Valerie Tate knew her marriage was over seven years after she’d wed.
She and her husband, Clark, tried therapy but they eventually realized that they wanted different things in an intimate relationship. As a therapist, she’d seen the damage divorce could do, especially to kids. The last thing they wanted to do was to drag their son Jonah, now 11, through an ugly breakup while they all were grieving. So they decided that they’d stop working on their marriage, which wasn’t helping anyway, and try something different.
Whatever you think about Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin’s “conscious uncoupling”, the San Francisco Bay Area couple did one better; they uncoupled but didn’t divorce. They stayed married and they stayed put. They just removed the romantic and sexual aspect of their marriage, but remained loving and respectful to each other, and focused on co-parenting.
“It was like a shift in what we were fighting for. Instead of fighting for the romantic relationship to continue,” she says, they put Jonah’s needs first by not upending his life.
That was eight years ago.
To outsiders, they might look like any other couple – they enjoy meals, holidays and adventures as a family. Except they’re not staying together miserably for the sake of their kid, as far too many couples do; they transformed their marriage into a parenting marriage.
While the Tates may have helped bring the concept to the national forefront when ABC’s Nightline captured their uncoupling ceremony before loved ones on a beach near the Golden Gate Bridge one balmy November day last year, it isn’t all that unusual. LGBT people have been successfully arranging all sorts of creative multiparenting partnerships for decades, often outside the realm of marriage. And it works.
As Judith Stacey details in her 2011 book Unhitched: Love, Marriage, and Family Values from West Hollywood to Western China, gay men who have children together create the most stable families of all the alternative families she’s encountered. It’s hard for men to become parents without women, she notes. But the gay men who “willingly unhitch their sexual and romantic desires from their domestic ones in order to become parents” show a commitment and determination that may be essential to give children the stability they need.
If gay men can do it, why can’t heterosexual people?
They already are – slowly. In recent years, there’s been a rise in websites like Modamily.com, Coparenting.com and FamilyByDesign.com, which connect men who are interested in being dads with women who are interested in being moms – but that’s it; they may not become spouses, lovers or even housemates.
In many ways, the couples who come together to create these parenting partnerships are proving to be much more prepared for the responsibilities of raising a child than couples that do it the old-fashioned way – meet, fall in love, marry and have vague discussions about how many kids they want and when. They are modeling the true definition of planned parenthood.
Los Angeles therapist Rami Aizic and his parenting partner spent months getting to know each other and their parenting philosophies, and went to therapy together before he was convinced he’d found the perfect woman to be the mother of his child. Their daughter is now a teen. “She loves that she’s got this non-mainstream configuration of a family,” he says.
Rachel Hope, author of Family By Choice: Platonic Partnered Parenting, has two children, now 24 and six, with two platonic friends, and hopes to have another one day with a still-unknown dad. Before she got pregnant both times, she exhaustively detailed with each father how they were going to make it work – from who would pay for what, to what kind of education their kids should get, to what they would do if one of them became romantically involved with someone else.
While some may worry about the potential legal pitfalls of such parenting partnerships, that’s not a problem in a marriage that starts off that way or, like the Tates, transforms into one.
But what a parenting marriage lacks in legal complications, it makes up in other concerns – love and sex. How will kids fare if their parents aren’t in love with each other? How will they learn about love if there’s no one to model it for them? And how do parents get their sexual needs met?
These are valid questions. However, there aren’t any studies that indicate children need their parents to love each other – whereas there are plenty of studies indicating children do need parental warmth and love, consistency, stability and a relatively conflict-free environment. Being kind to each other is what matters.
“Children are love radars; they can feel when there’s love and kindness and they can feel when there’s hurt and cutoff between parents,” says Valerie Tate, who works with couples to bring loving feelings back into their relationship and has helped a handful of couples transform their marriages into similar arrangements. “The way people treat each other makes a huge difference.”
San Francisco Bay Area therapist Susan Pease Gadoua has also been helping couples on the verge of divorce convert their traditional marriages into parenting marriages. In the beginning, just one or two couples were interested in it, and always at her suggestion. But in the past few weeks alone, she’s talked to four couples from across the US who told her they’d like to explore the option.
“It’s like the quantum leap has happened,” she says.
While each couple is free to create the terms of their new arrangement – who sleeps where, how financial obligations should be split, whether new romantic partners can be introduced into the family, when and if they eventually plan to divorce – they first must agree that their romantic and sexual relationship is over, and that the new purpose of their marriage is to be the best co-parents they can be.
Then they have to tell the kids as openly and honestly as they can in age-appropriate language.
And then there’s sex – what are couples supposed to do with their sexual desires? Some, like the Tates, keep romantic flings away from the family unless it’s someone who’s a long-term partner – just like many divorced people do. For couples that are entering into a parenting marriage, sex will have to be just another thing they need to negotiate. “It’s a really individual decision,” Gadoua says. The bigger question is: why must a person’s sexual needs dictate how he or she becomes a parent and continues to parent?
A parenting marriage makes sense when you consider the cost of divorce, not only financially but also emotionally. While more dads are fighting for – and winning – shared physical custody, divorce has often reduced men to being weekend dads. That isn’t what fathers want and it isn’t what their children want either. In fact, research by Penn State sociologist Paul Amato indicates that kids have the worst outcomes when their parents live apart, have a high-conflict relationship and when one parent – typically the father – is no longer active in their life.
So why not structure the relationship from the beginning so it works best for the kids?
Since 52% of millennials told the Pew Research Center that being a good parent is “one of the most important things” in life, while a mere 30% say the same about having a successful marriage, it’s likely that more couples may indeed do that.
