When I saw an interview with Belle Burden about her new book, “Strangers,” describing how her husband of 20 years walked out on her and their three children at the beginning of the pandemic with no explanation, I sent it to some girlfriends. “Hope this man is a pariah by now,” I noted.
I was not focused so much on the pain that Burden’s hedge-fund manager husband caused with his infidelity and then abandonment of his family. Or on the way that Burden managed to rebuild her life afterward, detailed in the book.
As much as it might be interesting to know the details of a relationship that falls apart, the social message sent by the disintegration and the public dissection of its aftermath has much broader implications.
Burden, a descendant of the Vanderbilts and John Jay, grew up in a world of privilege. Her family was fodder for celebrity gossip columns for a century. Her dating and marriage to James (a pseudonym she uses in the book) were a fairy tale. Though her courtship did overlap with the sudden death of her father, there were no red flags. Her family liked him. She liked his friends. They came from similar worlds, though his family had gone through some financial hardship. They talked about their future together, and their visions for it were compatible. Her family pushed her to sign a prenup. He made some changes to it. And they were off to the races.
Eventually Burden, a lawyer, quits her job to stay home with the kids. James works a lot more and becomes less involved in the kids’ day-to-day lives, but the division of labor would probably seem very familiar to many wealthy families today, and even middle-class families of an earlier era. She is in charge of the children and the home. He is in charge of work and finances.
In March 2020, when the world is shutting down, the family decamps from New York to their summer home in Martha’s Vineyard. Burden receives a voicemail from a man saying that his wife is having an affair with her husband. She confronts James and he announces the next morning that he wants a divorce. Most shockingly, he says, she can have full custody of the kids. He doesn’t want it. According to Burden, James had never told her he was unhappy. They had never been to counseling, or even had any outsized disagreements that would merit such a step.
When Burden published a piece about this decision in The New York Times’ Modern Love column a few years later, some readers wrote in to say they found the whole thing too hard to believe. The part where James comes to the house a few weeks later — not to see his children, but to search frantically for the prenup — and then casually asks his wife to make him a sandwich was the subject of an article in the New York Post.
I can’t speak to the veracity of Burden’s account, though James did not object to the publication of the Modern Love column. But I can tell you that I am aware of similarly bad behavior on the part of other men. What father leaves behind a son who is 17 and daughters who are 15 and 12 and makes no attempt to retain custody? To this day, according to Burden, the kids have never stayed with their father overnight or spent a single holiday or vacation with him. James is not the only one to behave like this.
Burden predictably beats herself up for not paying more attention to their finances. She has no idea how much money he makes or how the prenup leaves her at James’ mercy. And she draws the conclusion that many women draw in such circumstances: that from now on, she can depend only on herself. This is the message that is sent to so many women today, that marriage cannot be built on trust in a partner. Because you never really know. You should always have a plan B. You should never quit your job. You should have a separate bank account just in case. You should always be looking over your shoulder. The recent New York Times series “Motherhood Should Come With a Warning Label” includes these messages.
Maybe these ideas seem prudent in light of the ways in which the end of a marriage can leave women financially devastated. But they are not a recipe for a happy or long-lasting partnership.
The only appropriate response to stories like Burden’s is to make sure that abandonment exacts a serious social cost. When Burden says that the crowd at their club is not sure whether she or her ex-husband should be allowed to retain their membership, or when James’ buddies continue to invite him on boys’ weekends, or when her doctor suggests that men often lose interest in stay-at-home mothers (as if the divorce is her fault), it seems as though their social circle believes there is some kind of moral ambiguity in this situation.
There is not.
We can believe that there are times when divorce is a necessary tragedy. But there should be little doubt that a man who leaves his wife and children with no explanation and gives her a hard time about money after she has stayed home raising those kids is in the wrong. In the end Burden had to make peace with her situation. But the rest of us do not need to follow suit.