Divorce and Time

Abstract

This chapter offers the reader a better long-term insight into the divorce experience. In 2014 I went back to speak to a smaller group of the participants who were willing or able to continue participation in the study. In revisiting them and listening to their accounts after six years had passed, I captured the ways in which the experience and process of divorce has significant temporal aspects. The chapter thus maps changes over a six-year period, focusing on time in three specific ways. First, I consider contact time: the practices of parent–child interaction and the time parents spend with their children. Second, I look at the specific cultural time framing the experiences of the divorcing couples in this book. It is a time when normative changes in parenting and family practices are taking place, and I discuss how the case studies reveal an increase in paternal involvement and family fluidity but the ongoing gendered responsibility of care. Third, and lastly, I look at questions of the socioeconomic time in which this group of parents experience the divorce process. These issues move outward from the day-to-day negotiations of contact, through broader cultural and normative questions to the wider themes of the socioeconomic context.