My For­merly Hot Life,” about grow­ing older and going through a divorce while in the pub­lic eye.

Dol­goff urged them not to bris­tle when the judg­ments begin.

“Even in this day and age. … you get judged. You get judged left and right. I found that tremen­dously, tremen­dously dif­fi­cult, espe­cially because I knew what I was doing was the right thing,” she said. “You have to walk through fire, basi­cally, in most cases, to get to a bet­ter place.”

Only 10 or so peo­ple showed up for sen­su­al­ity expert Patty Contenta’s ses­sion show­ing women — and some men — how to “replen­ish” by read­just­ing their body lan­guage. “Your energy and your aura need to open up,” she offered.

For Schaub, who has no kids, the advice is spot on, and she wasn’t the only one look­ing for help in the mojo depart­ment. “I was with this guy for eight years so I don’t know how to date, or how to find guys,” she said. “I don’t know how to start.”

Though in a dif­fer­ent life stage, Diana Polon­skaya, 48, felt the same. The infor­ma­tion tech­nol­ogy spe­cial­ist from Brook­lyn has two grown sons and is going through an ami­ca­ble divorce with her sec­ond hus­band. “But still I need to start my life over.”

She was espe­cially inspired by Con­tenta and tips from the per­sonal shop­ping ser­vice of Macy’s on how to mix and match 10 wardrobe essentials.

“When you’re mar­ried you stop think­ing about this stuff and you get used to things,” Polon­skaya said. “There’s no more pas­sion, but now I need to go back to becom­ing more pas­sion­ate with life and clothes and everything.”

The expo, which fol­lows sim­i­lar gath­er­ings in Detroit and Toronto, cov­ered all the bases — from pur­vey­ors of wrin­kle reduc­tion, lipo­suc­tion and breast aug­men­ta­tion to life coaches, a match­maker and the writer of a book on how to inves­ti­gate your date.

“We’re tak­ing a very holis­tic approach,” said Baras Feuer, who got mar­ried at 24 and divorced 17 years later. “Peo­ple need to be edu­cated. People’s lives get destroyed by divorce because they don’t know every­thing they need to know.”

How do you date after 20 years? How do you meet new friends when your mar­ried ones no longer want any­thing to do with you? They’re the same ques­tions peo­ple of divorce have been ask­ing since divorce was invented, when­ever that was.

“Peo­ple going through this are still very iso­lated,” Baras said. “Peo­ple don’t want to hear about it who aren’t divorced. They’re afraid it’s contagious.”

Posted by AP News on Apr 4 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.