When I started researching the marriage and cohabitation behavior of the adult children of divorce, I was a novitiate in the study of marital breakdown. I grew up in Berkeley, where divorce abounds, but there had been only one divorce in my parents' extensive friendship network. Because the children lived across the street and were my close friends, that one break-up should have affected me, but our skateboarding and family picnicking continued pretty much as before. I was aware that my maternal great-grandmother divorced four times, but my mother always told that story as part of a portrait of Great-Grandma Goodman's exceptional independence, modernity, and colorfulness. (One of her marriages allegedly was to a hereditary nobleman.) I never heard any hint of the trauma my grandmother and great-aunts suffered. My first real exposure to people's thoughts and feelings about marital dissolution came when I mentioned to friends, acquaintances, and strangers on airplanes that I study divorce, and listened to the outpouring of their questions and recollections.

Many people view divorce as unfortunate but sometimes necessary. There are segments of the American population, however, who have intense feelings about it. Some people applaud the availability of divorce, regarding it as a basic freedom, while others deplore it. Each group has its political advocates. In the last fifteen years, more than thirty state legislatures have deliberated legislation that would toughen divorce laws; language urging reconsideration of no-fault divorce appeared in the 2000 Republican Party platform.