Divorce Confessions

Tales of Taboo

Ali Weiss

Society & Culture

4.8 • 725 Ratings

🗓️ 10 March 2025

⏱️ 57 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

I absolutely believe in marriage, but I also believe that marriage is inaccurately marketed as a one-stop solution for all of life’s problems. It’s no wonder why, as of 2024, about 43% of American marriages are said to end in divorce: we’re brainwashed! And yet, choosing to end a legally-bound relationship is still seen as a "failure."

This week’s anonymous confessors were all married and split by the age of 35. Their roads to divorce vary from the interference of religious parents, bisexuality, affairs, accidental pregnancies, drug addictions, and domestic abuse, to a FAKE death! However, their initial decisions to wed mostly stemmed from the same motivations: thinking (or being told) that marriage was “necessary” at that point in their life, or feeling lonely and insecure, and believing a contractual life partner would be a remedy.

Tales of Taboo is produced and narrated by Ali Weiss. Share your own confession - or love letters and hate mail - at [email protected]. Follow Ali on Instagram & TikTok @aliweissworld. Audio production by Chris Stathopolous and WTF Media. Theme song by Chris Stathopolous. Cover photo by Erika Flynn. Cover art by Kristen Montenegro. If you love the show, please take a moment to leave a rating and review - it's immensely helpful for expanding our network of anonymous confessors. Thank you!

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Ali Weiss and I'm obsessed with the people, ideas, and experiences that break the rules, beat the odds, or are considered
0:22.9	socially unacceptable. Welcome to Season 6 of Tales of Taboo. Here's how this works. Each week,
0:31.0	I gather anonymous confessions from my listeners around the world, who've existed in elusive
0:36.6	subcultures, ventured down the road less
0:39.2	traveled, made serious mistakes, and taken extraordinary chances. Some of them call my hotline,
0:46.5	and others submit written confessions for me to read. These stories are raw, they're honest,
0:52.3	they're even downright shocking sometimes, and you might not always agree with what you hear. But they deliver the most incredible life lessons and ask us to consider why we're all so afraid to be different. My hope is that by creating conversations around forbidden subjects, I can help remove the shame that surrounds them
1:13.0	and ideally encourage a more individualistic and less judgmental world. And maybe one day,
1:21.2	we won't even want to be anonymous. It's strange to present an intro to an episode where I don't have any personal insight to offer.
1:33.0	I like when this podcast is a conversation and not just me being a ringleader into other people's so-called freak show.
1:42.0	All of my contributors are so generous but but their time and effort and trust,
1:46.8	and returning the favor feels like the least that I can do. But, obviously, I've never been
1:54.5	divorced. So instead, I want to quickly touch on a key takeaway that I think fits into the larger narrative of relationships
2:03.3	that we're exploring this season. Many of the lessons that we learned from the previous
2:09.5	episode about dating in one's 30s and 40s are the same as the lessons offered today.
2:16.5	Most of the crumbled marriages our contributors' experience
2:20.4	stemmed from one of two motivations. One was thinking that getting married was the correct
2:27.5	or necessary thing to do at that point in the contributor's life, or being told by other people that it was.
2:36.7	Or the other motivation was because the contributor felt lonely, and insecure, and lost in the
2:43.6	world, and believed that a relationship could fix that.
2:49.0	I have experienced bouts of intense depression off and on since middle school.
2:56.2	Many of those feelings come specifically from identifying as a very lonely person.
	...

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