Re: Happy Valentine, by Shankar Vedantam

You don't need to have the skill of a psychologist to see with your own eyes that divorced families all over the western world are unhappy in quite similar fashions. Certainly, parents want to be free again, and a big majority of them because the butterfly wings of new love are stirring. Unfortunately, in times of growing speechlessness in the privacy of one's home, the idioms of the body language seem to be easier to understand than real words. Soon the butterflies can't hide the reality anymore that divorce never means the end of a prior relationship if there are children. As that realisation sets in, all the unfortunate members of ex-families are unhappy in the same way: they want to start into a new life, but the old one is still clinging to their feet. In the middle of that traumatic experience, the children become weapons in the hands of either mother or father against the one that's loved no longer. Children have to pay for the butterflies and all that sex-and-sack-hopping. They pay the price of their own right to happiness and of their right to grow up in the shelter of both of their natural parents. How can we expect young couples to know how to stay happily together for now and ever, if we old ones are not able to present our shining example? Happy Valentine is a symbol of our longing for true and never-ending love, world-wide. Maybe it’s a nasty trick of good old Valentine to make love bloom and at the same time to send the butterflies.

Karin Jäckel, Dr. phil.

Hansjakobstr.5, D-77704 Oberkirch

karin.jaeckel@t-online.de

www.karin-jaeckel-autorin.de