BROKEN HOME, BROKEN HEART?

If your parents split when you were a kid, it could be impacting your love life today. Cosmo looks at the effects of divorce through the eyes of women who were willing to open old wounds.

* My parents divorced in 1985, the year that actor Rock Hudson died of a new disease called AIDS and The Cosby Show topped the ratings. I was 13 years old, and like almost one out of three adults under the age of35 today, my family split in two. I watched one parent move out, half the furniture disappear, and what was once my home turn into a group of silent, empty rooms.

Time supposedly heals all wounds, and when I left for college, I thought my parents' breakup would amount to nothing more than scheduling complications during the holidays. But as I got older, I realized I was having problems in my own love life. Sometimes I clung too tightly to a guy, and other times I walked away too easily--I was unsure of how to behave or what to expect. That's when I realized my parents' divorce was still having an impact on me.

And I'm not alone. Experts agree that children of divorce feel the repercussions long into adulthood. "The most powerful effect occurs when a romantic relationship is center stage in one's life," says Judith Wallerstein, coauthor of the new book The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce (Hyperion, 2000), who has studied 60 divorced families for the past 25 years. Risa Garon, the executive director of the Children of Separation and Divorce Center in Maryland, agrees that memories of parental conflict can be triggered by feelings of intimacy. "All the issues from childhood start coming up again," says Garon. "Children of divorce can't help but wonder How will this relationship end? Am I being like my mother or my Father? Is my partner?'"

As a result, children shaped by the divorce boom of the '60s, '70s, and '80s are waiting longer before heading to the altar, if they choose to go at all. As of 1998, more than one-third of adults between the ages of 25 and 34 were still single, three times more than in 1970. But being marriage-shy isn't the only symptom--there are many ways children of divorce react as adults. Some women enter into relationships slowly and with great caution, afraid that commitment can only end in disaster. Others, who often crave the stability their family lacked, are overly eager to settle down and get married. And still more fall into a middle ground--they have long-term boyfriends but continually doubt and test the strength of the relationship. Here, three women discuss the problems they face in their love lives as a result of their parents' split and how they are struggling to overcome them.

AFRAID OF FALLING IN LOVE

Upon returning home from sleep-away camp at the age of 8, Wendy Greenberg remembers her parents sitting her and her older brother down at the kitchen table and telling them they were separating. "I started to ery," says Wendy, now 28. "I was in absolute shock." Wendy blamed her dad at first but later learned that her mother had been the one who initiated the divorce. Six months after her parents split, her father mysteriously cut of all contact. She never saw him again.