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.
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.