How Things Fall Apart

The New York Times has an interesting piece about Dana Adam Shapiro, a director who noticed that a lot of his friends were getting divorced and so interviewed dozens of them about their experiences.

He also made a movie that opens this weekend (Monogamy, starring Chris Messina and Rashida Jones) that draws on the things he learned, but the most illuminating parts of the article are the interview excerpts. The subjects offer a pretty frightening picture of what it’s like to have your marriage fall apart.

One man, who’s been divorced twice, had this to say: “I don’t care how much you might have loved the person — halfway through any divorce the only thing you can think of is: I hate this person, and I want this person to bleed.” Another woman, whose marriage only lasted a year, was brutally candid about her ex’s shortcomings:

“When I met him I was not particularly attracted to him, he just grew on me — maybe because I knew that he worshiped me and that I could dominate him. He wasn’t stupid; he just wasn’t interesting or worldly. Also, he sometimes dressed like an uncool retard.”

Shapiro sees the interviews as “cautionary tales,” and they do have that feeling of being a guide for what not to do. These people are definitely frank about what went wrong, and while it’s somewhat bleak, it’s also riveting — it’s a little bit like watching a car accident happen.