"Getting out of a marriage is rough, though, and not just fot the legal/ financial complications or the massive lifestyle upheavel. (...) It's the emotional recoil that kills you, the shock of stepping off the track of a conventional lifestyle and losing all the embracing comforts that keep so many people on that track forever. To create a family with a spouse is one of the most fundamental ways a person can find continuity and meaning in American (or any) society. I rediscover this truth every time I go to a big reunion of my mother's family in Minnesota and I see how everyone is held so reassuringly in their positions over the years. First you are a child, then you are a teenager, then you are a youg married person, then you are a parent, then you are retired, then you are a grandparent - at every stage you know who you are, you know what your duty is and you know where to sit at the reunion. (...) Who are you? No problem - you are the person who created all this. The satisfaction of this knowledge is immediate and, moreover, it's universally recognized. (...) But what if, either by choice or by reluctant necessity, you end up not participating in this comforting cycle of family and continuity? What if you step out? Where do you sit at the reunion?"
Eat, pray, love, one woman's search for everything across Italy, India and Indonesia, Elizabeth Gilbert