MJ calls what happened to her in Zion national park “small ‘T’ trauma”. She knows women have experienced worse from their partners. But she still feels the anger of being left behind on a hike by her now ex. “It brings up stuff in my body that maybe I have not cleared out yet,” she said.
Five years ago, MJ and a new partner – he was not exactly her boyfriend, and the pair were not exclusive – traveled from Los Angeles to Utah for an adventure getaway. MJ, who is 38 and works in PR, was looking forward to exploring Zion’s striking scenery; its vast sandstone canyon and pristine wading trails were on the list. But on the morning of their big hike, MJ was not feeling well. She could not shake the feeling that something was “off”; indeed, MJ would learn on this trip that her partner was seeing other women.
As they made their way up Angel’s Landing, MJ’s partner started walking faster than her. “I could tell it was getting on his nerves that I was slow,” she said. “I was like, ‘Fuck it, just go ahead of me.’” He did without hesitation.
When she caught up at the top of the mountain, they took a picture together. Then her partner hiked down the mountain with a woman he had met on the way up, leaving MJ to finish by herself. They broke up shortly after that trip. (MJ asked to be referred to by her initials for the sake of speaking openly about a past relationship.)
Last month, MJ opened TikTok and heard the phrase “alpine divorce”, a label she now attaches to her experience in Zion.
The point is, it doesn’t happen enough to merit an article that tries to imply, especially with its headline, that it’s a common occurrence.
It’s like when discussions about rape in general are primarily focused on incidents of violent ‘random’ rapes committed by strangers to the victim, when the fact is that that is literally the rarest type of rape that happens.
If the article was just talking about this shitty thing someone did to something else, without trying to pretend it’s ‘a thing’ that happens with any statistically-significant frequency, it wouldn’t get/merit the kind of reaction GreenBottles had.
The term “Alpine Divorce” isn’t a new trendy term coined from TikTok, y’know.
It’s a common enough occurrence for a journalist to decide to write an article about it and have enough stories from different women to deliver a solid read.
Deciding that it doesn’t happen at a high enough frequency for anyone to want to read about it or talk about it is certainly a stance that you can take, but clearly this has generated enough conversation in this thread alone to argue against that.
Just because it’s a type of abuse that happens at lower rates than other types doesn’t mean it’s worthless to talk about. For these women, it is a very real occurrence that happened to them. Why not give them space to share their stories?
Meanwhile, the very first sentence of its Wikipedia page, lol:
I was sincerely open to a conversation with you, but I guess downvotes and scorn is all I’m going to get from you.
Thanks, I guess.
No, you weren’t. Your comments are dripping with condescension and sanctimony, not to mention projection (care to cite the “scorn” in anything I wrote?).
When you reply to my comment:
with an ‘lol’ and deflection, yeah, it feels scornful.
Just say you don’t want to hear about women’s abuse stories and be honest.
The only time I wrote “lol” was when I noticed that the very first sentence of the Wikipedia entry of the term “alpine divorce” directly contradicted your assertion that it “isn’t a new, trendy term”. I found that funny. That had literally nothing to do with the actual subject matter of the OP, and had everything to do with discussion of the rate of incidence of a slang term in colloquial parlance.
It’s literally the opposite of “deflection” to directly address what you wrote (I quoted exactly what I was responding to), and it’s definitely not “scorn” to be amused by a contradiction. To even consider assigning the word “scorn” to something so trivially insignificant only bolsters your first impression of being an outrage junkie.
If anything in this thread actually deserves an exasperated “oh my fucking god” reaction (and/or a “lol”), it’s this. Come down from your cross, drama queen.
The entire article is women sharing stories of being abused in a specific way and the men in here are clutching their pearls about having to read about it. So many “not all men” type comments.
I don’t care if you think I’m a drama queen. Women deserve to be heard.
I don’t “think” you are a drama queen. It’s self-evident, from what I quoted. Not a single word of anything I said could genuinely lead to the ridiculous conclusion you did, in any rational mind.
That said, it matters much more that you don’t care about objectivity, accuracy, and intellectual honesty. You’re unfortunately more interested in labeling merited refutations of your demonstrably-bogus assertions as misogyny (which, naturally, magically justifies dismissing them outright), than actually accepting your error and learning from it.
Literally in the article that we’re all talking about.
Edit: Oh my fucking god, it’s on the wikipedia page as well if you had bothered to read further:
You’re being deliberately obtuse, and the feigned indignation (“Oh my fucking god”) just amplifies its obnoxiousness, in my opinion. It was used once in a short story over a century ago, but it’s only started to become a common term very recently.
Would you argue that “sus” doesn’t count as modern slang, because it was used as slang for “suspicious” in the early 1900s? Or would it be moronic to seriously argue that, because it’s obviously only exploded as common slang much more recently?
Alpine divorce may not have been the most popular way to describe these type of circumstances where a man leads his partner into the wilderness and abandons her to die before this tiktok trend, but its a term that has been around for a long time and there have been plenty of men who have taken these kinds of actions against their partners.
Facts don’t care about your feelings.
Firstly, cite what you quote from elsewhere in the future, if you want to be taken seriously. I found it myself, so no need in this case, anymore.
Secondly, that cited study of hiking accidents has literally nothing to do with ‘alpine divorce’—it makes no differentiation between hiking injuries following from someone being abandoned by someone else (much less specifically a man abandoning a woman) after going hiking together, and accidents that happen under any other circumstances. It’s a study about hiking accidents overall, and it’s extremely disingenuous to even attempt to reach any conclusions about ‘alpine divorce’ based on its data.
This is the study that was cited. Here are the variables about the accidents it had access to:
Can’t help but notice not a single data point related, at all, to even going hiking with someone else, much less anything about being separated from them during the hike.
It’s a massive, desperate straw grasp by the author to cite this study in support of any assertion about the frequency of ‘alpine divorce’, and no less of one by you to try and bolster your assertion with it.
“Facts don’t care about your feelings.” Once again, your own words come back to bite you; it’s obvious your feelings/biases led you to willfully discarding the part of your brain that would easily have seen how nonsensical that article’s claims are. I can find literally no data about how common this ‘phenomenon’ even is, much less anything about it becoming more or less frequent over time, and from what you’ve written so far, I have a feeling that I’ve ironically looked harder for it than you have, being the one of the two of us who isn’t driven by bias.